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Comment by jsheard | Hacker News Reader

I know that's what they're referring to. If you're concerned about Microsoft gaining undue influence over Vulkan/SPIR-V then rest assured they already effectively controlled the desktop graphics landscape, however they define DirectX becomes the template for hardware vendors to follow, and Vulkan then has to follow their lead.

The pattern is especially obvious with big new features like raytracing, which was added to DirectX first and then some time later added to Vulkan with an API which almost exactly mirrors how DirectX abstracts it. There are even Vulkan extensions which exist specifically to make emulating DirectX semantics easier.

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That's understandable. Control over standards has the immense value. Just like look at Nvidia's CUDA.

CUDA success has much to thank Intel and AMD for never providing anything with OpenCL that could be a proper alternative in developer experience, graphical debugging, libraries and stable drivers.

Even OpenCL 2.x C++ standard was largely ignored or badly supported by their toolchains.

cough cough

Remind me who owns the OpenCL trademark, again?

Intel and AMD weren't the ones that abandoned it. Speaking in no uncertain terms, there was a sole stakeholder that can be held responsible for letting the project die and preventing the proliferation of Open GPGPU standards. A company that has everything to gain from killing Open standards in the cradle and replacing them with proprietary alternatives. Someone with a well-known grudge against Khronos who's willing to throw an oversized wrench into the plans as long as it hurts their opponents.

Would you be willing to share the deal with Apple/Khronos relations?

Apple didn't like OpenGL, rightfully, and came up with their own Metal which they released two years before first version of Vulkan was released.

Now people pretend that Apple is bad because it never adopted Vulkan and never implemented the "good modern OpenGL" (which never really existed).

It runs deeper than that, during the development of WebGPU it came to light that Apple was vetoing the use of any Khronos IP whatsoever, due to a private legal dispute between them. That led to WebGPU having to re-invent the wheel with a brand new shader language because Apples lawyers wouldn't sign off on using GLSL or SPIR-V under any circumstances.

The actual details of the dispute never came out, so we don't know if it has been resolved or not.

Apple, refusing to use open standards, and instead demanding everyone else do things their way? Say it’s not so!

The bizarre thing is that Apple did used to cooperate with Khronos, they were involved with OpenGL and even donated the initial version of the OpenCL spec to them. Something dramatic happened behind the scenes at some point.

Most likely related to how Khronos managed OpenCL after getting hold of it.

Please, tell us all about how Khronos hurt Apple with free software that Apple had every opportunity to influence. Point to the boo-boo that justifies making things worse for everyone.

I can imagine a scenario: Apple donates openCL, then later suggests some changes for the next version. Khronos delays or pushes back and now openCL is stuck from Apple's perspective and they can't do anything about it.

Yep.

My dear Apple has zero influence on Windows, Linux and Android.

Where are those great OpenCL implementations from Intel, AMD and Google?

I really want them to get it together with OpenCL 3 and especially Vulkan interop but I’m not really holding out hope for it.

OpenCL 3 is OpenCL 1, no one cares, Intel has made extensions on too for DPC++, AMD is pushing Romc or whatever else they think of.

Still not showing that they care.

I don't know why anyone would try to care when Apple announced they were pivoting away from OpenCL half a decade ago. The value prop of a cross-platform GPGPU API died the moment that Apple gave up, and OpenGL's treatment reflects what happens once Apple abandons an open standard.

My absurd pet theory is that this was related to their 2017-2020 dispute with Imagination. Apple started (allegedly) violating Imagination's IP in 2017. They were, at the very least, threatened with a lawsuit, and the threats were compelling enough that they've been paying up since 2020. It could be Apple pulled out of the Khronos IP pool to prepare a lawsuit, or to have better chances of dodging one.

Don't blame Apple for what Khronos, Intel and AMD have done with OpenCL after version 1.0.

It isn't Apple's fault that Intel and AMD didn't deliver.

It is entirely Apple's fault that they rejected OpenCL to replace it with a proprietary library. If this was an implementation or specification problem, Apple had every opportunity to shape the project in their own image. They cannot possibly argue that this was done for any other reason than greed, considering they themselves laid the framework for such a project. Without Apple's cooperation, Open Source GPGPU libraries can not reasonably target every client. Apple knows they wield this power, and considering their history it's both illogical and willfully ignorant to assume they're not doing this as part of a broader trend of monopolistic abuse.

Having shut out Nvidia as part of a petty feud, Apple realized they could force any inferior or nonfree CUDA alternative onto their developers no matter how unfinished, slow or bad it is. They turned away from the righteous and immediately obvious path to complicate things for developers that wanted to ship cross-platform apps instead of Mac-only ones.

The fact is that Intel, AMD and even Google (coming up with Renderscript), didn't gave a shit about making OpenCL something developers cared about.

That's not their job. CUDA wasn't "something developers cared about" for 11 fucking years and now look at where we are. If the OEMs focused on doing their job and implementing their standards, then neither of us would be trying to assign blame in the first place.

The worst part is, now that Apple has gone all-in on incomplete and proprietary alternatives, nobody has won. Apple successfully applied their monopoly abuse to a market that they have completely captive. And we want to blame... checks clipboard Intel and AMD, for having renewed interest in a successful decade-old concept.

OpenCL 2.x was a major failure across the board.

OpenGL and Vulkan were good though. Gotta take the wins where they exist.

Thanks to Intel and AMD.

NVidia never even implemented OpenCL 2.0

AMD had a buggy version. Intel had no dGPIs so no one cared how well an iGPU ran OpenCL (be it 1.3 or 2.0)

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AMD was clearly pushing C++ AMP at the time with Microsoft. And IMO, it worked great!! Alas, no one uses it so that died.

Don't blame NVidia for Intel and AMD failures to support OpenCL.

Olympics-tier mental gymnastics, considering Apple treated both Intel and AMD as manufacturing partners at the time.

Isn't the point of OpenCL to be... open? Not only did Intel and AMD not provide enough value, but neither did the community.

CUDA... is kind of annoying. And yet, it's the best experience (for GPGPU), as far as I can tell.

I feel like it says something that CUDA sets a standard for GPGPU (i.e. its visible runtime API) but others still fail to catch up.

The problem is the OpenCL development model is just garbage.

Compare the hello world of OpenCL [1] vs CUDA [2]. So much boilerplate and low level complexity for doing OpenCL whereas the CUDA example is just a few simple lines using the cuda compiler.

And what really sucks is it's pretty hard to get away from that complexity the way OpenCL is structured. You simply have to know WAY too much about the hardware of the machine you are running on, which means having the intel/amd/nvidia routes in your application logic when trying to make an OpenCL app.

Meanwhile, CUDA, because it's unapologetically just for nVidia cards, completely does away with that complexity in the happy path.

For something to be competitive with CUDA, the standard needs something like a platform agnostic bytecode to target so a common accelerated platform can scoop up the bytecode and run it on a given platform.

[1] https://github.com/intel/compute-samples/blob/master/compute...

[2] https://github.com/premprakashp/cuda-hello-world

Yeah, not just OpenCL, but even "newer" standards like WebGPU. I considered making a blog post where I just put the two hello worlds side-by-side and say nothing else.

I was severely disappointed after seeing people praise WebGPU (I believe for being better than OpenGL).

As for the platform-agnostic bytecode, that's where something like MLIR would work too (kind of). But we could also simply just start with transpiling that bytecode into CUDA/PTX.

Better UX with wider platform compatibility: CuPy, Triton.

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