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Ultimately AMD missed the most important boat with their woeful support for GPU compute. 10 years ago they needed to go all in and offer something to compete with CUDA - whether that was internal or something standard from Khronos. They just couldn't commit to it as a business, didn't have the vision.

Intel missed for a different reason - they didn't invest in the product space at all for decades. In terms of units they had the most market share (millions of Intel Integrated Graphics chips), but it wasn't seen as important. Bare minimum to render Windows and Office UI, nothing more.

by swerner10 hours ago|

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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.

by bigyabai10 hours ago|

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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.

by swerner10 hours ago|

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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?

by my12310 hours ago|

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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

by swerner9 hours ago|

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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.