A consortium of tech companies including Intel, Arm, Google, Samsung, Qualcomm, Fujitsu, Imagination, VMware, and Linux Foundation have joined forces to establish the Unified Acceleration (UXL) Foundation. Their aim is to create an open standard for a variety of accelerator chips in the market.
UXL’s work will be based on the oneAPI specification pioneered by Intel for several years now. This is a strategic move to compete with NVIDIA’s CUDA, a dominant player in the market, and to challenge NVIDIA’s stronghold in the GPU market as many software in the industry rely on CUDA.
The UXL Foundation team will further develop the specification beyond oneAPI within this year and invite other major tech giants to participate. UXL states that their specification will also support NVIDIA hardware in the long run.
Interestingly, The Verge notes the absence of AMD and Microsoft in the list of partners, despite previous rumors of collaborative chip development in the AI space. AMD faces software support challenges with ROCm not being as widespread as CUDA.
Source: Reuters, The Verge
TLDR: A group of leading tech companies has formed the UXL Foundation to establish open standards for a variety of accelerator chips, with a focus on challenging NVIDIA’s dominance in the market. AMD and Microsoft are notably absent from the partnership.
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