[HN Gopher] Intel's Arc GPUs will compete with GeForce and Radeo... ___________________________________________________________________ Intel's Arc GPUs will compete with GeForce and Radeon in early 2022 Author : TangerineDream Score : 226 points Date : 2021-08-16 15:16 UTC (7 hours ago) (HTM) web link (arstechnica.com) (TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com) | Exmoor wrote: | As TFA rightly points out, unless something _drastically_ changes | in the next ~6mo, Intel is going to launch into the most | favorable market situation we 've seen in our lifetimes. | Previously, the expectation is that they needed to introduce | something that was competitive with the top end cards from nVidia | and AMD. With basically all GPU's out of stock currently they | really just need to introduce something competitive with the | almost _anything_ on the market to be able to sell as much as | they can ship. | NonContro wrote: | How long will that situation last though, with Ethereum 2.0 | around the corner and the next difficulty bomb scheduled for | December? | | https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/olla5w/eip_3554_o... | | Intel could be launching their cards into a GPU surplus... | | That's discrete GPUs though, presumably the major volumes are | in laptop GPUs? Will Intel have a CPU+GPU combo product for | laptops? | dathinab wrote: | It's not "just" a shortage of GPU's but all kinds of | components. | | And it's also not "just" caused by miners. | | But that means if they are _really_ unlucky they could launch | into a situation where there is a surplus of good second hand | graphic cards _and_ still shortages /price hikes on the GPU | components they use... | | Through as far as I can tell they are more targeting OEM's | (any OEM instead of a selected few), and other large | customers, so it might not matter too much for them for this | release (but probably from the next one after one-ward it | would). | orra wrote: | Alas: Bitcoin. | cinntaile wrote: | You don't mine bitcoin with a GPU, those days are long | gone. | errantspark wrote: | > How long will that situation last though | | Probably until at least 2022 because the shortage of GPUs | isn't solely because of crypto. Until we generally get back | on track tricking sand to think we're not going to be able to | saturate demand. | | > Will Intel have a CPU+GPU combo product for laptops? | | What? Obviously the answer is yes, how could it possibly be | no? CPU+GPU combo is the only GPU related segment where Intel | currently has a product. | mhh__ wrote: | If they come out swinging here they could have the most | deserved smugness in the industry for a good while. People have | been rightly criticising them but wrongly writing them off. | 015a wrote: | Yup; three other points I'd add: | | 1) I hate to say "year of desktop Linux" like every year, but | with the Steam Deck release later this year, and Valve's | commitment to continue investing and collaborating on Proton to | ensure wide-range game support; Linux gaming is going to grow | substantially throughout 2022, if only due to the new devices | added by Steam Decks. | | Intel has always had fantastic Linux video driver support. If | Arc is competitive with the lowest end current-gen Nvidia/AMD | cards (3060?), Linux gamers will love it. And, when thinking | about Steam Deck 2 in 2022-2023, Intel becomes an option. | | 2) The current-gen Nvidia/AMD cards are _insane_. They 're | unbelievably powerful. But, here's the kicker: Steam Deck is | 720p. You go out and buy a brand new Razer/Alienware/whatever | gaming laptop, the most common resolution even on the high end | models is 1080p (w/ high refresh rate). The Steam Hardware | survey puts 1080p as the most common resolution, and ITS NOT | EVEN REMOTELY CLOSE to #2 [1] (720p 8%, 1080p 67%, 1440p 8%, 4k | 2%) (did you know more people use Steam on MacOS than on a 4k | monitor? lol) | | These Nvidia/AMD cards are unprecedented overkill for most | gamers. People are begging for cards that can run games at | 1080p, Nvidia went straight to 4K, even showing off 8K gaming | on the 3090, and now they can't even deliver any cards that run | 720p/1080p. Today, we've got AMD releasing the 6600XT, | advertising it as a beast for 1080p gaming [2]. This is what | people actually want; affordable and accessible cards to play | games on (whether they can keep the 6600xt in stock remains to | be seen, of course). Nvidia went straight Icarus with Ampere; | they shot for the sun, and couldn't deliver. | | 3) More broadly, geopolitical pressure in east asia, and | specifically taiwan, should be concerning investors in any | company that relies heavily on TSMC (AMD & Apple being the two | big ones). Intel may start by fabbing Arc there, but they | uniquely have the capacity to bring that production to the | west. | | I am very, very long INTC. | | [1] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware- | Softw... | | [2] https://www.pcmag.com/news/amd-unveils-the-radeon- | rx-6600-xt... | iknowstuff wrote: | Intel sells expensive CPUs which are becoming useless thanks | to ARM - as much in consumer devices as they are in | datacenters, with big players designing their own ARM chips. | GPUs are their lifeboat. Three GPU players is better than | two, but I don't see much of a reason to be long Intel. | ZekeSulastin wrote: | ... Nvidia _did_ release lower end cards that target the same | market and price point as the 6600 XT a lot _earlier_ than | AMD though - as far as MSRP goes the 3060 and 3060 Ti bracket | the 6600 XT's $380 at $329 and $399 (not that MSRP means a | thing right now) and similarly brackets performance, and even | the MSRP was not received well in conjunction with the 1080p | marketing. _Both_ manufacturers have basically told the mid | and low range market to buy a console even if you are lucky | enough to get an AMD reference or Nvidia FE card. | Revenant-15 wrote: | I've happily taken their advice and have moved to an Xbox | Series S for a good 80% of my gaming needs. What gaming I | still do on my PC consists mainly of older games, emulators | and strategy games. Although I've been messing with | Retroarch/Duckstation on my Xbox, and it's been quite novel | and fun to be playing PS1 games on a Microsoft console. | pjmlp wrote: | Steam will hardly change the 1% status of GNU/Linux desktop. | | Many forget that most studios don't bother to port their | Android games to GNU/Linux, which are mostly written using | the NDK, so plain ISO C and C++, GL, Vulkan, OpenSL,..., yet | no GNU/Linux, because the market just isn't there. | reitzensteinm wrote: | Not disagreeing with your overall point, but it's pretty | rare for people to port their mobile game to PC even if | using Unity and all you have to do is figure out the | controls. Which you've probably got a beta version of just | to develop the game. | 015a wrote: | The first wave of Steam Decks sold out in minutes. They're | now pushing back delivery to Q2 2022. The demand for the | device is pretty significant; not New Console large, but | its definitely big enough to be visible in the Steam | Hardware Survey upon release later this year, despite the | vast size of Steam's overall playerbase. | | Two weeks ago, the Hardware Survey reported Linux breaching | 1% for the first time ever [1], for reasons not related to | Deck (in fact, its not obvious WHY linux has been growing; | disappointment in the Win11 announcement may have caused | it, but in short, its healthy, natural, long-term growth). | I would put real money up that Linux will hit 2% by the | January 2022 survey, and 5% by January 2023. | | Proton short-circuits the porting argument. It works | fantastically