Apple Seeks To Position Metal as Part of New 3D Graphics Standard For Web (appleinsider.com)

Mikey Campbell, writing for AppleInsider: Apple's WebKit team on Tuesday proposed a new Community Group at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) that will focus on developing a new standard API, perhaps based on Metal, for accelerating GPU-based 3D graphics and general computation for the web. Announced through Apple's WebKit blog, the new 'GPU for the Web' Community Group will discuss a potential next-generation web graphics API that can better leverage modern GPUs. Along with 3D content, Apple proposes GPU architecture might also be used to accelerate general web computations. As noted by Dean Jackson from the WebKit team, advancements in the GPU hardware space has led to identical enhancements in software APIs. He cites platform technologies like Apple's Metal, Microsoft's Direct3D 12 and the Khronos Group's Vulkan as offering lower overhead, and thus better performance, than the OpenGL standard. Unfortunately, the new graphics APIs contain nuanced architectural differences and are not available across all platforms, making them unsuitable for wide implementation on the web.

Comments

Vulkan

[Gibgezr]

The whole point of Vulkan is that it is a modern, high-performance, platform-agnostic API. Isn't that what they should use? It's already positioned as all that, it just needs the web folks to adopt it.

Re:Vulkan

[LynnwoodRooster]

But then how can Apple gain a proprietary stranglehold on the industry? How can they force adoption of their own standard and ensure a way to monetize all future 3D web graphics?

Re:Vulkan

[kbonin]

Apple was a member of Vulkan and those of us who code to GPUs were excited to have a unified target finally coming into view - until Apple withdrew and announced a proprietary alternative. They shouldn't be allowed to influence the standard now.

Re:Vulkan

[UnknowingFool]

But then how can Apple gain a proprietary stranglehold on the industry? How can they force adoption of their own standard and ensure a way to monetize all future 3D web graphics?

Considering the history of Apple open source contributions in things like OpenGL, I'd say your concerns are at best not really likely. Also Apple is proposing a new standard which means it will be a standard unlike MS and the embrace and extend philosophy.

Re:Vulkan

[MightyMartian]

It looks like Rambus all over again. Proprietary components should not be part of standards, period.

Re:Vulkan

[UnknowingFool]

Please elaborate on what you mean by "proprietary". Metal is competing with Vulkan and Direct3D as the successor to OpenGL. Apple wants the next version to be based on their work on Metal. Such version will undoubtedly be open source unlike Direct3D and WebGPU will is proposed to replace OpenGL.

To help get things started, Apple's WebKit team is proposing an initial API dubbed "WebGPU." Apple began testing next-generation APIs in WebKit "a few years ago" and found encouraging results, so the company is sharing its WebGPU prototype with the the W3C Community Group.

Re:Vulkan

[LynnwoodRooster]

Apple has enough cash and equivalents on-hand in the US to buy about 4% of Microsoft. Hardly enough to buy them... Yes, Apple has about $18 billion in cash and equivalents on-hand; it has close to $200 billion in overseas funds and long-term investments, but those would be subject to a 40% tax load if repatriated/converted to buy Microsoft, meaning it would have - at most - $140 billion to use. And that would buy about 30% of Microsoft (which is close to $500 billion in value - not too far behind Apple's $700 billion in value).

Re:Vulkan

[TheFakeTimCook]

But then how can Apple gain a proprietary stranglehold on the industry? How can they force adoption of their own standard and ensure a way to monetize all future 3D web graphics?

Considering the history of Apple open source contributions in things like OpenGL, I'd say your concerns are at best not really likely. Also Apple is proposing a new standard which means it will be a standard unlike MS and the embrace and extend philosophy.

Exactly. Apple has a pretty good track record of leaving things Open. Take CUPS for example.

Re: Vulkan

[DontBeAMoran]

That 640 KiB limit was pretty innovative and it required courage.

Re:Vulkan

[UnknowingFool]

When something gets forked, if the fork sucks, you can fork it again. Think Apple is gonna drop some Metal drivers on my Linux box? No, this is exactly what they are trying to do- erect a toll across the bridge someone else built.

Um if Apple is proposing a new standard, they won't be the ones to do it. It's a standard. Just like Apple has contributed on OpenGL for years. Did they write an OpenGL driver for Linux machines? No. AMD, NVidia and Intel did that.

Re:Vulkan

[Anubis IV]

Everyone in the comments suggesting we should just use their favorite graphics API is missing the point entirely.

Neither Vulkan nor its competitors are safe to use with untrusted code from the web. Allowing any random web developer to have access to the full capabilities of any of those APIs is a recipe for disaster. This standard is, from what I can gather, intended to be a layer that abstracts away the underlying API, whether it be Metal, Vulkan, or Direct 3D 12, which should provide a safe means for using them.

