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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

#121

Post by ksec »

missosoup wrote: post #120
ksec wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The consumer/gaming market is nothing compared to the GPGPU market today. Even at the peak of Bitcoin mining, Gaming GPU is still by far the largest source of revenue for GPU market.

We're not at the peak of gpu bitcoin mining. We're in the age of serverside GPGPU on the cloud. "Looking at the GPU segment, the revenues have almost doubled over the past two years. This can primarily be attributed to Nvidia’s foray into data centers, expanding in both High Performance Computing and the cloud. The data center revenues were up a solid 133% in 2017, led by continued growth in its CUDA platform, and in…

The peak of bitcoin was when GPU marker were at their highest revenue. May be the word mining should not have been there. Given they are mostly gone to ASIC.

Doubling GPGPU market from 2017 -2018 doesn't mean "he consumer/gaming market is nothing compared to the GPGPU market today" And even they managed to grow in 2019 again, it is still no where near close.

Nvidia's revenue has been consistent over the years that their Gaming revenue is still the most important source of income and over 50% [1] of their revenue source.

[1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/15111/nvidia-announces-q3-fy-...

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

#122

Post by missosoup »

ksec wrote: post #121
missosoup wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're not at the peak of gpu bitcoin mining. We're in the age of serverside GPGPU on the cloud. "Looking at the GPU segment, the revenues have almost doubled over the past two years. This can primarily be attributed to Nvidia’s foray into data centers, expanding in both High Performance Computing and the cloud. The data center revenues were up a solid 133% in 2017, led by continued growth in its CUDA platform, and in…

The peak of bitcoin was when GPU marker were at their highest revenue. May be the word mining should not have been there. Given they are mostly gone to ASIC. Doubling GPGPU market from 2017 -2018 doesn't mean "he consumer/gaming market is nothing compared to the GPGPU market today" And even they managed to grow in 2019 again, it is still no where near close. Nvidia's revenue has been consistent over the years that th…

Fair point. The gaming revenue isn't negligible. It's half.

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

#124

Post by new_realist »

imtringued wrote: post #105
fxtentacle wrote: post #46

AMD is blocked by being not versatile enough. Their consumer cards support neither AI nor do they have good Linux drivers. Of course, the average gamer doesn't care, but developers do. And as the result, almost all the video games - their core sales driver - are not as thoroughly optimized and tested on AMD as they are on the (likely overpriced) NVIDIA cards that developers use in their own home rigs.

I chose an AMD card specifically because of their great Linux drivers. Building a system on top of proprietary drivers is a non starter for me. Being heavily dependent on a vendor to support your platform has bitten me multiple times and it's especially frustrating when a proprietary software company uses something like electron but never ships a Linux release. Running these applications in wine is a complete pain in…

I’ve found amdgpu to be a terrible driver for high end displays; 8K doesn’t work, for example.

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

#126

Post by t0mas88 »

parsimo2010 wrote: post #104

Even if everything the article says is true, and the AMD software environment was also improved to compete with Nvidia, it's probably still not enough to beat Nvidia. The best they are claiming with Big Navi is 30% faster than a 2080 Ti. Sounds great, but they are comparing a card that won't be available for a year with a card that has been on the market for over a year already. Nvidia will have been working on faste…

I agree, the author makes a vague point about the 3080 not being released yet, but AMD also hasn't released their new chip yet.

What I think will be great for consumers is AMD releasing a good competing offer in a similar timeframe as Nvidia releasing their next generation. That may limit the Nvidia price increases, because over the past few generations they have gone up a lot for their top offering. And even a year after release they're still high. That can't stay like that if the next gen mid range AMD has higher performance.

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

#129

Post by xiphias2 »

pjmlp wrote: post #90
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.

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.

In theory HIP is a modified LLVM, but as far as I know Julia uses a modified LLVM as well, so unless they are upstreamed, we can't use them together :(

I guess I'm staying with NVIDIA with developer laptops for a long time, and maybe using AMD for ultrabook.

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

#130

Post by qchris »

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.

As one of the other replies to this comment mentioned, this is one of the pain points that the company System76 has spent some time working on. I think it's because it addresses a core part of their target market: professional developers or other users who might need access to the GPU for programming, but don't have the time or motivation to learn how to play around with a CUDA installation from scratch (I'm making the assumption that's probably a large part of your problem, as it has been mine).

Their Ubuntu-based distro, Pop!_OS, does a lot of good in this regard, and is really pretty plug and play for an Intel/NVIDIA combo set-up. The driver that they use to manage their CUDA install is also available for plain Ubuntu[1], and I've had good experience with using that to manage my own set-up running an Intel Xeon/NVIDIA P-series (if I'm remembering correctly). I haven't given it a shot on Debian, and if you're using something like Arch, there's a decent chance you'll be out of luck.

Note: I'm not affiliated with System76 in any way, just have slammed my head into this problem on multiple occasions and found this to be my go-to way of managing it.

[1] https://support.system76.com/articles/cuda/

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