for most games, with zero effort from the | devs. | | We're not talking about Linux being the majority. But its | definitely looking like it will see growth over the next | decade. | | [1] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/steam-survey- | linux-1-perce... | pjmlp wrote: | It took 20 years to reach 1%, so... | | I believed in it back in the Loki golden days, nowadays I | rather bet on macOS, Windows, mobile OSes and game | consoles. | | It remains to be seen how the Steam fairs versus the | Steam Machines of yore. | onli wrote: | Don't let history blind you to the now ;) | | It's way better now than it was back then. There was a | long period of good ports, which combined with the Steam | for Linux client made Linux gaming a real thing already. | But instead of fizzling out like the last time there were | ports, now Linux transitioned to "Run every game" without | needing a port. Some exceptions, but they are working on | it and compatibility is huge. | | This will grow slowly but steadily now, and is ready to | explode if Microsoft does on bad move (like crazy Windows | 11 hardware requirements, but we'll see). | | Biggest danger to that development are the gpu prices, | the Intel gpus can only help there. A competent 200 bucks | model is desperately needed to keep the PC as a gaming | platform alive. It has to run on fumes - on old hardware | - now. | [deleted] | trangus_1985 wrote: | >Steam will hardly change the 1% status of GNU/Linux | desktop. | | I agree. But it will change the status in the listings. | Steam deck and steamos appliances should be broken out into | their own category, and I could easily see them overtaking | linux desktop | dheera wrote: | > will compete with GeForce | | > which performs a lot like the GDDR5 version of Nvidia's | aging, low-end GeForce GTX 1030 | | Intel is trying to emulate what NVIDIA did a decade ago. Nobody | in the NVIDIA world speaks of GeForce and GTX anymore, RTX is | where it's at. | pier25 wrote: | Exactly. There are plenty of people that just want to upgrade | an old GPU and anything modern would be a massive improvement. | | I'm still rocking a 1070 for 1080p/60 gaming and would love to | jump to 4K/60 gaming but just can't convince myself to buy a | new GPU at current prices. | leeoniya wrote: | i wanna get a good Alyx setup to finally try VR, but with the | gpu market the way it is, looks like my RX480 4GB will be | sticking around for another 5yrs - it's more expensive now | than it was 4 yrs ago (used), and even then it was already | 2yrs old. batshit crazy; no other way to describe it :( | mey wrote: | I refuse to engage with the current GPU pricing insanity, so | my 5900x is currently paired with a 960 GTX. When Intel | enters the market it will be another factor in driving | pricing back down, so might play Cyberpunk in 2022... | deadmutex wrote: | If you really want to play Cyberpunk on PC, and don't want | to buy a new GPU.. playing it on Stadia is an option | (especially if you have a GPU that can support VP9 | decoding). I played it at 4K/1080p, and it looked pretty | good. However, I think if you want the best graphics | fidelity (i.e. 4K RayTracing), then you probably do want to | just get a high end video card. | | Disclosure: Work at Google, but not on Stadia. | voidfunc wrote: | Intel has the manufacturing capability to really beat up | Nvidia. Even if the cards don't perform like top-tier cards | they could still win bigly here. | | Very exciting! | pankajdoharey wrote: | What about design capabilities? If they had it in them what | were they doing all these yrs? i mean since 2000 i can | remember a single GPU from intel that wasnt already behind | the market. | Tsiklon wrote: | Raja Koduri is Intel's lead architect for their new product | line; prior to this he was the lead of the Radeon | Technologies Group at AMD, successfully delivering Polaris, | Vega and Navi. Navi is AMD's current GPU product | architecture. | | Things seem promising at this stage. | flenserboy wrote: | Indeed. Something that's affordable and hits even RX 580 | performance would grab the attention of many. _Good enough_ | really is when supply is low and prices are high. | opencl wrote: | Intel is not even manufacturing these, they are TSMC 7nm so | they are competing for the same fab capacity that everyone | else is using. | judge2020 wrote: | *AMD/Apple is using. Nvidia's always-sold-out Ampere-based | gaming chips are made in a Samsung fab. | | https://www.pcgamer.com/nvidia-ampere-samsung-8nm-process/ | Yizahi wrote: | Nvidia would also use TSMC 7nm since it is much better | that Samsung 8mn. So potentially they are also waiting | for the TSMC availability. | judge2020 wrote: | How is it 'much better'? 7nm is not better than 8nm | because it has a smaller number - the number doesn't | correlate strongly with transistor density these days. | kllrnohj wrote: | Did you bother trying to do any research or comparison | between TSMC's 7nm & Samsung's 8nm or did you just want | to make the claim that numbers are just marketing? | Despite the fact that numbers alone were not being talked | about, but two specific fab processes, and thus the "it's | just a number!" mistake wasn't obviously being made in | the first place? | | But Nvidia has Ampere on both TSMC 7nm (GA100) and | Samsung's 8nm (GA102). The TSMC variant has a | significantly higher density at 65.6M / mm2 vs. 45.1M / | mm2. Comparing across architectures is murkey, but we | also know that the TSMC 7nm 6900XT clocks a lot higher | than the Samsung 8nm RTX 3080/3090 while also drawing | less power. There's of course a lot more to clock speeds | & power draw in an actual product than the raw fab | transistor performance, but it's still a data point. | | So there's both density & performance evidence to suggest | TSMC's 7nm is meaningfully better than Samsung's 8nm. | | Even going off of marketing names, Samsung has a 7nm as | well and they don't pretend their 8nm is just one-worse | than the 7nm. The 8nm is an evolution of the 10nm node | while the 7nm is itself a new node. According to | Samsung's marketing flowcharts, anyway. And analysis | suggests Samsung's 7nm is competitive with TSMC's 7nm. | IshKebab wrote: | TSMC have a 56% percent market share. The next closest is | Samsung at 18%. I think that's enough to say that | everyone uses them without much hyperbole. | paulmd wrote: | if NVIDIA cards were priced as ridiculously as AMD cards | they'd be sitting on store shelves too | kllrnohj wrote: | Nvidia doesn't price any cards other than the founder's | editions which you'll notice they both drastically cut | down on availability for and also didn't do _at all_ for | the "price sensitive" mid-range tier. | | Nvidia's pricing as a result is completely fake. Like the | claimed "$330 3060" in fact _starts_ at $400 and rapidly | goes up from there, with MSRP 's on 3060's as high as | $560. | paulmd wrote: | I didn't say NVIDIA did directly price cards? Doesn't | sound like you are doing a very good job of following the | HN rule - always give the most gracious possible reading | of a comment. Nothing I said directly implied that they | did, you just wanted to pick a bone. It's really quite | rude to put words in people's mouths, and that's why we | have this rule. | | But a 6900XT is available for $3100 at my local store... | and the 3090 is $2100. Between the two it's not hard to | see why the NVIDIA cards are selling and the AMD cards | are sitting on the shelves, the AMD cards are 50% more | expensive for the same performance. | | As for _why_ that is - which is the point I think you | wanted to address, and decided to try and impute into my | comment - who knows. Price are "sticky" (retailers