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Comment by sandGorgon | Hacker News Reader

does anyone know what is the story on the software side - CUDA is basically industry standard now.

Tensorflow OpenCL support bug [1] has been open for FOUR years now (with the discussion devolving into an Intel PlaidML flame war).

AMD OpenCL is now ROCm ?

At the end of the day, I cant run ANY accelerated workloads using Intel graphics or AMD ....because there's simply no software support anywhere.

OTOH, if you have a nVidia stack... boom. you get accelerated python https://developer.nvidia.com/how-to-cuda-python

Are you running containerized workloads on kubernetes ? it has BAKED-IN support for nvidia-docker (https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/manage-gpus/scheduling-gpus...)

Is anything going to change ?

[1] https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/issues/22

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> At the end of the day, I cant run ANY accelerated workloads using Intel graphics or AMD ....because there's simply no software support anywhere.

You can, there’s an Intel framework: OpenVINO that is targeting Intel hardware, processors and HD video cards, you can convert TF graph to Vino and use their inference server, that mimics TF serving.

There’s TF ROCm port by AMD as well.

Huh, that's strange. I remember in the infancy of cryptocurrency mining (back before specialized ASIC hardware), OpenCL was far superior to CUDA, and AMD cards were doing 10X the hashrate for the price as OpenCL cards. What changed in the interim? Is SHA256^2 just a completely different workload than Tensorflow, or has Nvidia pulled ahead?

It's a different workload. Afaik, AMD cards are still better hash-per-dollar for the coins that are gpu-mineable.

I'm pessimistic. I doubt things will change unless all the major platform owners can come to an agreement on a common API for GPU compute. If NVIDIA were the only holdout, they might be forced to support it.

As it stands, CUDA is the only API with a decent implementation available on the three major desktop OSes. It's ridiculous.

Does AMD/Intel have any hardware worth switching for or is it just an ideological question?

Is Tensorflow+OpenCL a feature that a lot of folks are demanding? shrugs

Yes, in the sense that it creates actual competition, and will presumably mean that datacenter cards for ML will lose Nvidia's $5-10k markup.

There is zero demand since there is rocm support for tensorflow.

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