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Re:AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M by eightysixfour on Wednesday July 10, 2024 @10:24AM (#40927263)
Yes, nvidia spends a lot of time and money developing software that induces demand for their GPUs.
Re:AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M by KeplerBoy on Wednesday July 10, 2024 @11:16AM (#40927856)
The biggest frameworks are still from other players though. Pytorch, tensorflow and jax aren't funded by Nvidia.
Re:AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M by stanleykm on Wednesday July 10, 2024 @11:30AM (#40928032)
But they are built on top of nvidia tooling and you can use nvidia tools to do more extensive profiling than other players offer.
Re:AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M by KeplerBoy on Wednesday July 10, 2024 @12:05PM (#40928387)
True, gotta love Nsight Systems and Compute.

That's the first hurdle of working with AMD GPUs, I have no idea what the GPU is actually doing because there is no quality profiler.

Re:AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M by Conscat on Wednesday July 10, 2024 @12:34PM (#40928683)
Is Omniperf/Omnitrace not very good? I haven't used it, but I have been using Nsight Systems recently and it looks comparable to me at a glance.
Re:AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M by mcbuilder on Wednesday July 10, 2024 @12:59PM (#40928925)
No way would any of those have any have bindings to backend libraries like cuDNN.
Re:AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M by fortran77 on Wednesday July 10, 2024 @06:16PM (#40932053)
Yeah but the frameworks use CUDA in their NVIDIA implementation , don’t they?
Re:AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M by eightysixfour on Wednesday July 10, 2024 @09:32PM (#40933039)
That’s ignoring a huge swath of software nvidia uses to push industry forwards (in the direction they want it to go).

Omniverse, Isaac, Metropolis, Rapids, etc.

Re:AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M by xyst on Wednesday July 10, 2024 @02:00PM (#40929601)
Nvidia also spends a metric shit ton of money to make sure professors use and teach on their platform.

I don’t remember any alternatives in uni. Maybe OpenCL but only lightly mentioned

Re:AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M by fngjdflmdflg on Wednesday July 10, 2024 @03:35PM (#40930612)
>Nvidia also spends a metric shit ton of money to make sure professors use and teach on their platform.

Do you have a source for this claim? Or do you simply mean that since they spend money making it better that professors end up using it on their own accord?

Re:AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M by flakiness on Wednesday July 10, 2024 @03:52PM (#40930808)
They co-author the definitive CUDA textbook, and it's based on their sponsored class (You can find the story in the intro of the book.) https://www.amazon.com/Programming-Massively-Parallel-Proces...
Re:AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M by YetAnotherNick on Wednesday July 10, 2024 @06:41PM (#40932198)
Co authoring a book is not "metric shit ton of money".
Re:AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M by chaostheory on Thursday July 11, 2024 @10:28AM (#40937207)
No, I think it’s a source for the claim and not the actual evidence of what they spent it on.
Re:AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M by physicsguy on Wednesday July 10, 2024 @04:24PM (#40931132)
I hold an NVidia instructors cert from when I worked in academia. They even give you access to hardware while you’re running courses on it. It’s super easy and totally free.
Re:AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M by nojvek on Wednesday July 10, 2024 @06:42PM (#40932210)
I won an Nvidia GPU while I was doing my advanced graphics course for making custom shaders.

Had to buy a new power supply just so I could use it.

Re:AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M by Narhem on Wednesday July 10, 2024 @04:00PM (#40930895)
Not exactly but they give massive discounts and the tools are much more appropriate to use for late undergrads and grads.
Re:AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M by helloericsf on Wednesday July 10, 2024 @02:06PM (#40929657)
OpenCL was discussed more frequently in classes about a decade ago. However, I haven't heard it mentioned in the last five years or so.
Re:AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M by eddiewithzato on Thursday July 11, 2024 @05:52AM (#40935023)
Yea people tried to push OpenCL back then, it simply was just inferior
Re:AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M by light_hue_1 on Wednesday July 10, 2024 @02:23PM (#40929816)
> Nvidia also spends a metric shit ton of money to make sure professors use and teach on their platform.

