Intel oneAPI Initiative Evolves Into The Unified Acceleration "UXL" Foundation

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Intel oneAPI Initiative Evolves Into The Unified Acceleration "UXL" Foundation

Here's a surprise announcement I was briefed on last week and now made public by the Linux Foundation and Intel... The Linux Foundation is forming the Unified Acceleration (UXL) Foundation that is an evolution of Intel's oneAPI initiative and has the potential to make the compute accelerator ecosystem as a whole more open and unified across vendors.

https://www.phoronix.com/review/oneapi-uxl-foundation

[Meteorhead]

It is hard to convey meaning to this move and will likely stir a lot of discussions within Khronos.

These industry members lining up behind oneAPI is surely a commendable if their commitment sticks. It does rhyme a lot with HSA which was kickstarted with AMD and ARM and then went nowhere when the interests of these parties went in different directions. Having read quite some about HSA (at the time) and Level0, they are similar lowest-level substrates with HSA being more holistic in capturing platform capabilities, Level0 is more simplistic. It will be interesting to see if all the founding members will provide 1st party Level0 implementations or if their interest remains at the level of providing their logos for slideware.

Another interesting question is whether the founding members will also aspire to borrow the entire ecosystem and ride the entire stack: SYCL->OpenCL->Level0. FWIW AMD being absent isn't surprising the least. If it hurts someone that much (US DoE behind Frontier) then perhaps they can just pour a pile of cash on top for someone to implement Level0 atop AMDKFD and call it a day. If AMD would be kind enough to provide the sources of PAL on Windows, not just Linux, they could also get Windows for free without lifting a finger.

[Jumbotron]

This does have AMD HSA vibes. But that and unified addressing and zero copy went out the window when Lisa Su came in and reorganized AMD and started fresh with Zen arch. They're just now getting back to what they had with Carrizo and Bristol Ridge and HSA with Zen 5 and RDNA 3+ and Infinity Architecture.

But ROCm is still a mess and will be for some time. Even Lisa alluded to this with her comment earlier this year about doubling efforts around ROCm. With this wasted time CUDA continues to solidify its stronghold and Intel has the only real CUDA alternative with oneAPI and now this.

[Nocturnal64]

Notably absent from the UXL Foundation is AMD and to a lesser surprise NVIDIA

So we will end up with yet another vendor-specific set of APIs…

[boboviz]

Oh, great, another USELESS foundation

[Jumbotron]

Well, the Intel Marketing Department would disagree

[Jumbotron]

Sooo....I read this article again and paid more attention to the founding members of this new accelerated compute foundation. And then I searched to see if the old HSA Foundation website was still around . Yep, and lookee here....

HSA Founding Members
AMD
ARM
Mediatek
Imagination Technology
Qualcomm
Samsung

And now compare to UXL
Intel
ARM
Fujitsu
Google Cloud
Imagination Technology
Qualcomm
Samsung

Here is some boiler plate from the old HSA website from 2015

"The HSA Foundation seeks to sponsor applications that seamlessly blend scalar processing with high performance compute on CPU's, GPU's, DSP's, Image Signal Processors, VLIW's, Neural Network Processors, FPGA's, and more."

And from the UXL in 2023

" Of the foundation, today's press release adds, "enabling solutions that are productive, performant, and provide customers with the freedom to choose the hardware that best fits their unique needs." The UXL Foundation will work on oneAPI / open accelerated compute across CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, and other accelerators."

Yep.... 8 years later and AMD's HSA Foundation is now Intel's UXL Foundation.

What a wasted opportunity AMD....SMH

[Jumbotron]

Sadder still is that the only company that has been truly fulfilling the promise of HSA and now UXL longer and better than anyone else including AMD and Intel....

....is Apple with Apple Silicon first with their A series phone SoCs and their M series SoCs for laptops and desktops.