[MUSIC PLAYING]
Hello, and welcome to Tech Decoded.
I'm Henry Gabb, editor of The Parallel Universe.
Today I'm here with Bill Savage, vice president
and general manager of Compute Performance and Developer
Products.
Welcome, Bill.
Hello, Henry.
So Bill, Intel recently announced
the oneAPI initiative.
Can you tell us what oneAPI is and the vision behind it?
It's about architecture, Henry, both hardware and software.
As Intel expands, the architectures
we're supporting to address the emerging data-centric workloads
for customers, we needed to architect
a software solution that would simplify the programming
of those diverse architectures.
So the main vision of oneAPI was to give a programming
abstraction that would unify and simplify
the diverse architectures that meet customer workload needs.
And so in your view, what are the major aspects of oneAPI?
There's two major aspects--
an industry specification, where we're
specifying a language and a set of APIs for the industry,
as well as a low-level interface to hardware.
And the second part is an Intel product,
the oneAPI product that implements the compilers
for that language, the libraries for those APIs,
but also includes debuggers, analysis tools,
and other related products and tools that
support the one API standard.
Now you've experienced and even driven
some of the major inflection points in software,
as an example, the move from serial performance
to parallel performance.
Can you reflect on those inflection points?
Yeah.
Each of those inflection points that I've
been involved in and observed in the industry
were motivated by a change in hardware architecture.
For example, the push for parallel software
was motivated by the need for multicore architectures.
Multicore architectures were needed because we couldn't
continue to scale at frequency.
So the reality of multicore architectures
required a software solution.
And then another inflection point in the industry
was when GPUs started to provide compute capabilities
in the data center, a software solution
was needed to give access to the GPU architecture.
And a final one that we've observed
was the emergence of deep learning
and artificial intelligence.
And as that came to the industry,
there needed to be a set of software that enabled
that change in the industry.
And oneAPI is along those journeys, the experience
that we've had internally to Intel, as well
as our observations of our competitors in the industry
all form together for us to architect
the exact needed solution for the oneAPI diverse
architecture.
And so how does cross-architecture
and cross-vendor development help the developers
in the developer community?
In two ways.
The language that we've selected, Data Parallel C++,
lets them program in a common programming language that can
cross these architectures, as well as crossing vendors.
Oftentimes, solutions in languages,
in particular in the case of CUDA, is vendor-specific,
and oneAPI is open, standard, available
for multiple architectures and vendors.
And then the libraries, as well, helps
the developer cross architectures and vendors
with a common software investment.
So the benefit to developers are lowering their cost
in addressing a much broader market
of diverse architectures.
And so what differentiates oneAPI from other approaches?
The language is different than previous language.
Our Data Parallel C++ delivers uncompromised performance
by sharing a common source language that can cross not
only architectures but vendors.
So we were very diligent to find a language that can do that.
Java delivered cross-architecture but not
performance.
OpenCL attempted to deliver on this promise.
We think we've found a language that does.
Through explicit expression of parallel kernels,
the compiler can create the threading, the vectorization,
and the other operations needed to fully exploit
the parallelism of multiple architectures.
And then the libraries, as well, we're
motivated as Intel to give libraries that actually
cross architecture boundaries.
Up till this point, both vendors have
been motivated only to enable a single architecture.
And so we'll have a full suite of tools,
presumably, that will give complete visibility
into the hardware.
Is that correct?
Largely, yes.
That the full suite of tools-- analysis,
as well as compilers and libraries--
will give full insight into the hardware
and allow developers to fully exploit
that hardware and its performance
with a shared source code investment.
Well, my favorite part of the interview is to ask,
do you care to make any bold predictions
for the next 5 to 10 years?
Bold predictions-- well, I do want to be clear.
oneAPI is a phased approach.
It's going to be a multiyear effort.
We'll introduce our first beta this year.
A product later, we need to work with partners in the industry.
So this is a multiyear effort with many phases.
So if I'm looking in the future, we
have multiple vendors across the industry,
including some of our competitors,
have adopted oneAPI as the standard for programming
in the data center, and that Intel
has its broad reach of architectures
deployed in the industry fully enabled by that software.
Thanks, Bill, for sharing your insights today.
We're all excited about oneAPI.
Thank you, Henry.
I'm Henry Gabb with Tech Decoded.
Please visit our website for more information about oneAPI.
[MUSIC PLAYING]