Intel, Google and Qualcomm will 'dethrone' Nvidia with new programming platform

Nvidia, a $2.2 trillion graphics chip maker, has become the “lifeblood” of synthetic artificial intelligence (AI) models. In addition to hardware, the company’s strength also comes from the computer code it has developed over the past 20 years, making competitors who want to dethrone Nvidia wary. Currently, more than 3 million global programmers are relying on the CUDA platform to build AI and other applications.

Based on technology developed by Intel, called OneAPI, a group of technology companies - the UXL Foundation, has planned to build a new set of software and tools capable of programming many types of AI chips. This open source project aims to bring computer code that can run on any device with any chip and hardware.

Nvidia's shadow in the AI field is too large.

“The challenge is how to create an open ecosystem for machine learning that can drive performance and scale across a wide range of hardware,” said Bill Hugo, director of Google’s high-performance computing unit. The search giant is a founding member of UXL and provides technical guidance for the project.

Reuters said that in the first half of this year, UXL will prepare to determine the basic specifications, before transferring to engineers to refine and complete by the end of the year.

The technology alliance also does not rule out the possibility of “admitting” additional members such as cloud giant Amazon, Microsoft and other chipmakers. Since its inception in September 2023, UXL has received technical contributions from third parties, in addition to the organization’s members, and those interested in using open technology.

Intel's OneAPI is ready to go. The next step is to create a standard programming model specifically for AI. In the long term, UXL will also support Nvidia's hardware and programming code.

The UXL Foundation project is one of several efforts to chip away at Nvidia’s dominance in AI-powered programming software. Venture capitalists and companies have poured more than $4 billion into 93 separate projects, according to data firm PitchBook.

The interest in beating Nvidia through software has been growing since last year. The graphics company has cast such a large shadow that few startups have been able to break through, as CUDA is, on paper, a compelling, feature-rich piece of software that is constantly being developed by Nvidia and the programming community.

“The important thing is that people have been using CUDA for over 15 years and using this platform to build other programming code,” commented Jay Goldberg, CEO of financial and strategy consulting firm D2D Advisory.

The Viet (Source: Reuters)

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