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bigyabai 5 hours ago

I would too, but sadly that's Khronos' job to organize, and they've had trouble getting American vendors to work together.

It's likely that CUDA will continue dominating until they put aside their differences. The current MLX/MPS/ROCm ecosystems are too fractured to threaten Nvidia.

boredatoms 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Maybe a not-Khronos org should try

high_na_euv 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Wdym American Vendors?

Intel uses SPIRV iirc

my123 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Intel uses SPIRV iirc

They're migrating away from SPIR-V to their own, Intel PISA: https://discourse.llvm.org/t/rfc-upstreaming-the-pisa-backen...

swerner 3 hours ago | parent [-]

To my knowledge, SPIR-V on Intel will stay, and be it only because it’s part of the OpenCL and Vulkan standards.

my123 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Yeah talking about the (vendor-preferred) compute part here

Vulkan's SPIR-V dialect is substantially different from the OpenCL one, notably with the former having structured control flow. They're incompatible between each other.

swerner 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Yes, unfortunately. Otherwise we could just implement all of SYCL and OpenCL on top of Vulkan and live happily ever after.

bigyabai 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm talking about holistic efforts like OpenCL, and standards that would be equivalent to Nvidia's "Compute Capability" versioning.

The basic underlying tech can be agreed on, but Apple/AMD/Intel all have different GPU priorities that limit their ability to agree on a CUDA-adjacent hardware platform.

swerner 4 hours ago | parent [-]

What do you mean by holistic? SYCL is an open versioned standard that allows for vendor specific extensions. The problem is not that there isn’t a proper standard, the problem is that many hardware vendors - or software developers simply don’t want to adopt it.

Intel (via Codeplay) was handing it out on a silver platter - Nvidia on SYCL, full top chain, and people still wouldn’t want it.

bigyabai 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Isn't OneAPI a good example of the problem, alongside Mojo/ONNX/TensorRT? The industry doesn't need a fifteenth competing standard. They need hardware buy-in.

By holistic, I mean hardware architecture cooperation. Nvidia can hold onto their lead forever if GPU designers fight over what a GPGPU hardware baseline looks like. The current ecosystem fragmentation is not competitive, and future fragmentation probably wouldn't work either. I think the fastest way to kill Nvidia would be a hardware consortium.

swerner 4 hours ago | parent [-]

The problem with OneAPI is naming. It leads people to believe that is another competing standard where in fact is is simply just an implementation of a standard compliant SYCL compiler. If it just had been named “Intel SYCL compiler”, similar to the existing and accepted Intel OpenCL compiler, it would have been easier.

What would you expect the hardware consortium to coordinate on? Unified ISA?

my123 4 hours ago | parent [-]

oneAPI is effectively an Intel-only platform not a standard.

Yes they have implementations on top of CUDA but they're maintained by... Intel. They didn't get buy-in for cross-vendor collaboration

swerner 4 hours ago | parent [-]

They were maintained by Codeplay - paid for my Intel. Nvidia can make contributions anytime they want, and here is the problem: Nvidia does not want to. Until each vendor starts pitching in with contributing their backend to an open standard, you will have to rely on others doing it for them.