don't | want to mark down prices and take a loss) and AMD moves | fewer cards in general. Maybe that means that prices are | "stickier for longer" with AMD. Or maybe it's another | thing like Vega where AMD set the MSRP so low that | partners can't actually build and sell a card for a | profit at competitive prices. But in general, regardless | of why - the prices for AMD cards are generally higher, | and when they go down the AMD cards sell out too. The | inventory that is available is available because it's | overpriced. | | (and for both brands, the pre-tariff MSRPs are | essentially a fiction at this point apart from the | reference cards and will probably never be met again.) | RussianCow wrote: | > But a 6900XT is available for $3100 at my local | store... and the 3090 is $2100. | | That's just your store being dumb, then. The 6900 XT is | averaging about $1,500 brand new on eBay[0] while the | 3090 is going for about $2,500[1]. Even on Newegg, the | cheapest in-stock 6900 XT card is $1,700[2] while the | cheapest 3090 is $3,000[3]. Everything I've read suggests | that the AMD cards, while generally a little slower than | their Nvidia counterparts (especially when you factor in | ray-tracing), give you way more bang for your buck. | | > the prices for AMD cards are generally higher | | This is just not true. There may be several reasons for | the Nvidia cards being out of stock more often than AMD: | better performance; stronger brand; lower production | counts; poor perception of AMD drivers; specific games | being optimized for Nvidia; or pretty much anything else. | But at this point, pricing is set by supply and demand, | not by arbitrary MSRPs set by Nvidia/AMD, so claiming | that AMD cards are priced too high is absolutely | incorrect. | | [0]: https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=6900x | t&_sacat... | | [1]: https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=3090& | _sacat=0... | | [2]: https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?N=100007709%20601359957& | Order=1 | | [3]: https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?N=100007709%20601357248& | Order=1 | BuckRogers wrote: | This is a problem for AMD especially, but also Nvidia. Not | so much for Intel. They're just budging in line with their | superior firepower. Intel even bought out first dibs on | TSMC 3nm out from under Apple. I'll be interested to see | the market's reaction to this once everyone realizes that | Intel is hitting AMD where it hurts and sees the inevitable | outcome. | | This is one of the smartest moves by Intel, make their own | stuff and consume production from all their competitors, | which do nothing but paper designs. Nvidia and especially | AMD took a risk not being in the fabrication business, and | now we'll see the full repercussions. It's a good play | (outsourcing) in good times, not so much when things get | tight like today. | wmf wrote: | _This is a problem for AMD especially_ | | Probably not. AMD has had their N7/N6 orders in for | years. | | _They 're just budging in line with their superior | firepower. Intel even bought out first dibs on TSMC 3nm | out from under Apple._ | | There's no evidence this is happening and people with | TSMC experience say it's not happening. | | _Nvidia and especially AMD took a risk not being in the | fabrication business_ | | Yes, and it paid off dramatically. If AMD stayed with | their in-house fabs (now GloFo) they'd probably be dead | on 14nm now. | BuckRogers wrote: | Do you have sources for any of your claims? Other than | going fabless being a fantastic way to cut costs and | management challenges, but increase longterm supply line | risk, none of that is anything that I've heard. Here are | sources for my claims. | | AMD on TSMC 3nm for Zen5. Will be squeezed by Intel and | Apple- https://videocardz.com/newz/amd-3nm-zen5-apus- | codenamed-stri... | | Intel consuming a good portion of TSMC 3nm- | https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/intel-locks- | down-a... | | I see zero upside with these developments for AMD, and to | a lesser degree, Nvidia, who are better diversified with | Samsung and also rumored to be in talks with fabricating | at Intel as well. | wmf wrote: | I expect AMD to start using N3 after Apple and Intel have | moved on to N2 (or maybe 20A in Intel's case) in 2024 so | there's less competition for wafers. | AnthonyMouse wrote: | > Will be squeezed by Intel and Apple | | This doesn't really work. If there is more demand, | they'll build more fabs. It doesn't happen overnight -- | that's why we're in a crunch right now -- but we're | talking about years of lead time here. | | TSMC is also not stupid. It's better for them for their | customers to compete with each other instead of having to | negotiate with a monopolist, so their incentive is to | make sure none of them can crush the others. | | > I see zero upside with these developments for AMD, and | to a lesser degree, Nvidia | | If Intel uses its own fabs, Intel makes money and uses | the money to improve Intel's process which AMD can't use. | If Intel uses TSMC's fabs, TSMC makes money and uses the | money to improve TSMC's process which AMD does use. | Animats wrote: | Oh, that's disappointing. Intel has three 7nm fabs in the | US. | | There's a lot of fab capacity under construction. 2-3 years | out, semiconductor glut again. | deaddodo wrote: | Where do you get that idea? The third-party fabs have far | greater production capacity[1]. Intel isn't even in the top | five. | | They're a shared resource; however, if you're willing to pay | the money, you _could_ monopolize their resources and | outproduce anybody. | | 1 - https://epsnews.com/2021/02/10/5-fabs-own-54-of-global- | semic... | wtallis wrote: | You're looking at the wrong numbers. The wafer capacity of | memory fabs and logic fabs that are only equipped for older | nodes aren't relevant to the GPU market. So Micron, SK | hynix, Kioxia/WD and a good chunk of Samsung and TSMC | capacity are irrelevant here. | abledon wrote: | it seems AMD manufactures most 7nm all at TSMC, but intel has | a factory coming online next year in Arizona... https://en.wi | kipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_manufacturing_si... | | I could see gov/Military investing/awarding more contracts | based on these 'locally' situated plants | humanistbot wrote: | Nope, wiki is wrong. According to Intel, the facility in | Chander, AZ will start being built next year, but won't be | producing chips until 2024. See | https://www.anandtech.com/show/16573/intels-new- | strategy-20b... | [deleted] | chaosharmonic wrote: | Given that timeline and their years of existing production | history with Thunderbolt, Intel could also feasibly beat both | of them to shipping USB4 on a graphics card. | pankajdoharey wrote: | I suppose the better thing to do would be to ship an APU, | Besting both Nvidia on GPU and AMD on CPU? But can they? | hughrr wrote: | GPU stock is rising and prices falling. It's too late now. | rejectedandsad wrote: | I still can't get a 3080, and the frequency of drops seems to | have decreased. Where are you seeing increased stock? | hughrr wrote: | Can get a 3080 tomorrow in UK no problems at all. | mhh__ wrote: | Can get but still very expensive. | [deleted] | YetAnotherNick wrote: | No, they aren't. They are trading at 250% of MSRP. See this | data: | | https://stockx.com/nvidia-nvidia-geforce- | rtx-3080-graphics-c... | RussianCow wrote: | Anecdotally, I've noticed prices falling on the lower end. | My aging RX 580 was worth over $400 used at the beginning | of the year; it now goes for ~$300. The 5700 XT was going | for close to $1k used, and is more recently