The UXL Foundation's effort is essentially an evolution of Intel's oneAPI initiative, which provides a unified programming model for developers across accelerator architectures. The foundation's goal is to support not only CPUs and GPUs, but also other accelerators, such as FPGAs. However, challenging Nvidia's dominance may not be easy, as many customers have already invested heavily in projects based on Nvidia's software stack.
Key takeaways:
- The UXL Foundation is preparing its open standard accelerator programming model, seen as a potential alternative to Nvidia's CUDA platform, for a spec release in Q4.
- The UXL Foundation is a group of companies under the Linux Foundation aiming to develop an open standard accelerator programming model for various application realms, including AI.
- Implementations of the spec have been under development for a few years and are now being used by some developers to write code and target multiple vendors.
- Steering members of the UXL Foundation include Arm, Intel, Google Cloud, Qualcomm, Fujitsu, and VMware. The project is an evolution of Intel's oneAPI initiative.