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AMD now has more compute on the top 500 than Nvidia

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195 points rbanffy | 7 comments | 18 Nov 24 18:54 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source | bottom
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pie420 ◴[18 Nov 24 20:14 UTC] No.42176400[source]▶
layperson with no industry knowledge, but it seems like nvidia's CUDA moat will fall in the next 2-5 years. It seems impossible to sustain those margins without competition coming in and getting a decent slice of the pie
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metadat ◴[18 Nov 24 20:17 UTC] No.42176440[source]▶
But how will AMD or anyone else push in? CUDA is actually a whole virtualization layer on top of the hardware and isn't easily replicable, Nvidia has been at it for 17 years.

You are right, eventually something's gotta give. The path for this next leg isn't yet apparent to me.

P.s. how much is an exaflop or petaflop, and how significant is it? The numbers thrown around in this article don't mean anything to me. Is this new cluster way more powerful than the last top?

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bryanlarsen ◴[18 Nov 24 20:27 UTC] No.42176567[source]▶
Anybody spending tens of billions annually on Nvidia hardware is going to be willing to spend millions to port their software away from CUDA.
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1. pjmlp ◴[19 Nov 24 12:10 UTC] No.42182571[source]▶
First they need to support everything that CUDA is capable of in programing language portfolio, tooling and libraries.
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2. bryanlarsen ◴[19 Nov 24 13:09 UTC] No.42183003[source]▶
A typical LLM might use about 0.1% of CUDA. That's all that would have to be ported to get that LLM to work.
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3. pjmlp ◴[19 Nov 24 14:15 UTC] No.42183651[source]▶
Which is missing the point why CUDA has won.

Then again, maybe the goal is getting 0.1% of CUDA market share. /s

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4. its_down_again ◴[19 Nov 24 14:59 UTC] No.42184109{3}[source]▶
In the words of Gilfoyle-- I'll bite. Why has CUDA won?
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5. imtringued ◴[19 Nov 24 15:09 UTC] No.42184220{3}[source]▶
Nvidia has won because their compute drivers don't crash people's systems when they run e.g. Vulkan Compute.

You are mostly listing irrelevant nice to have things that aren't deal breakers. AMD's consumer GPUs have a long history of being abandoned a year or two after release.

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6. pjmlp ◴[19 Nov 24 15:44 UTC] No.42184726{4}[source]▶
CUDA C++, CUDA Fortran, CUDA Anything PTX, plus libraries, IDE integration, GPU graphical debugging.

Coupled with Khronos, Intel, AMD never delivering anything comparable with OpenCL, Apple losing interest after Khronos didn't took OpenCL into the direction they wanted, Google never adopting it favouring their Renderscript dialect.

7. pjmlp ◴[19 Nov 24 15:45 UTC] No.42184735{4}[source]▶
CUDA C++, CUDA Fortran, CUDA Anything PTX, plus libraries, IDE integration, GPU graphical debugging, aren't only nice to have things.