selling for | $800-900. | | With that said, I don't know if it's a sign of the shortage | coming to an end; I think the release of the Ryzen 5700G | with integrated graphics likely helped bridge the gap for | people who wanted low-end graphics without paying the crazy | markups. | ayngg wrote: | I thought they are using TSMC for their gpu, which means they | will be part of the same bottleneck that is affecting everyone | else. | teclordphrack2 wrote: | If they purchased a slot in the queue then they will be fine. | davidjytang wrote: | I believe nvidia doesn't use TSMC or not only use TSMC. | dathinab wrote: | Independent of the question around TSMC they are still | affected as: | | - Shortages and price hikes caused by various effect are | not limit to the GPU chiplet but also most other parts on | the GPU. | | - Especially it also affects the RAM they are using, which | can be a big deal wrt. pricing and availability. | mkaic wrote: | 30 series Nvidia cards are on Samsung silicon iirc | monocasa wrote: | Yeah, Samsung 8nm, which is basically Samsung 10nm++++. | abraae wrote: | 10nm--? | monocasa wrote: | The '+' in this case is a common process node trope where | improvements to a node over time that involve rules | changes become Node+, Node++, Node+++, etc. So this is a | node that started as Samsung 10nm, but they made enough | changes to it that they started marketing it as 8nm. When | they started talking about it, it wasn't clear if it was | a more manufacturable 7nm or instead a 10nm with lots of | improvements, so I drop the 10nm++++ to help give some | context. | tylerhou wrote: | The datacenter cards (which are about half of their | revenue) are running on TSMC. | ayngg wrote: | Yeah they use Samsung for their current series but are | planning to move to TSMC for the next irrc. | YetAnotherNick wrote: | Except Apple | rasz wrote: | You would think that. GamersNexus did try Intels finest, and it | doesnt look pretty | | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSseaknEv9Q We Got an Intel | GPU: Intel Iris Xe DG1 Video Card Review, Benchmarks, & | Architecture | | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uW4U6n-r3_0 Intel GPU A Real | Threat: Adobe Premiere, Handbrake, & Production Benchmarks on | DG1 Iris Xe | | Its below GT1030 with a lot of issues. | agloeregrets wrote: | DG1 isn't remotely related to Arc. For one, it's not even | using the same node nor architecture. | deaddodo wrote: | That's not quite true. The Arc was originally known as the | DG2 and is the successor to the DG1. So to say it isn't | "remotely related" is a bit misleading, especially since we | have very little information on the architecture. | trynumber9 wrote: | For some comparison, that's a 30W 80EU part using 70GB/s | memory. DG2 is supposed to be 512EU part with over 400GB/s | memory. GPUs generally scale pretty well with EU count and | memory bandwidth. Plus it has a different architecture which | may be even more capable per EU. | pitaj wrote: | This won't be the same as the DG1 | phone8675309 wrote: | The DG1 isn't designed for gaming, but it is better than | integrated graphics. | deburo wrote: | Just to add on that, DG1 was comparable to integrated | graphics, but just in a discrete form factor. It was a tiny | bit better because of higher frequency, I think. But even | then it wasn't better in all cases, if I recall correctly. | fefe23 wrote: | The fact that the selling point most elaborated on in the press | is the AI upscaling, I'm worried the rest of their architecture | may not be up to snuff. | dragontamer wrote: | https://software.intel.com/content/dam/develop/external/us/e... | | The above is Intel's Gen11 architecture whitepaper, describing | how Gen11 iGPUs work. I'd assume that their next-generation | discrete GPUs will have a similar architecture (but no longer | attached to CPU L3 cache). | | I haven't really looked into Intel iGPU architecture at all. I | see that the whitepaper has some oddities compared to AMD / | NVidia GPUs. Its definitely "more different". | | The SIMD-units are apparently only 4 x 32-bit wide (compared to | 32-wide NVidia / RDNA or 64-wide CDNA). But they can be | reconfigured to be 8x16-bit wide instead (a feature not really | available on NVidia. AMD can do SIMD-inside-of-SIMD and split up | its registers once again however, but its a fundamentally | different mechanism). | | -------- | | Branch divergence is likely to be less of an issue with narrower | SIMD than its competitors. Well, in theory anyway. | jscipione wrote: | I've been hearing Intel play this tune for years, time to show us | something or change the record! | mhh__ wrote: | They've been playing this for years because it's only really | now that they can actually respond to Zen and friends. Intel's | competitors have been asleep at the wheel until 2017, getting a | new chip out takes years. | jbverschoor wrote: | New ceo, so some press releases, but the company remains the | same. I am under no illusion that this will change, and | definitely not in such a short notice. | | They've neglected almost every market they were in. They're | altavista. | | Uncle roger says bye bye ! | andrewmcwatters wrote: | Mostly unrelated, but I'm still amazed that if you bought Intel | at the height of the Dot-com bubble and held on, you still | wouldn't have broken even, even ignoring inflation. | jeffbee wrote: | Interesting, but the add-in-card GPU market _for graphics | purposes_ is so small, it 's hard to get worked up about it. The | overwhelming majority of GPU units sold are IGPs. Intel owns | virtually 100% of the computer (excluding mobile) IGP market and | 70% of the total GPU market. You can get almost the performance | of Intel's discrete GPUs with their latest IGPs in "Tiger Lake" | generation parts. Intel can afford to nibble at the edges of the | discrete GPU market because it costs them almost nothing to put a | product out there and to a large extent they won the war already. | selfhoster11 wrote: | You must be missing the gamer market that's positively starving | for affordable dedicated GPUs. | mirker wrote: | I would guess that the main point has to be hardware | accelerated features, such as ray-tracing. I agree though that | it seems pointless to buy a budget GPU when it's basically a | scaled up iGPU. Perhaps it makes sense if you want a mid-range | CPU without a iGPU and you can't operate it headlessly, or if | you have an old PC that needs a mild refresh. | jeswin wrote: | If Intel provides as much Linux driver support as they do for | their current integrated graphics lineup, we might have a new | favourite among Linux users. | stormbrew wrote: | This is the main reason I'm excited about this. I really hope | they continue the very open approach they've used so far, but | even if they start going binary blob for some of it like nvidia | and (now to a lesser extent) amd have at least they're likely | to properly implement KMS and other things because that's what | they've been doing already. | jogu wrote: | Came here to say this. This will be especially interesting if | there's better support for GPU virtualization to allow a | Windows VM to leverage the card without passing the entire card | through. | modeless wrote: | This would be worth buying one for. It's super lame that | foundational features like virtualization are used as | leverage for price discrimination by Nvidia, and hopefully | new competition can shake things up. | dcdc123 wrote: | A long time Linux graphics driver dev friend of mine was just | hired by Intel. | r-bar wrote: | They also seem to be the most willing to open up their GPU | sharding API, GVTG, based on their work with their existing Xe | GPUs. The