Nah. People teach what they use because that's what's easy.

Re:AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M by baumy on Wednesday July 10, 2024 @03:26PM (#40930508)
It's definitely both.

I'm sure plenty of professors use CUDA in their courses because it's what they actually use. At the same time, in 2013 when I was in college I took a course on "parallel computing" as a CS elective. The professor told us on day 1 that NVidia was sponsoring the course and had donated a bunch of GPUs to the clusters we could remotely connect into for the sake of the class. Naturally we used CUDA exclusively.

I know for a fact that this happened at a lot of schools. I don't know if it's still happening since I'm not in that world anymore, but don't see why it would have stopped.

Re:AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M by Narhem on Wednesday July 10, 2024 @04:03PM (#40930929)
CUDA is extremely simple, the classes might as well be on rails. OpenCL is like impossible without graphics and/or CUDA/distributed computing/operating system experience.
Re:AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M by kimixa on Wednesday July 10, 2024 @07:56PM (#40932632)
I'm not sure if I really agree - the level of abstraction used for each is extremely similar. There's not really any "Graphics Pipeline Specifics" pollution in OpenCL or CUDA.

You can pretty much translate something like https://github.com/jcupitt/opencl-experiments/blob/master/Op... with string replace function names.

Re:AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M by alphabeta2024 on Wednesday July 10, 2024 @05:43PM (#40931831)
You get free access to hardware for courses if you teach CUDA courses.
Re:AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M by Izikiel43 on Wednesday July 10, 2024 @02:01PM (#40929615)
Opencl is horrible compared to cuda
Re:AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M by Narhem on Wednesday July 10, 2024 @04:04PM (#40930938)
Especially since AMD and nVidia have similar costs for a GPU
Re:AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M by kcb on Wednesday July 10, 2024 @04:41PM (#40931271)
AMD has hip which is basically a CUDA clone.
Re:AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M by pjmlp on Thursday July 11, 2024 @03:23AM (#40934394)
Only for those that equate CUDA to C++ only, and poor tooling.
Re:AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M by kcb on Thursday July 11, 2024 @01:20PM (#40938715)
They've replicated many of the libraries as well. But yea haven't personally tried it.
Re:AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M by wsay on Wednesday July 10, 2024 @04:20PM (#40931097)
As someone who has designed and taught those courses, my experience (admittedly only one persons) is that you pick what will work with the least hassle - because you'll have plenty of hassle elsewhere and probably no real time to deal with any of it without making more.
Re:AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M by sillysaurusx on Wednesday July 10, 2024 @06:14PM (#40932037)
This is actually one of my favorite comments of all time, because it's how software wins. The software that students use is the software the industry uses about five years later.
Re:AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M by chii on Wednesday July 10, 2024 @11:25PM (#40933414)
> The software that students use is the software the industry uses about five years later.

which is why it's anti-competitive for a company to sponsor university courses (such as providing educational versions for free). It should be disallowed, unless the course is _specifically_ teaching the software, rather than a general course.

Re:AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M by paulddraper on Wednesday July 10, 2024 @11:36PM (#40933471)
That's competitive, not anti-competitive.

Anti-competitive means others are not allowed to do the same.

Re:AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M by chii on Wednesday July 10, 2024 @11:46PM (#40933513)
> others are not allowed to do the same.

it's usually the case where the sponsor is the sole sponsors (aka, the course does not teach both X and Y, esp. if X is given to the uni for free).

It's anti-competitive to allow companies to embed themselves in general courses, despite it not being so by the letter of the laws.

Re:AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M by zamfi on Thursday July 11, 2024 @12:39AM (#40933727)
Sort of -- but basically no course is going to teach X and Y, if they're functionally equivalent ways to learn about Z, because almost no course is specifically about X or Y, it's about Z, and learning both X and Y isn't germane to learning Z, just learning one is enough.

