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AMD reckons it can win the high-end GPU battle

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Re: AMD reckons it can win the high-end GPU battle

#81

Post by microtonal »

dnautics wrote: post #58
jamesblonde wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cuda is a proprietary Nvidia framework. You don't need cuda support to train deep learning models on TensorFlow. ROCm also works - and is built by AMD and is open-source.

Have you tried installing rocm? Last I checked two months ago you had to run a Ubuntu 16.04 container on Ubuntu 18.04 because the amd drivers were only compiled for bionic and the rocm software was only compiled for xenial.

We have installed ROCm on vanilla Ubuntu 18.04. Though I use the libraries through Nix with the nixos-rocm repo:

https://github.com/nixos-rocm/nixos-rocm

The last time we purchased GPUs, we bought two Radeon VIIs besides RTX 5000s. For training transformers in Tensorflow and PyTorch, they were a steal, because the training is only marginally slower than the RTXes at a fraction of the price.

For LSTMs, we have found performance regressions compared to NVIDIA, but it's largely because it was hard to hit the optimized MIOpen code paths.

Re: AMD reckons it can win the high-end GPU battle

#82

Post by mrob »

dannyw wrote: post #64
jdc wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm running an RX 570 on Linux and it works fine for my purposes (work, Steam games & Blizzard games under wine).

The driver issues are for the 5500, 5600, and 5700 cards. Your card is a gen out of date, so it's fine.

I bought an out-of-date RX570 after the RX5000 series was released, because I wanted mature Linux drivers (and reduced price as vendors cleared out their obsolete stock). It's the first AMD card I've owned that's been completely trouble-free.

Re: AMD reckons it can win the high-end GPU battle

#83

Post by [deleted] »

pixelpoet wrote: post #20

AMD's rather old Radeon VII can really smash a 2080 Ti if you're doing relatively simple streaming computation, like say video processing. That 1TB/s HBM is no joke, and there's 16GB of it, at ~half the price of the 2080 Ti with 11GB. Nvidia's memory compression is very impressive and allows them to do better with a narrower memory bus in many situations (such as games), however if your data is not so compressible (o…

[deleted]

Re: AMD reckons it can win the high-end GPU battle

#84

Post by bamboozled »

pixelpoet wrote: post #20

AMD's rather old Radeon VII can really smash a 2080 Ti if you're doing relatively simple streaming computation, like say video processing. That 1TB/s HBM is no joke, and there's 16GB of it, at ~half the price of the 2080 Ti with 11GB. Nvidia's memory compression is very impressive and allows them to do better with a narrower memory bus in many situations (such as games), however if your data is not so compressible (o…

I recently purchased a laptop with an Nvidia/Intel composite setup.

As a Linux user, I’ll never buy a laptop with an Nvidia GPU again (if I can help it). What a pain.

A nice piece of hardware with relatively pathetic software to drive it.

Re: AMD reckons it can win the high-end GPU battle

#85

Post by MaxBarraclough »

pixelpoet wrote: post #20

AMD's rather old Radeon VII can really smash a 2080 Ti if you're doing relatively simple streaming computation, like say video processing. That 1TB/s HBM is no joke, and there's 16GB of it, at ~half the price of the 2080 Ti with 11GB. Nvidia's memory compression is very impressive and allows them to do better with a narrower memory bus in many situations (such as games), however if your data is not so compressible (o…

> Really all I care about is a good OpenCL driver implementation, especially OpenCL 2.2 support would be extremely attractive.

nVidia seem to still only support OpenCL 1.1.

Presumably this is a conscious decision - they'd rather invest in CUDA.

I have no idea what AMD is up to regarding OpenCL. Have they just quietly dropped all support? [0][1]

Intel seem to be doing better, with support for OpenCL 2.1, with support for both CPU and GPU targets. [2]

[0] https://community.amd.com/thread/232600

[1] https://community.amd.com/thread/233197

[2] https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/opencl-drivers

Re: AMD reckons it can win the high-end GPU battle

#86

Post by willis936 »

catalogia wrote: post #62
willis936 wrote: post #5

I’ll believe it when I see it. ATI has never made a good product and nothing has changed recently to turn them around.