performance of their implementation in their first | generation was a bit underwhelming, but it seems like the | intention is there. | | If Intel is able to put out something reasonably competitive | and that supports GPU sharding it could be a game changer. It | could change the direction of the ecosystem and force Nvidia | and AMD to bring sharding to their consumer tier cards. I am | stoked to see where this new release takes us. | | Level1Linux has a (reasonably) up to date state of the GPU | ecosystem that does a much better job outlining the potential | of this tech. | | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXUS1W7Ifys | kop316 wrote: | This was my thought too. If their linux driver support for this | is as good as their integrated ones, I will be switching to | Intel GPUs. | heavyset_go wrote: | Yep, their WiFi chips have good open source drivers on Linux, | as well. It would be nice to have a GPU option that isn't AMD | for open driver support on Linux. | holoduke wrote: | Well. Every single AAA game is reflected in GPU drivers. I bet | they need to work on windows drivers first. Sure they need to | write tons of custom driver mods for hundreds of games. | tmccrary55 wrote: | I'm down if it comes with open drivers or specs. | the8472 wrote: | If they support virtualization like they do on their iGPUs that | would be great and possibly drive adoption by power users. But | I suspect they'll use that feature for market segmentation just | like AMD and Nvidia do. | TechieKid wrote: | Phoronix has been covering the Linux driver development for the | cards as they happen: | https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=search&q=DG2 | arcanus wrote: | Always seems to be two years away, like the Aurora supercomputer | at Argonne. | stormbrew wrote: | I know March 2020 has been a very very long month but I'm | pretty sure we're gonna skip a bunch of calendar dates when we | get out of it. | re-actor wrote: | Early 2022 is just 4 months away actually | timbaboon wrote: | :O ;( | AnimalMuppet wrote: | Erm, last I checked, four months from now is December 2021. | midwestemo wrote: | Man this year is flying, I still think it's 2020. | smcl wrote: | Honestly, I've been guilty of treating much of the last | year as a loading screen. At times I've been hyper-focussed | on doing that lovely personal development we're all | supposed to do when cooped up alone at home, and at others | just pissing around making cocktails and talking shite with | my friends over social media. | | So basically what I'm saying is - "same" :D | dubcanada wrote: | Early 2022 is only like 4-8 months away? | dragontamer wrote: | Aurora was supposed to be delivered in 2018: | https://www.nextplatform.com/2018/07/27/end-of-the-line- | for-... | | After it was delayed, Intel said that 2020 was when they'd be | ready. Spoiler alert: they aren't: | https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/doe-confirms- | auro... | | We're now looking at 2022 as the new "deadline", but we know | that Intel has enough clout to force a new deadline as | necessary. They've already slipped two deadlines, what's the | risk in slipping a 3rd time? | | --------- | | I don't like to "kick Intel while they're down", but Aurora | has been a disaster for years. That being said, I'm liking a | lot of their OneAPI tech on paper at least. Maybe I'll give | it a shot one day. (AVX512 + GPU supported with one compiler, | in a C++-like language that could serve as a competitor to | CUDA? That'd be nice... but Intel NEEDS to deliver these GPUs | in time. Every delay is eating away at their reputation) | Dylan16807 wrote: | Edit: Okay I had it slightly wrong, rewritten. | | Aurora was originally slated to use Phi chips, which are an | unrelated architecture to these GPUs. The delays there | don't say much about problems actually getting this new | architecture out. It's more that they were halfway through | making a supercomputer and then started over. | | I could probably pin the biggest share of the blame on 10nm | problems, which are irrelevant to this architecture. | | As far as _this_ architecture goes, when they announced | Aurora was switching, they announced 2021. That schedule, | looking four years out for a new architecture, has only had | one delay of an extra 6 months. | dragontamer wrote: | > I could probably pin the biggest share of the blame on | 10nm problems, which are irrelevant to this architecture. | | I doubt that. | | If Xeon Phi were a relevant platform, Intel could have | easily kept it... continuing to invest into the platform | and make it into 7nm like the rest of Aurora's new | design. | | Instead, Intel chose to build a new platform from its | iGPU architecture. So right there, Intel made a | fundamental shift in the way they expected to build | Aurora. | | I don't know what kind of internal meetings Intel had to | choose its (mostly untested) iGPU platform over its more | established Xeon Phi line, but that's quite a dramatic | change of heart. | | ------------ | | Don't get me wrong. I'm more inclined to believe in | Intel's decision (they know more about their market than | I do), but its still a massive shift in architecture... | with a huge investment into a new software ecosystem | (DPC++, OpenMP, SYCL, etc. etc.), a lot of which is | largely untested in practice (DPC++ is pretty new, all | else considered). | | -------- | | > As far as this architecture goes, when they announced | Aurora was switching, they announced 2021. That schedule, | looking four years out for a new architecture, has only | had one delay of an extra 6 months. | | That's fair. But the difference between Aurora-2018 vs | Aurora-2021 is huge. | [deleted] | pjmlp wrote: | I keep seeing such articles since Larrabe, better wait and see if | this time it is actually any better. | RicoElectrico wrote: | Meanwhile overloading a name of an unrelated CPU architecture, | incidentally used in older Intel Management Engines. | cwizou wrote: | They still are not saying with which _part_ of that lineup they | want to compete with, which is a good thing. | | I still remember Pat Gelsinger telling us over and over that | Larrabee would compete with the high end of the GeForce/Radeon | offering back in the days, including when it was painfully | obvious to everyone that it definitely would not. | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larrabee_(microarchitecture) | judge2020 wrote: | Well there's already the DG1 which seems to compete with the | low-end. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSseaknEv9Q | at_a_remove wrote: | I find myself needing, for the first time ever, a high-end video | card for some heavy video encoding, and when I look, they're all | gone, apparently in a tug of war between gamers and crypto | miners. | | At the exact same time, I am throwing out a box of old video | cards from the mid-nineties (Trident, Diamond Stealth) and from | the looks of it you can list them on eBay but they don't even | sell. | | Now Intel is about to leap into the fray and I am imagining | trying to explain all of this to the me of twenty-five years | back. | noleetcode wrote: | I will, quite literally, take those old video cards off your | hands. I have a hoarder mentality when it comes to old tech and | love collecting it. | at_a_remove wrote: | That involves shipping, though. It wouldn't be worth it to | you to have my old 14.4 Kbps modem and all of the attendant | junk I have. | topspin wrote: | "apparently in a tug of war between gamers and crypto miners" | | That, and the oligopoly of AMD and NVidia. Their grip is so | tight they dictate terms to card makers. For example; you can't | build an NVidia GPU card unless you source