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Comment by varispeed | Hacker News Reader

This looks like something Intel should be paying good money for, but I feel like they are just going to "embrace" open source and snatch it without giving a penny to the author.

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Disclosure: I work at Intel.

At one of the internal Q&As, there was a question as to why we didn't just implement CUDA. One of the reasons given was that the lawyers looked at the license of CUDA and decided that Intel could not legally implement CUDA for Intel's GPU devices. I don't know the details, but quite frankly, it wouldn't surprise me if Nvidia didn't somehow put a poison pill in there to prevent Intel or AMD from implementing it for their own GPUs (note that AMD also doesn't provide an implementation of CUDA for its own GPUs).

Instead, the strategy Intel pursued was to develop a migration tool from CUDA to Sycl: https://software.intel.com/content/www/us/en/develop/tools/o...

AMD implemented HIP, which is nearly CUDA (if not identical). There is an implementation for Intel too though it is third-party:

https://github.com/cpc/hipcl

The problem here seems to be that everyone kinda wants Nvidia's market capture. Intel didn't contribute to AMD's project - they started their own.

And they are all approaching it the wrong way, the typical hubris of a hardware company that thinks they can just have some interns make a software solution for their problem.

Here is how you beat the CUDA lock-in: consistently make better performing GPUs so not using them is a liability. Instead buying AMD you not only get a worse GPU but also the intern software solution, and that is just not compelling.

Or AMD could simply knock off the binary blobs. The DRM excuse has always been weak, because it is a tiny fraction of the total firmware blob - and it'd be easy to make it so that the legally hobbled hardware decoder simply errors out in cases where the end user chooses not to load the DRM blob. Boom, no more dependence on AMD interns. I've been following their commit logs pretty closely for a year now, and I frequently see some amazing accidental admissions about the left hand (software team) not knowing what the right hand (hardware team) is doing. During one very frustrating series of patches it was difficult resisting the impulse to say "Go get your dad."

It doesn't help if they don't offer the same GUI debugging capabilities, and polyglot support as CUDA does in its current form.

Not only that, everyone that has jumped into SYSCL is doing SYSCL + their own sugar on top, so what is the "portability" selling point actually?

Also they keep forgetting that CUDA is not only C++, rather a polyglot eco-system.

Why not collaborate with AMD for once an improve HIP? If AMD and Intel stay divided all hope is lost and nvidia will stay the main target

Because HIP/ROCm is awful.

Instead of targeting an IR, it directly targets a given GPU's ISA, so that your existing binary will not run on future hardware. That's a total no-go for basically every non-HPC use case.

Intel is much better off building a sound technical foundation from scratch.

You better make Zluda work well on AMD gpus then otherwise it will be irrelevant

And it doesn't even work on most consumer AMD graphic cards^^

I am guessing that Nvidia only copied what Intel is doing with x86. Why don't Intel free the x86? A little bit of competition would be good for everyone, otherwise ARM will take over the market, so Intel has nothing to lose from doing that.

You make it sound like that's an issue with Intel while the license is to blame.

So, basically this project is illegal and waiting to be removed from Github then?

yes. I am not a lawyer but nvidia's lawyers would be interested I bet.

(IANAL.)

Without looking into the CUDA licenses (who knows, they might even expressly allow this kind of thing, but seems pretty unlikely to me), I'd expect this to be a case of whether "APIs are copyrightable" or not, same as the famous and sort of still ongoing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_....

The US courts said "yes" in this case (note: 100% stupid IMO), but I'm not confident that nVidia'd have an easy win if they decided to sue the developer, and I'm also relatively sure they wouldn't send a DMCA request at this stage (and that if they did, their request would probably be reviewed harder than normal).

That's not the most accurate summary of Google v Oracle. The case has been tried twice, Google has been found in the clear twice at the district court by the jury, and the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has twice overturned the jury result, and the case is now at the Supreme Court awaiting a decision as to whether or not CAFC's decision is off it's rocker.

It is not usual for CAFC to hear copyright disputes; that it was appealed to CAFC instead of the 9th Circuit is because there was a patent claim at one point, and CAFC should have followed 9th Circuit precedent on the matter. Google contends that 9th Circuit precedent holds that the API is not copyrightable, which means that CAFC erred in ignoring precedent. Most software companies ultimately agree with Google here, not Oracle: it's telling that most of the amici who side with Oracle are not software companies but media publishers (e.g., MPAA, RIAA).

That link is missing a trailing period by the way

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_....

Edit: huh? I pasted it in with the period and it gets removed. Do trailing periods get removed because it thinks it's the end of a sentence?

Anyway, this redirects to the right URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_v_Oracle

Yeah, HN strips trailing periods for the reason you stated. You can normally get around that by adding a hash/pound sign.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_...

I think you could argue from the interop side which would make such a project legal in Europe. So Intel or AMD could funnel money into this via their European branches or some subsidiary?

> I'm not confident that nVidia'd have an easy win if they decided to sue the developer

So long as Nvidia's case doesn't get outright laughed out of court, they can throw money at their legal team until the developer goes bankrupt.

This makes me think, why Intel doesn't actually care? There's a lot of money poured into marketing, and today it's always about "AI-optimized muti-core nano-whateverer GPU", so isn't it obvious making your shitty GPUs compatible with software written for competition's less shitty GPUs is probably even more profitable in the 5-year run than trying to make your GPUs a bit less trash? Yes, Nvidia wouldn't want that, so it won't be easy to make your product CUDA-compatible, but not impossible. Is it illegal for them to do, or what? We all are kind of accustomed to the idea that Intel doesn't care, but why don't they care? It is money laying around waiting to be taken, and they just ignore it.

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