Hacker News Reader

Comment by wtallis | Hacker News Reader

From the preceding paragraph:

> We weren’t able to get to the bottom of this because we don’t have the profiling tools necessary to get disassembly from the GPU.

View on HN

And that's all I need to know about replacing all NVIDIA stuff. I know it's pretty hard to get there, but Intel should know that having a serious general purpose computing thing means solid compilers, toolchains, optimized libraries, and a whole lot of mindshare (as in 'a large number of people willing to throw their time to test your stuff').

I am an Intel shill lately but I think it's more of a time thing rather than the desire to keep stuff a secret. They've been pretty good about open documentation on the stuff that matters (like this) such as OpenVINO.

I was a bit annoyed about the OpenVINO reference, because I felt they closed most of the things about myriad-x and the SHAVE arch. And last time I tried OpenVINO on TigerLake I was left with a very thick pile of undebuggable, uninspectable opencl-y stuff, very bad taste in my mouth.

I mean OpenVINO's perf is up there on Intel CPUs and it's a great optimising compiler, I've thrown a lot of weird stuff in there and it didn't crap out with complaints about unsupported layers or unsupported combination of layers. It also has an OK batching story (as opposed to TVM last time I checked...) if you're ready to perform some network surgery.

I also feel it's very bad at reporting errors, and stepping through with gdb is one of the worst experiences... BUT but yeah most of the code is available now.

Now if they could stop moving shit around, and renaming stuff, it'd be great. Hoping they settle on 'OneAPI' for some time.

SHAVE was such a cool architecture, it's too bad about all the secrecy.

Is the Intel Xe ISA even publicly documented? I’ve searched before and I can’t find a PDF detailing the instruction set. AMD releases them,[0] but I can’t find anything from Intel (or Nvidia for that matter).

[0]: RDNA2 ISA: https://www.amd.com/content/dam/amd/en/documents/radeon-tech...

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/docs/graphics-for-li... (Alchemist is a variant of Xe)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com