the GDDR from | NVidia. Between them the world supply of high end GDDR is | monopolized. | | Intel is going to deliver some badly needed competition. They | don't even have to approach the top of the GPU high end; just | deliver something that will play current games at 1080p at | modest settings and they'll have an instant hit. Continuing the | tradition of open source support Intel has had with (most) of | their GPU technology is something else we can hope for. | dleslie wrote: | The sub-heading is false, I had a dedicated Intel GPU in 1998 by | way of the i740. | acdha wrote: | Was that billed as a serious gaming GPU? I don't remember the | i740 as anything other than a low-budget option. | dleslie wrote: | It was sold as a serious gaming GPU. | | Recall that this was an era where GPUs weren't yet a thing; | instead there was 2D video cards and 3D accelerators that | paired with. The i740 and TNT paved the way toward GPUs, | while I don't recall whether either had programmable | pipelines they both had 2D capacity. For budget gamers, it | wasn't a _terrible_ choice to purchase an i740 for the | combined 2D/3D ability. | acdha wrote: | I definitely remember that era, I just don't remember that | having anything other than an entry-level label. It's | possible that this could have been due to the lackluster | results -- Wikipedia definitely supports the interpretation | that the image changed in the months before it launched: | | > In the lead-up to the i740's introduction, the press | widely commented that it would drive all of the smaller | vendors from the market. As the introduction approached, | rumors of poor performance started circulating. ... The | i740 was released in February 1998, at $34.50 in large | quantities. | | However, this suggests that it was never going to be a top- | end contender since it was engineered to hit a lower price | point and was significantly under-specced compared to the | competitors which were already on the market: | | > The i740 was clocked at 66Mhz and had 2-8MB of VRAM; | significantly less than its competitors which had 8-32MB of | VRAM, allowing the card to be sold at a low price. The | small amount of VRAM meant that it was only used as a frame | buffer, hence it used the AGP interface to access the | system's main memory to store textures; this was a fatal | flaw that took away memory bandwidth and capacity from the | CPU, reducing its performance, while also making the card | slower since it had to go through the AGP interface to | access the main memory which was slower than its VRAM. | dleslie wrote: | It was never aimed at top-end, but that doesn't mean it | wasn't serious about being viable as a gaming device. | | And it was, I used it for years. | smcl wrote: | My recollection is that the switchover to referring to them | as a "GPU" wasn't integrating 2D and 3D in the same card, | but the point where we offloaded MUCH more computation to | the graphics card itself. So we're talking specifically | about when NVidia launched the Geforce 256 - a couple of | generations after the TNT | detaro wrote: | That's how it turned out in practice, but it was supposed to | be a serious competitor AFAIK. | | Here's an old review: https://www.anandtech.com/show/202/7 | smcl wrote: | It's kind of amazing to me that I never really encountered | or read about the i740. I got _really_ into PC gaming in | 1997, we got internet that same year so I read a ton and | was hyper aware of the various hardware that was released, | regardless of whether I could actually own any of it | (spoiler, as a ~11 year old, no I could not). How did this | sneak by me? | dkhenkin wrote: | But what kind of hash rates will they get?! /s | IncRnd wrote: | They will get 63 Dooms/Sec. | f6v wrote: | 20 Vitaliks per Elon. | vmception wrote: | I'm going to add this to the Intel GPU graveyard in advance | byefruit wrote: | I really hope this breaks Nvidia's stranglehold on deep learning. | Some competition would hopefully bring down prices at the compute | high-end. | | AMD don't seem to even be trying on the software-side at the | moment. ROCm is a mess. | pjmlp wrote: | You know how to break it? | | With modern tooling. | | Instead of forcing devs to live in the pre-historic days of C | dialects and printf debugging, provide polyglot IDEs with | graphical debugging tools capable of single step GPU shaders | and a rich libraries ecosystem. | | Khronos got the message too late and now no one cares. | lvl100 wrote: | I agree 100% and if Nvidia's recent showing and puzzling focus | on "Omniverse" is any indication, they're operating in a | fantasy world a bit. | jjcon wrote: | I wholeheartedly agree. PyTorch did recently release AMD | support which I was happy to see (though I have not tested it), | I'm hoping there is more to come. | | https://pytorch.org/blog/pytorch-for-amd-rocm-platform-now-a... | byefruit wrote: | Unfortunately that support is via ROCm, which doesn't support | the last three generations (!) of AMD hardware: https://githu | b.com/ROCm/ROCm.github.io/blob/master/hardware.... | dragontamer wrote: | ROCm supports Vega, Vega 7nm, and CDNA just fine. | | The issue is that AMD has split their compute into two | categories: | | * RDNA -- consumer cards. A new ISA with new compilers / | everything. I don't think its reasonable to expect AMD's | compilers to work on RDNA, when such large changes have | been made to the architecture. (32-wide instead of 64-wide. | 1024 registers. Etc. etc.) | | * CDNA -- based off of Vega's ISA. Despite being "legacy | ISA", its pretty modern in terms of capabilities. MI100 is | competitive against the A100. CDNA is likely going to run | Frontier and El Capitan supercomputers. | | ------------ | | ROCm focused on CDNA. They've had compilers emit RDNA code, | but its not "official" and still buggy. But if you went for | CDNA, that HIP / ROCm stuff works enough for the Oak Ridge | National Labs. | | Yeah, CDNA is expensive ($5k for MI50 / Radeon VII, and $9k | for MI100). But that's the price of full-speed scientific- | oriented double-precision floating point GPUs these days. | byefruit wrote: | That makes a lot more sense, thanks. They could do with | making that a lot clearer on the project. | | Still handicaps them compared to Nvidia where you can | just buy anything recent and expect it to work. Suspect | it also means they get virtually no open source | contributions from the community because nobody can run | or test it on personal hardware. | dragontamer wrote: | NVidia can support anything because they have a PTX- | translation layer between cards, and invest heavily on | PTX. | | Each assembly language from each generation of cards | changes. PTX recompiles the "pseudo-assembly" | instructions into the new assembly code each generation. | | --------- | | AMD has no such technology. When AMD's assembly language | changes (ex: from Vega into RDNA), its a big compiler | change. AMD managed to keep the ISA mostly compatible | from 7xxx GCN 1.0 series in the late 00s all the way to | Vega 7nm in the late 10s... but RDNA's ISA change was | pretty massive. | | I think its only natural that RDNA was going to have | compiler issues. | | --------- | | AMD focused on Vulkan / DirectX support for its RDNA | cards, while its compute team focused on continuing | "CDNA" (which won large supercomputer contracts). So | that's just how the business ended up. | blagie wrote: | I bought an ATI card for deep learning. I'm a big fan of | open source. Less than 12 months later, ROCm dropped | support. I bought an NVidia, and I'm not looking back. | | This makes absolutely no sense to me, and I have a Ph.D: | | "* RDNA -- consumer cards. A new ISA with new compilers / | everything. I don't think its reasonable to expect AMD's | compilers to work on RDNA, when such large changes have | been made to the architecture. (32-wide instead of | 64-wide. 1024 registers. Etc. etc.) * CDNA -- based off | of Vega's ISA. Despite being "legacy ISA", its pretty | modern in terms of capabilities. MI100 is competitive | against the A100. CDNA is likely going to run Frontier | and El Capitan supercomputers. ROCm focused on CDNA. | They've had compilers emit RDNA code, but its not | "official" and still buggy. But if you went for CDNA, | that HIP / ROCm stuff works enough for the Oak Ridge | National Labs. Yeah, CDNA is expensive ($5k for MI50 / | Radeon VII, and $9k for MI100). But that's the price of | full-speed scientific-oriented double-precision floating | point GPUs these days. | | I neither know nor care what RDNA, CDNA, A100, MI50, | Radeon VII, MI100, or all the other AMD acronyms are. | Yes, I could figure it out, but I want plug-and-play, | stability, and backwards-compatibility. I ran into a | whole different minefield with AMD. I'd need to run old | ROCm, downgrade my kernel, and use a different card to | drive monitors than for ROCm. It was a mess. | | NVidia gave me plug-and-play. I bought a random NVidia | card with the highest "compute level," and was confident | everything would work. It does. I'm happy. | | Intel has historically had great open source drivers, and | if it give better plug-and-play and open source, I'll buy | Intel next time. I'm skeptical, though. The past few | year, Intel has a hard time tying their own shoelaces. I | can't imagine this will be different. | dragontamer wrote: | > Yes, I could figure it out, but I want plug-and-play, | stability, and backwards-compatibility | | Its right there in the ROCm introduction. | | https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm#Hardware-and- | Softw... | | > ROCm officially supports AMD GPUs that use following | chips: | | > GFX9 GPUs | | > "Vega 10" chips, such as on the AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 | and Radeon Instinct MI25 | | > "Vega 7nm" chips, such as on the Radeon Instinct MI50, | Radeon Instinct MI60 or AMD Radeon VII, Radeon Pro VII | | > CDNA GPUs | | > MI100 chips such as on the AMD Instinct(tm) MI100 | | -------- | | The documentation of ROCm is pretty clear that it works | on a limited range of hardware, with "unofficial" support | at best on other sets of hardware. | blagie wrote: | Only... | | (1) There are a million different ROCm pages and | introductions | | (2) Even that page is out-of-date, and e.g. claims | unofficial support for "GFX8 GPUs: Polaris 11 chips, such | as on the AMD Radeon RX 570 and Radeon Pro WX 4100," | although those were randomly disabled after ROCm 3.5.1. | | ... if you have a Ph.D in AMD productology, you might be | able to figure it out. If it's merely in computer | science, math, or engineering, you're SOL. | | There are now unofficial guides to downgrading to 3.5.1, | only 3.5.1 doesn't work with many modern frameworks, and | you land in a version incompatibility mess. | | These aren't old cards either. | | Half-decent engineer time is worth $350/hour, all in | (benefits, overhead, etc.). Once you've spent a week | futzing with AMD's mess, you're behind by the cost of ten | NVidia A4000 cards which Just Work. | | As a footnote, I suspect in the long term, small | purchases will be worth more than the supercomputing | megacontracts. GPGPU is wildly underutilized right now. | That's mostly a gap of software, standards, and support. | If we can get that right, every computer have many | teraflops of computing power, even for stupid video chat | filters and whatnot. | dragontamer wrote: | > Half-decent engineer time is worth $350/hour, all in | (benefits, overhead, etc.). Once you've spent a week | futzing with AMD's mess, you're behind by the cost of ten | NVidia A4000 cards which Just Work. | | It seems pretty simple to me if we're talking about | compute. The MI-cards are AMD's line of compute GPUs. Buy | an MI-card if you want to use ROCm with full support. | That's MI25, MI50, or MI100. | | > As a footnote, I suspect in the long term, small | purchases will be worth more than the supercomputing | megacontracts. GPGPU is wildly underutilized right now. | That's mostly a gap of software, standards, and support. | If we can get that right, every computer have many | teraflops of computing power, even for stupid video chat | filters and whatnot. | | I think you're right, but the #1 use of these devices is | running video games (aka: DirectX and Vulkan). Compute | capabilities are quite secondary at the moment. | wmf wrote: | Hopefully CDNA2 will be similar enough to RDNA2/3 that | the same software stack will work with both. | dragontamer wrote: | I assume the opposite is going on. | | Hopefully the RDNA3 software stack is good enough that | AMD decides that CDNA2 (or CDNA-3) can be based off of | the RDNA-instruction set. | | AMD doesn't want to piss off its $100 million+ customers | with a crappy software stack. | | --------- | | BTW: AMD is reporting that parts of ROCm 4.3 are working | with the 6900 XT GPU (suggesting that RDNA code | generation is beginning to work). I know that ROCm 4.0+ | has made a lot of github checkins that suggest that AMD | is now actively working on the RDNA-code generation. Its | not officially written into the ROCm documentation yet, | its mostly the discussions with ROCm github issues that | are noting these changes. | | Its not official support and its literally years late. | But its clear what AMD's current strategy is. | FeepingCreature wrote: | You don't think it's reasonable to expect machine | learning to work on new cards? | | That's exactly the point. ML on AMD is a third-class | citizen. | dragontamer wrote: | AMD's MI100 has those 4x4 BFloat16 and FP16 matrix | multiplication instructions you want, with PyTorch and | TensorFlow compiling down into them through ROCm. | | Now don't get me wrong: $9000 is a lot for a development | system to try out the software. NVidia's advantage is | that you can test out the A100 by writing software for | cheaper GeForce cards at first. | | NVidia also makes it easy with the DGX computer to | quickly get a big A100-based computer. AMD you gotta shop | around with Dell vs Supermicro (etc. etc.) to find | someone to build you that computer. | paulmd wrote: | > ROCm supports Vega, Vega 7nm, and CDNA just fine. | | yeah, but that's exactly what OP said - Vega is three | generations old at this point, and that is the last | consumer GPU (apart from VII which is a rebranded compute | card) that ROCm supports. | | On the NVIDIA side, you can run at least basic | tensorflow/pytorch/etc on a consumer GPU, and that option | is not available on the AMD side, you have to spend $5k | to get a GPU that their software actually supports. | | Not only that but on the AMD side it's a completely | standalone compute card - none of the supported compute | cards do graphics anymore. Whereas if you buy a 3090 at | least you can game on it too. | Tostino wrote: | I really don't think people appreciate the fact enough | that for developers to care to learn about building | software for your platform, you need to make it | accessible for them to run that software. That means "run | on the hardware they will already have". AMD really need | to push to get ROCm compiling for RDNA based chips. | slavik81 wrote: | There's unofficial support in the rocm-4.3.0 math-libs | for gfx1030 (6800 / 6800 XT / 6900 XT). rocBLAS also | includes gfx1010, gfx1011 and gfx1012 (5000 series). If | you encounter any bugs in the | {roc,hip}{BLAS,SPARSE,SOLVER,FFT} stack with those cards, | file GitHub issues