Also remember that AMD and Intel both make discrete GPUs and iGPUs but AMD has much more share in discrete GPUs and Intel has much more share in iGPUs, so this helps them both.
And then if either of them managed to hit one out of the park on the hardware side it would benefit both. A really interesting possibility there is to put a strong GPU in a HEDT CPU socket with a lot of memory channels to feed it, because then it shares a memory controller with the CPU and doesn't have to copy over PCIe. That could drive demand, and Nvidia can't do that on a PC without an x86 license but AMD and Intel both can.
If Intel were clever like a fox, they'd invest heavily in making oneAPI work well on both Nvidia and AMD platforms. As a new market entrant they have nothing to lose, but everything to gain by luring companies into a vendor agnostic solution.
They've already starting doing this to a degree, but only in partnership with some university. This should be one of their major KPIs, they've got plenty of cash laying about.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=oneAPI-A...
Then the open standard and the proprietary one coexist as long as any of the vendors implementing the open standard is competitive, but if the vendor with the proprietary standard stumbles in any way, developers abandon them.
Hardware vendors don't really need lock in. People buy your hardware again because you make it faster every year. And if your hardware stops being competitive then the lock in won't save you.
"oneAPI is a cross-industry, open, standards-based unified programming model..." I'm sure they'd be happy for AMD to build on that. But they won't.
I think they'll both push their own APIs as the portable standard, but they can't rely on their competitors to contribute. Intel has much more developer grunt and a much more confident start, though they're a latecomer to GPUs.
Also their hardware is notoriously buggy. PCIe passthrough especially, google the PCI reset bug if you wanna know more. There is a project called vendor reset on github that reverse engineered the issues and works around them. The author is sure the issue can be fixed by a firmware update to those cards, but although initially AMD engineers showed interest, further attempts at coordinating proper fixes with them failed. Requests for documentation of affected cards were denied. Compare to Intel where you can freely download all the documentation about their GPUs, with registers, internal state, everything you'd need to write a driver from scratch. People want to fix AMD's shit for free but they don't want that.
We recently had calls with NVIDIA, AMD and Intel regarding their enterprise gpu offerings. NVIDIA and Intel were quick to respond and offer a meeting, AMD took forever. Followup questions, even very technical were answered within two days by Intel with concise to the point answers, no bullshit. With AMD they bounced around for two weeks until we got somewhat useful answers.
I really hate NVIDIA, it's a horrible, greedy company with a shitty attitude. I was excited about ryzen. I'm almost an AMD fan boy in the desktop space. I like competition, when the underdog rises from the ashes. But oh boy, AMD GPUs in the server/enterprise space a a clustersuck; buggy hardware, shitty drivers, clueless salesreps. You really have no choice but NVIDIA if you don't want to hire an expert working in getting these cards to work with anything more advanced than having them encode video in hardware or something.
We really hope Intel will deliver.
The new AMD graphics cards have drivers that ship as part of the Linux driver, and work perfectly fine. Better than Nvidia under a number of circumstances (where is Nvidia with Wayland support?)
Hopefully rocm 5 will bring support for RDNA 2 cards, but I said that about rocm 4 too.
https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/issues/1180#issuec...
6000-series cards work under WSL with Windows using DirectML, so it can't be too far away.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/ai/directml/gpu-ten...
They released drivers at the end of October that support GBM. Since XWayland 21.1.3 hardware acceleration for X should work too. I haven't tried myself though, since Nouveau is enough for my basic desktop usage.
NVIDIA is honest about what they are, whereas AMD brands itself as the puppy underdog that supports "open platforms" in order to sell you a product that doesn't work, but that you can "fix yourself". How's that for attitude?
I don't even care - yet. AMD hardware support has been criminal. Maybe in a few years we can talk about a parole hearing, then another year of probation, then we can talk about reintegration into society.