wgpu-mm VS gpuweb

This is very exciting! (I had suspected it would slip to 114)

WebGPU implementations are still pretty immature, but certainly enough to get started with. I've been implementing a Rust + WebGPU ML runtime for the past few months and have enjoyed writing WGSL.

I recently got a 250M parameter LLM running in the browser without much optimisation and it performs pretty well! (https://twitter.com/fleetwood___/status/1638469392794091520)

That said, matmuls are still pretty handicapped in the browser (especially considering the bounds checking enforced in the browser). From my benchmarking I've struggled to hit 50% of theoretical FLOPS, which is cut down to 30% when the bounds checking comes in. (Benchmarks here: https://github.com/FL33TW00D/wgpu-mm)

I look forward to accessing shader cores as they mentioned in the post.

Works for me.

WebGPU support is behind a couple flags on Linux: https://github.com/gpuweb/gpuweb/wiki/Implementation-Status

People keep spreading this incredibly misleading statement, and yours is even more misleading (suggesting Apple opposed a 'GPU WASM')

By all accounts, Apple's /only/ stance was that if WebGPU used SPIR-V it would be a non-starter for them, due to ongoing legal issues between Apple and Khronos.

Apple actually proposed WebHLSL in collaboration with Microsoft, to have HLSL be the standard.

Mozilla employee's stance[0] was that SPIRV was too low level, did not fit with the goals of WebGPU portability and security, and expressed concern that Khronos may add functionality to SPIRV they cannot support in WebGPU like raytracing instructions .. 'So we'd always be on the verge of forking SPIR-V in some way.'

It was also noted by many people that even if a bytecode format was used, it would still have to be translated to the target (HLSL/DXIL, MSL, etc.) in almost the same way a text format would.

Nobody proposed a 'GPU WASM equivalent' or an alternative bytecode format.

The hard truth is that shader compilation is a fucking nightmare, people do not realize how bad it is across the different native APIs. SPIR-V is good, but it doesn't solve that - and presents other challenges if you are a web browser API. Vulkan and SPIRV are not the golden goose many make them out to be.

[0] https://github.com/gpuweb/gpuweb/issues/847#issuecomment-642...

Yes it is still a bit new. WebGPU is not finished and is still being worked on: https://webgpu.io/

WebGPU currently doesn't support the "bindless" resource access model (see: https://github.com/gpuweb/gpuweb/issues/380).

The "max number of sampled texture per shader stage" is a runtime device limit, and the minimal value for that seems to be 16. So texture atlasses are still a thing in WebGPU.

There's even an implementation under discussion to have the dp4a instruction added to WebGPU (https://github.com/gpuweb/gpuweb/issues/2677)