Hacker News Reader

Comment by swerner | Hacker News Reader

What do you mean by holistic? SYCL is an open versioned standard that allows for vendor specific extensions. The problem is not that there isn’t a proper standard, the problem is that many hardware vendors - or software developers simply don’t want to adopt it.

Intel (via Codeplay) was handing it out on a silver platter - Nvidia on SYCL, full top chain, and people still wouldn’t want it.

View on HN

Isn't OneAPI a good example of the problem, alongside Mojo/ONNX/TensorRT? The industry doesn't need a fifteenth competing standard. They need hardware buy-in.

By holistic, I mean hardware architecture cooperation. Nvidia can hold onto their lead forever if GPU designers fight over what a GPGPU hardware baseline looks like. The current ecosystem fragmentation is not competitive, and future fragmentation probably wouldn't work either. I think the fastest way to kill Nvidia would be a hardware consortium.

The problem with OneAPI is naming. It leads people to believe that is another competing standard where in fact is is simply just an implementation of a standard compliant SYCL compiler. If it just had been named “Intel SYCL compiler”, similar to the existing and accepted Intel OpenCL compiler, it would have been easier.

What would you expect the hardware consortium to coordinate on? Unified ISA?

oneAPI is effectively an Intel-only platform not a standard.

Yes they have implementations on top of CUDA but they're maintained by... Intel. They didn't get buy-in for cross-vendor collaboration

They were maintained by Codeplay - paid for my Intel. Nvidia can make contributions anytime they want, and here is the problem: Nvidia does not want to. Until each vendor starts pitching in with contributing their backend to an open standard, you will have to rely on others doing it for them.

Codeplay is Intel since the acquisition in 2022.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com