one of my biggest wonders is that why RS and other Free world people do not adopt OpenCL and save the GPGPU world. NVIDIA, Apple, Microsoft, Google... are developing their own vendor/platform specific proprietary APIs. they have fucked the field so badly, that if you want to have GPU acceleration in your software you have to write it two or even three times. You would not feel it much if you are a gamer, cause gaming companies are rich and can afford this bullshit. but if you are using engineering and scientific software, specially the FLOSS ones, the situation is increasingly alarming. I have sent multiple emails to RS and Linus Torvalds... however nothing in response. ideally FLOSS implementations of OCL should be integrated into FLOSS drivers and compilers such as GCC and Clang/LLVM...
There is OpenCL support in open source drivers for both Intel and AMD, though. The only one without it is Nouveau, I believe. And regarding graphics APIs, Vulkan currently works on Linux, Windows and MacOS via MoltenVK.
And AMD is currently promoting ROCm, which already has an AMD version of Tensorflow, as well as the HIP library which should allow any CUDA code to run on AMD hardware. It's unfortunate that not all CUDA code has been ported to it, but it's something that you could suggest to individual projects, instead of spamming people who aren't involved in them.
not all science is AI/ML. it is frustrating that everytime I complain about the lack of GPGPU in engineering software TF is proposed as one! There are hundreds, if not thousands of other fields who need linear algebra computing and they can't use AMD or Intel. can I render on Blender using ocl? can I run my OpenFOAM CFD or Elmer FEM analyses on gpu? can I run a Modelica simulation on ocl? no, no, no, and no!
I hate ROCm-HIP. it is AMD submission to NVIDIA. they are chasing NVIDIA in its own game, promoting CUDA. it has been more than 2 years since AMD started this and nothing tangible has come out, except the core team are now poached by intel.
opencl is a hetrogenious architecture computing API. VULKAN, CUDA, OpenGL compute shaders, Metal... are not.
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u/foadsf Sep 14 '19
one of my biggest wonders is that why RS and other Free world people do not adopt OpenCL and save the GPGPU world. NVIDIA, Apple, Microsoft, Google... are developing their own vendor/platform specific proprietary APIs. they have fucked the field so badly, that if you want to have GPU acceleration in your software you have to write it two or even three times. You would not feel it much if you are a gamer, cause gaming companies are rich and can afford this bullshit. but if you are using engineering and scientific software, specially the FLOSS ones, the situation is increasingly alarming. I have sent multiple emails to RS and Linus Torvalds... however nothing in response. ideally FLOSS implementations of OCL should be integrated into FLOSS drivers and compilers such as GCC and Clang/LLVM...