Re:Facebook Is Forming a Team to Design Its Own Chips
by Symmetry on Thursday April 19, 2018 @09:55AM
(#16875888)
For researchers, yes. At the scale Facebook and Google operate at the lack of CUDA isn't much of a problem. The big difference is that AMD's GPUs only work on vectors whereas Google's TPUs (and NVidia's latest card) can work on matrices directly for a large increase in throughput.
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Re:Facebook Is Forming a Team to Design Its Own Chips
by p1esk on Thursday April 19, 2018 @12:22PM
(#16877190)
Most DL researchers don't care about CUDA, they use higher level frameworks (Tensorflow, Pytorch, Caffe, etc). The frameworks can be extended to support other backends (e.g. OpenCL). If someone builds their own hardware, provides integrated support for that hardware in Tensorflow, and demonstrates speed advantages, people will use it.