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talldayo10/11/20243 repliesview on HN

You can blame ARM for the popularity of CUDA. At least x86 had a few passable vector ISA ops like SSE and AVX - the ARM spec only supports the piss-slow NEON in it's stead. Since you're not going to unify vectors and mobile hardware anytime soon, the majority of people are overjoyed to pay for CUDA hardware where GPGPU compute is taken seriously.

There were also attempts like OpenCL, that the industry rejected early-on because they thought they'd never need a CUDA alternative. Nvidia's success is mostly built on the ignorance of their competition - if Nvidia was allowed to buy ARM then they could guarantee the two specs never overlap.


Replies

robotresearcher10/11/2024

> Since you're not going to unify vectors and mobile hardware anytime soon

Apple's M4 as described in its iPad debut has about the same chip area for CPU and GPU/vector functions. It's as much a vector machine as not.

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2024/05/apple-introduces-m4-c...

oivey10/11/2024

CUDA clobbered x86, not ARM. Maybe if x86’s vector ops were better and more usable ARM would have been motivated to do better.

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saagarjha10/11/2024

ARM has SVE these days. This comment makes no sense, anyway: people don’t do numerical computing on phones.

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