The UXL alliance will aim to dislodge NVIDIA’s dominant position
A group of technology companies, including Intel, Google, Arm, Qualcomm and Samsung, created the Unified Accelerator Fund (UXL) alliance, through which they will work together to remove the advantages that NVIDIA has as a dominant player in the artificial intelligence market, reports The Verge.
The alliance will undertake the mission of developing an open-source software package that will allow AI professionals to break away from NVIDIA’s technology. Additionally, the code that developers create will be able to function on any machine with any chip.
The Unified Acceleration Foundation is still in the design phase, but is expected to begin operations by the beginning of the second half of the year. UXL currently supports the OneAPI open standard. It was created by the Intel company.
Members of the alliance believe that it will remove restrictions on developers using specific programming languages, code sets and any other tools intended to bind developers to the use of certain architectures. For example – NVIDIA’s CUDA platform, which strives for this.
After focusing entirely on making chips for AI models like the H100, the company reached $2 trillion in market capitalization last month. This secured NVIDIA’s top spot among chip makers. The company is also planning to release new AI models soon – H200 GPU.
The chips that NVIDIA manufactures require developers to use the CUDA architecture, which supersedes all other chip manufacturers’ architectures by leaps and bounds. Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, also shared that 4 million developers use CUDA.
However, technology companies are not giving up and continue to try to create alternative architectures of their own to displace the dominant one in the market.
For now, the creators of UXL intend to support NVIDIA hardware and code. Initially, the project will aim to develop options for AI applications.
The group of tech companies that make up the alliance is looking to collaborate with other powerhouses like Microsoft and Amazon to make sure the solutions they provide can be built into any chip or hardware.
