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ReginaldIII t1_iycqo8c wrote

Reply to comment by trajo123 in Does anyone uses Intel Arc A770 GPU for machine learning? [D] by labloke11

> People replying with "don't bother, just use Nvidia&CUDA" only make the problem worse ...music for Nvidia's ears.

My job is to get a trained model out the door so we can run experiments.

My job is not revolutionize the frameworks and tooling available so that competing hardware can be made a feasible alternative for everyone.

There are only so many hours in the day. I get paid for a very specific job. I have to work within the world that exists around me right now.

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philthechill t1_iycso44 wrote

If you’re in a commercial setting your job is to get market-beating learning done at minimal cost. OP says these things might have a revolutionary cost per learning value, so yeah it is within your job parameters to look at specs, pricing and tool support at the very least. Ignoring technological revolutions is definitely one way companies end.

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ReginaldIII t1_iyctmv8 wrote

90% of the time my job is to be a small and consistently performing cog in a much bigger machine because I am there to help drive down stream science outcomes for other scientists (often in a different discipline).

We need to get X done within Y timeframe.

> "Lets consider upending our infrastructure and putting millions of pounds worth or existing and battle proven code and hardware up in flux so we can fuck around seeing if Intel has actually made a viable GPU-like product on their umpteenth attempt"

... is not exactly an easy sell to my board of governance.

I was in the first wave of people who got access to Xeon Phi Knights Corner Co-Processor cards. Fuck my life did we waste time on that bullshit. The driver support was abysmal, even with Intels own ICC compiler and their own MPI distribution.

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philthechill t1_iyctys1 wrote

Yeah fair.

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ReginaldIII t1_iydnekt wrote

Also worth considering how many years it is going to take to offset the sizeable cost of such a migration.

Forget the price of the hardware, how long is it going to take to offset the cost of the programming and administration labour to pull off this sort of move?

What about maintenance? We've got years of experience with Nvidia cards in datacentres, we understand the failure modes pretty well, we understand the tooling needed to monitor and triage these systems at scale.

What guarantees do I have that if I fill my racks with this hardware they won't be dying or catching on fire within a year?

What guarantees do I have that Intel won't unilaterally decide this is a dead cat for them and they want to scrap the project? Like they have for almost every GPU adjacent project they've had.

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AtomKanister t1_iycydix wrote

>"Lets consider upending our infrastructure and putting millions of pounds worth or existing and battle proven code and hardware up in flux so we can fuck around seeing if Intel has actually made a viable GPU-like product on their umpteenth attempt"

That's exactly how innovation is made, and missing out on this in crucial moments is how previously big players become irrelevant in the blink of an eye. See: Kodak, Blockbuster, Sears, Nokia.

It's valid to be skeptical of new developments (because a lot of them will be dead ends), but overdo it and you're setting yourself up for disaster.

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hgoel0974 t1_iyczwvn wrote

Setting up infrastructure that relies on a GPU that can't do what you need yet and is not optimized for it either is certainly innovative but not in the way that you're thinking.

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ReginaldIII t1_iydl00l wrote

> That's exactly how innovation is made

It's also how companies overextend and go out of business.

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