Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

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In practice it's the other way around.

In practice AMD and Intel GPUs should be suitable for machine learning but the software story isn't good. I know I can buy a NVIDIA card and know it's a good investment because everything worth with CUDA and be training models in less than a day. If I went with some other brand I'd expect to put 6 man*months into figuring out the software story, and that's a lot more than the price difference in the cards.

I've been wondering about the soundness of Intel's software strategy in that OneAPI ("One" is a bad smell in marketing speak, the only premium product in my mind that has "One" in the name is "Purina ONE" pet food, the XBOX ONE is an astonishing own goal of a name because you'd never get your mom to understand that an XBOX ONE is better than an XBOX or XBOX 360) is based on OpenCL and the one thing I know about OpenCL is that I don't know anyone who likes coding for it. The idea that you could code for FPGA and GPU out of the same API also seems delusional because FPGA is (mostly) about latency and GPU is about throughput. That is, FPGA can do certain small operations insanely fast and avoid the overhead of 16-bit math when 13-bit math will do, GPU is all about doing large operations in bulk.

> If I went with some other brand I'd expect to put 6 man*months into figuring out the software story, and that's a lot more than the price difference in the cards.

Several companies are spending >$10B annually on AI compute. There are a lot more than 6 man-months of savings in it for them...

One firm saving $2B saves $2B, open source software that opens up the market for everyone is priceless.

A company like OpenAI that is mostly concerned about pace might see going with the #2 GPU vendor is risky, even if it has the possibility to save money.

OneAPI is an implementation of SYCL. Apart from being standardized by Khronos, SYCL and OpenCL don't have that much in common, except that they are often interoperable due to many SYCL implementations running on top of OpenCL. Intel specifically has two backends, one for OpenCL and one for the lower-level Level Zero API.

Saying OneAPI/SYCL is bad "because OpenCL" is the same as saying OpenCL is good "because CUDA" (since the NVIDIA implementation of OpenCL is called CUDA and uses the larger CUDA stack).

As for the FPGA/GPU code sharing, iirc FPGA vendors including Altera/Intel and Xilinx/AMD support OpenCL as well. The idea doesn't sound that crazy to me: GPU code also often uses small data types (fp16, tf32, int4), and both work with data parallelism. GPUs operate in parallel with SIMD vectors, but a compute accelerator FPGA achieves a similar thing by essentially pipelining the program. Effective pipelining requires parallelism too, since a serial FPGA program only has one stage active, similar to how a serial GPU program only has one ALU per compute unit active. As such both are mostly suitable for massively parallel programs.

>"One" is a bad smell in marketing speak.

Thank goodness other people recognize this too. Whenever I see “One” in branding I sense a corporation bereft of creativity and afraid of risk. Alternatively, it might also indicate that were too many executives involved and no single person had the authority to make a decision, so they picked the most bland and uninspiring option they could all agree on.

It’s so lame and milquetoast. However, there is one exception I will make, the radio station 101.1 “The One”. Here it feels appropriate and even a little endearing.

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