As long as the companies behind X and Y both have a fair shot at sponsorship, this isn't really anti-competitive. It's literally a competition in which the companies compete for student and faculty attention.

Anti-competitive would be a company saying "you must teach X and not Y in your class about Z because you use Xco's mail services" or some other such abuse of one contractual relationship for an unrelated gain.

Re:AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M by paulddraper on Thursday July 11, 2024 @12:55AM (#40933780)
They say "hey if you want to teach a class using X, we'll sponsor it."

A competitor can complete for that sponsorship. So long as it's done on direct merit of the value, there's no problem.

Anti-competitive would be providing products or services and forcibly leveraging that into an unrelated contract.

Re:AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M by nh2 on Thursday July 11, 2024 @01:58AM (#40934014)
Not always.

One of our machine learning courses was taught in Matlab.

Unsurprisingly, nobody used Matlab after uni, or 5 years later.

Re:AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M by gibolt on Thursday July 11, 2024 @03:01AM (#40934286)
Matlab is fairly easy to work with (initially) and is great when learning a new concept, instead of learning that plus arbitrary syntax of the tool.

It isn't particularly fast though, and the simplicity quickly becomes an obstacle when solving a real problem.

Re:AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M by lmpdev on Thursday July 11, 2024 @07:27AM (#40935502)
Also did an algorithms in machine learning course in matlab

It’s a great language choice for it

It weeded out the script kiddies who incorrectly signed up wanting a Tensorflow or PyTorch course

It’s a fairly bland and slow but usable language for the task

Shits me off to no end a lot of engineering courses moreorless indoctrinate their students into using it unconditionally, though

Octave exists but is a relative pain to use

Re:AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M by plaguuuuuu on Thursday July 11, 2024 @09:31PM (#40942069)
It's still a pain spending time learning matlab syntax/semantics when you could just, idk, use C or Haskell instead
Re:AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M by TremendousJudge on Thursday July 11, 2024 @10:55AM (#40937457)
My experience in university was the exact opposite. The stuff we were using was 5-10 years behind what industry was using.
Re:AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M by Narhem on Wednesday July 10, 2024 @03:45PM (#40930745)
No nvidia makes great tooling. Like as a startup if I had to pick a development tool AmD fails repeatedly while nvida tooling is like matlab level of usefulness.

Those companies have money to make ‘nice’ things which open source software doesn’t have the time to do.

For 100m you could probably make some pretty sweet clones if amd is hiring anybody to man that position.

Re:AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M by xzel on Wednesday July 10, 2024 @07:07PM (#40932358)
I’m not sure if I’m in the minority here but Matlab levels of tooling is an insult. Their guides were always two or three steps before being useful. Just enough to make you think whatever they were selling would solve your problems but never enough when really building a solution.
Re:AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M by Narhem on Saturday July 13, 2024 @05:48PM (#40957155)
Before visual studio code the laggyness of eclipse always pushed me to use notepad++. Which in turn pushed me away from Java.
Re:AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M by cosentiyes on Wednesday July 10, 2024 @07:15PM (#40932402)
> matlab level of usefulness

that's a little harsh :D

Re:AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M by Dalewyn on Wednesday July 10, 2024 @08:35PM (#40932803)
>Those companies have money to make ‘nice’ things which open source software doesn’t have the time to do.

I would posit it's a lack of will rather than time.

Re:AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M by lmpdev on Thursday July 11, 2024 @07:34AM (#40935537)
Moreso lack of will to effectively mass organise

Thousands of OSS devs would be willing to devote serious time to it, but can’t/won’t run the gauntlet of starting such a ludicrously large project from scratch

It’s easy to contribute, difficult to be the one organising the contributions

A real “where do I even begin” problem

Re:AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M by eightysixfour on Wednesday July 10, 2024 @09:24PM (#40933012)
I don’t understand what you are disagreeing with.

Nvidia makes software that induces demand for their products. Sometimes that software is a tool, or a platform, or an ML model, or foundational research on algorithms.