on the corresponding project. | | I have not seen any problems with those cards in BLAS or | SOLVER, though they don't get tested as much as the | officially supported cards. | | FWIW, I finally managed to buy an RX 6800 XT for my | personal rig. I'll be following up on any issues found in | the dense linear algebra stack on that card. | | I work for AMD on ROCm, but all opinions are my own. | BadInformatics wrote: | I've mentioned this on other forums, but it would help to | have some kind of easily visible, public tracker for this | progress. Even a text file, set of GitHub issues or | project board would do. | | Why? Because as-is, most people still believe support for | gfx1000 cards is non-existent in any ROCm library. Of | course that's not the case as you've pointed out here, | but without any good sign of forward progress, your | average user is going to assume close to zero support. | Vague comments like | https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/issues/1542 are | better than nothing, but don't inspire that much | confidence without some more detail. | rektide wrote: | ROCm seems to be tolerably decent, if you are willing to spend | a couple hours, and, big if, if HIP supports all the various | libraries you were relying on. CUDA has a huge support library, | and ROCm has been missing not just the small fry stuff but a | lot of the core stuff in the that library. | | Long term, AI (& a lot of other interests) need to serve | themselves. CUDA is excellently convenient, but long term I | have a hard time imagining there being a worthwhile future for | anything but Vulkan. There don't seem to be a lot of forays | into writing good all-encompassing libraries in Vulkan yet, nor | many more specialized AI/ML Vulkan libraries, so it feels | largely like we more or less haven't started really trying. | rektide wrote: | Lot of downvotes. Anyone have any opinion? Is CUDA fine | forever? Is there something other than Vulkan we should also | try? Do you think AMD should solve every problem CUDA solves | for their customers too? What gives here? | | I see a lot a lot a lot of resistance to the idea that we | should start trying to align to Vulkan. Here & elsewhere. I | don't get it, it makes no sense, & everyone else using GPU's | is running fast as they can towards Vulkan. Is it just too | soon too early in the adoption curve, or do ya'll think there | are more serious obstructions long term to building a more | Vulkan centric AI/ML toolkit? It still feels inevitable to | me. What we are doing now feels like a waste of time. I wish | ya'll wouldn't downvote so casually, wouldn't just try to | brush this viewpoint away. | BadInformatics wrote: | > Do you think AMD should solve every problem CUDA solves | for their customers too? | | They had no choice. Getting a bunch of HPC people to | completely rewrite their code for a different API is a | tough pill to swallow when you're trying to win | supercomputer contracts. Would they have preferred to spend | development resources elsewhere? Probably, they've even got | their own standards and SDKs from days past. | | > everyone else using GPU's is running fast as they can | towards Vulkan | | I'm not qualified to comment on the entirety of it, but I | can say that basically no claim in this statement is true: | | 1. Not everyone doing compute is using GPUs. Companies are | increasingly designing and releasing their own custom | hardware (TPUs, IPUs, NPUs, etc.) | | 2. Not everyone using GPUs is cares about Vulkan. Certainly | many folks doing graphics stuff don't, and DirectX is as | healthy as ever. There have been bits and pieces of work | around Vulkan compute for mobile ML model deployment, but | it's a tiny niche and doesn't involve discrete GPUs at all. | | > Is it just too soon too early in the adoption curve | | Yes. Vulkan compute is still missing many of the niceties | of more developed compute APIs. Tooling is one big part of | that: writing shaders using GLSL is a pretty big step down | from using whatever language you were using before (C++, | Fortran, Python, etc). | | > do ya'll think there are more serious obstructions long | term to building a more Vulkan centric AI/ML toolkit | | You could probably write a whole page about this, but TL;DR | yes. It would take _at least_ as much effort as AMD and | Intel put into their respective compute stacks to get | Vulkan ML anywhere near ready for prime time. You need to | have inference, training, cross-device communication, | headless GPU usage, reasonably wide compatibility, not | garbage performance, framework integration, passable | tooling and more. | | Sure these are all feasible, but who has the incentive to | put in the time to do it? The big 3 vendors have their | supercomputer contracts already, so all they need to do is | keep maintaining their 1st-party compute stacks. Interop | also requires going through Khronos, which is its own | political quagmire when it comes to standardization. Nvidia | already managed to obstruct OpenCL into obscurity, why | would they do anything different here? Downstream libraries | have also poured untold millions into existing compute | stacks, OR rely on the vendors to implement that | functionality for them. This is before we even get into | custom hardware like TPUs that don't behave like a GPU at | all. | | So in short, there is little inevitable about this at all. | The reason people may have been frustrated by your comment | is because Vulkan compute comes up all the time as some | silver bullet that will save us from the walled gardens of | CUDA and co (especially for ML, arguably the most complex | and expensive subdomain of them all). We'd all like it to | come true, but until all of the aforementioned points are | addressed this will remain primarily in pipe dream | territory. | dnautics wrote: | is there any indication that ROCm has solved its stability | issues? I wasn't doing the testing myself, but the reason why | we rejected ROCm a while back (2 years?) was because you | could get segfaults hours into a ML training run, which is... | frustrating, to say the least, and not easily identifiable in | quickie test runs (or CI, if ML did more CI). | rowanG077 wrote: | I think this situation can only be fixed by moving up into | languages that compile to vendor specific GPU languages. Just | treat CUDA, openCL, vulkan compute, metal compute(??) etc. as | the assembly of graphics cards. | T-A wrote: | https://www.oneapi.io/ | snicker7 wrote: | Currently only supported by Intel. | hobofan wrote: | Barely anyone is writing CUDA directly these days. Just add | support in PyTorch and Tensorflow and you've covered probably | 90% of the deep learning market. | hprotagonist wrote: | and ONNX. | pjmlp wrote: | That is just part of the story. | | CUDA wiped out OpenCL, because it went polyglot as of version | 3.0, while insisting that everyone should write in a C | dialect. | | They also provide great graphical debugging tools and | libraries. | | Khronos waited too long to introduce SPIR, and in traditional | Khronos fashion, waited for the partners to provide the | tooling. | | One could blame NVidia, but it isn't as the competition has | done a better job. | astockwell wrote: | More promises tied --not to something in hand-- but to some | amazing future thing. Intel has not learned one bit. | tyingq wrote: | _" The earliest Arc products will be released in "the first | quarter of 2022"_ | | That implies they do have running prototypes in-hand. | bifrost wrote: | I'd be excited to see if you can run ARC on Intel ARC! | | GPU Accelerated HN would be very interesting :) | [deleted] ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-08-16 23:01 UTC)