[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]
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