For an initial implementation, Apple is providing a prototype that is compatible with Metal, given that they had apparently already done quite a bit of work mapping Metal to Javascript, but it's clear that the end goal with this standard is to provide something that is compatible with all of these close-to-the-metal APIs. I imagine that version 1 of the standard will resemble an intersection of features between the competing APIs, that way they can ensure the broadest compatibility right from the get-go.

In addition to but separate from the web standard, they're talking about taking Metal cross-platform. That wouldn't affect the web standard (which, again, should be able to work on top of any of these competing APIs), but it would ensure that the standard is usable on any platform they choose to support with Metal. If they do take Metal cross-platform, that would seem to suggest an uptick in their interest in creating web-based products that are consistent and in top-shape across a variety of platforms, in much the same way that Google created Chrome to do the same.

Headline doesn't really match actual news

[Anubis IV]

Where in the article does it suggest that Apple is making a power play here to position Metal like the headline says? This really doesn't have a whole lot to do with Metal specifically, and is instead about leveraging the entire class of APIs that have been coming out that are closer to the (lowercase) metal. In fact, they specifically said so in the summary:

As noted by Dean Jackson from the WebKit team, advancements in the GPU hardware space has led to identical enhancements in software APIs. He cites platform technologies like Apple's Metal, Microsoft's Direct3D 12 and the Khronos Group's Vulkan as offering lower overhead, and thus better performance, than the OpenGL standard.

The only thing special about Metal that's mentioned in the article is its role in the initial implementation. To pull the relevant quote:

While Metal appears to underpin Apple's initial web graphics proposal, the company does not expect its concept to become the ultimate standard. That said, it appears Apple is angling to take Metal cross-platform.

"We don't expect this to become the actual API that ends up in the standard, and maybe not even the one that the Community Group decides to start with, but we think there is a lot of value in working code," Jackson says.

So, basically, Apple folks have access to Metal and understand how it works, so they're starting with what they know and have so that they can get the ball rolling quickly. Where it goes from there is up to the community, which, given Apple's typical approach their open source/community-driven projects (e.g. WebKit, LLVM, Clang, Swift, etc.), it's likely that they actually mean that. Of course, they'll no doubt use their role in the community to try and steer things to their own advantage, but if they do so too much it's likely that this will simply become another dead-end "standard" that no one adopts.

Re:Headline doesn't really match actual news

[UnknowingFool]

So if Apple doesn't like a current open source implementation of something, then by your assertion, they should just implement it. No need to propose their own. Because that's how open source is supposed to work.

Re:Headline doesn't really match actual news

[Anubis IV]

You clearly have no idea what any of this is about, because what you just said is a terrible idea regardless of whether you support Vulkan or not.

For one, Vulkan and its competitors aren't designed for use with untrusted code, so there are quite a number of significant security and technical concerns with your notion that we can simply adopt one of them as a web standard that any random web developer has full access to (which would've been just as true had you said Metal or Direct 3D 12 instead). What you "need", then, is a safe layer that abstracts the underlying API and provides safety to the user (I say "need" in quotes, because I'm not actually clear that this is something we want, let alone need).

Second, neither Vulkan nor its competitors are actually cross-platform in practice today. It may be the case that one of them will become more widespread over time, but, for now, the world we live in is a fragmented one. Any given platform likely supports at least one of these competing standards, but you can't count on having support for any particular one. A web standard that lives over all of them would make it possible to tap into that power without having to know anything about any of them.

When they talk about using Metal for this standard's initial implementation, what they mean is that they've already done most of the work of mapping Metal back to existing web standards (e.g. Javascript), so they have a head start on which features a standard may be able to support and what that web API may look like. They'll likely take something resembling the intersection of Metal's features with Direct 3D 12's and Vulkan's features so as to provide an initial release of the standard that works across most platforms.

When they talk about Metal going cross-platform, that's a separate (but related) topic. It wouldn't affect this standard (i.e. you should eventually be able to use this standard with Metal as easily as with Vulkan), but it would provide them with a means for ensuring the availability of the standard across any platforms supported by Metal.

Re:Headline doesn't really match actual news

[UnknownSoldier]

> For one, Vulkan and its competitors aren't designed for use with untrusted code,

[[Citation]]

Do you have an _actual example_ that shows this or are you just repeating dogma that everyone else does?

> neither Vulkan nor its competitors are actually cross-platform in practice today.

Um, Hello, McFly. We already have WebGL. Hell, even Microsoft supports it on Edge! Of all the graphics API available WebGL is the most cross-platform. The only exceptions that I'm aware of are consoles such as PS3/PS4 and Xbox360/Xbone.

WebGL 2.x was here in 2013. We don't need Yet-Another-Graphics-API. It is time to get rid of proprietary vendor lock-in regardless of how much "freedom" it promises.
 

927

[ArhcAngel]

How was this not the first post? And just so we don't ruin a perfectly good law...NAZIS