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Comment by ndneighbor | Hacker News Reader

OneAPI isn't bad for PyTorch, the performance isn't there yet but you can tell it's an extremely top priority for Intel.

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But this is the the thing. Speaking as someone who dabbles in this area rather than any kind of expert, it’s baffling to me that people like Intel are making press releases and public statements rather than (I don’t know) putting in the frikkin work to make performance of the one library that people actually use decent.

You have a massive organization full of gazillions of engineers many of whom are really excellent. Before you open your mouth in public and say something is a priority, deploy a lot of them against this and manifest that priority by actually doing the thing that is necessary so people can use your stuff.

It’s really hard to take them seriously when they haven’t (yet) done that.

You know how it works. The same busybodies who are putting out this useless noise releases are the ones who squandered Intel's lead, and now are patting themselves on the back for figuring out that with this they'll again be on top for sure!

There was a post on HN a few months ago about how Nvidia's CEO still has meetings with engineers in the trenches. Contrast that with what we know of Intel, which is not much good, and a lot of bad. (That they are notoriously not-well-paying, because they were riding on their name recognition.)

Intel has to do it by themselves. NVIDIA just lets Meta/OpenAI/Google engineers do it for them. Such a handicapped fight.

It wasn’t always like this. Nvidia did the initial heavy lifting to get cuda off the ground to a point where other people could use it.

That's because CUDA is a clear, well-functioning library and Intel has no equivalent. It makes any "you just have to get Pytorch working" a little less plausible.

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