The ATI brand hasn't been in use for something like a decade.

Same technology and same ship being run by the same people. Why patronize a rebrand if nothing has changed?

Re: AMD reckons it can win the high-end GPU battle

#87

Post by tonypace »

missosoup wrote: post #78
dekken_ wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unless AMD can provide a toolchain which takes cuda code and generates whatever it takes to run it with performance parity to Nvidia cards, it'll never take off. They have this. It's called HIP.

https://rocm-documentation.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Programm... "HIP is designed to ease the porting of existing CUDA code into the HIP environment." Not even close an drop-in swappable alternative.

Of course not, and some things would never be ported. But if they had a massive cost advantage for a year or two in data centers, a lot of things would get ported, quickly.

Re: AMD reckons it can win the high-end GPU battle

#88

Post by castis »

bamboozled wrote: post #84
pixelpoet wrote: post #20

AMD's rather old Radeon VII can really smash a 2080 Ti if you're doing relatively simple streaming computation, like say video processing. That 1TB/s HBM is no joke, and there's 16GB of it, at ~half the price of the 2080 Ti with 11GB. Nvidia's memory compression is very impressive and allows them to do better with a narrower memory bus in many situations (such as games), however if your data is not so compressible (o…

I recently purchased a laptop with an Nvidia/Intel composite setup. As a Linux user, I’ll never buy a laptop with an Nvidia GPU again (if I can help it). What a pain. A nice piece of hardware with relatively pathetic software to drive it.

I hear that, I had a laptop some years ago with an Nvidia Optimus card in it. It was quite the frustrating experience. I got it to work well enough with bumblebee on Ubuntu but it never felt solid. I had hoped maybe the experience had gotten better but I guess not. I'll continue steering clear.

Re: AMD reckons it can win the high-end GPU battle

#89

Post by SkyMarshal »

bamboozled wrote: post #84
pixelpoet wrote: post #20

AMD's rather old Radeon VII can really smash a 2080 Ti if you're doing relatively simple streaming computation, like say video processing. That 1TB/s HBM is no joke, and there's 16GB of it, at ~half the price of the 2080 Ti with 11GB. Nvidia's memory compression is very impressive and allows them to do better with a narrower memory bus in many situations (such as games), however if your data is not so compressible (o…

I recently purchased a laptop with an Nvidia/Intel composite setup. As a Linux user, I’ll never buy a laptop with an Nvidia GPU again (if I can help it). What a pain. A nice piece of hardware with relatively pathetic software to drive it.

Nvidia has traditionally been very easy to use with Linux, as long as you were ok using their non-free drivers. Why was it so problematic for you?

Re: AMD reckons it can win the high-end GPU battle

#90

Post by pjmlp »

dekken_ wrote: post #76
missosoup wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tensorflow is only a small subset of the massive engineering investment that has been done into cuda by various orgs and open source projects. We have GPU databases, GPU accelerated analytics packages, GPU accelerated DSP, etc. All with hand-written cuda kernels. Unless AMD can provide a toolchain which takes cuda code and generates whatever it takes to run it with performance parity to Nvidia cards, it'll never take…

> Unless AMD can provide a toolchain which takes cuda code and generates whatever it takes to run it with performance parity to Nvidia cards, it'll never take off. They have this. It's called HIP.

Does HIP support all the programming languages that are able to target CUDA, like Julia, Numba, .NET, Java, Haskell, Fortran, C++?

Khronos did a big mistake to keep pushing C as the only compute language for so long, and it remains to be seen how much adoption SPIR-V is able to actually take from PTX.

So unless HIP actually matches PTX, it is a non-starter.

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