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PyTorch 1.8, with AMD ROCm support

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Re: PyTorch 1.8, with AMD ROCm support

#71
post #39
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because with support for M1 you can prototype your network on your local machine with „good“ performance. There are many cloud solutions etc. but for convenience nothing beats your local machine. You can use an IDE you like etc.

Because contrary to what you believe, M1 simply is not performant enough to be used to "prototype" your network. NNs can't be simply scaled up and down. It is *NOT* like those web apps which you can run on potatoes just fine as long as nobody are hitting them heavily.

Sure you probably don’t want to do full training runs locally, but There’s a lot you can do locally that has a lot of added friction on a gpu cluster or other remote compute resource

I like to start a new project by prototyping and debugging my training and cunning config code, setting up the data loading and evaluation pipeline, hacking around with some baseline models and making sure they can overfit some small subset of my data

After all that’s done it’s finally time to scale out to the gpu cluster. But I still do a lot of debugging locally

Maybe this kind of workflow isn’t as necessary if you have a task that’s pretty plug and play like image classification, but for nonstandard tasks I think there’s lots of prototyping work that doesn’t require hardware acceleration

Re: PyTorch 1.8, with AMD ROCm support

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s worse.... It’s Linux only so no Mac, Windows or WSL. No support what so ever for APUs which means if you have a laptop without a dedicated GPU you’re out of luck (tho discrete mobile GPUs aren’t officially supported either and often do not work). They’ve not only haven’t been supporting any of their consumer based R“we promise it’s not GCN this time”DNA GPUs, but since December last year (2020) they’ve dropped s…

> It’s worse.... > It’s Linux only so no Mac, Windows or WSL. I don't see really a problem here. You want Office or Photoshop? It runs on Mac and Windows only, so you better get one. You want ROCm? Get Linux for exactly the same reason.

It's a big problem if you want to use GPGPU in a product shipped to customers, or if you want to do some GPU programming on your own computer in your free time.

Keep in mind that not only is it Linux only, it doesn't work on consumer hardware either.

Re: PyTorch 1.8, with AMD ROCm support

#73
post #55

Ryzen APU - the embedded GPU inside laptops is not supported by AMD for running rocm There is an unofficial Bruhnspace project...but it is really sad that AMD has made a management decision that prevents use of a perfectly viable Ryzen laptop to make use of these libraries. Unlike...say a M1

Might have to do with the fact that AMD just doesn't seem to have the resources (see the common complaints about their drivers' quality) to fully support every chip. Another reason is certainly that they simply don't need to - just like Intel's iGPU, people working with deep learning opt for discrete GPUs (either built-in or external), both just isn't an option (yet?) for M1-based systems. The audience would be a nic…

> AMD just doesn't seem to have the resources

AMD's net income for 2020 was about $2.5B. If it was a management priority, they would fund more people to focus on this.

I would love to support open-source drivers, but AMD's efforts with ROCm on consumer hardware are a joke. It's been said in other comments that AMD only cares about the datacenter. That certainly seems to be the case. So until AMD takes this seriously and gets a legitimate developer story together, I'm spending my money elsewhere.

Re: PyTorch 1.8, with AMD ROCm support

#74
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is more of an issue that they have Compute optimised and Graphics optimised cards and Vega is their last compute optimised card. It would be very nice for them to refresh their compute cards as well.

Going for market segmentation like that sounds like a pretty bad idea if you are already the underdog in the game.

Especially since more and more consumer workloads use compute as well. DLSS makes real time ray tracing at acceptable resolutions possible, your phone camera uses neural nets for every photo you take, Nvidias OptiX noise reduction is very impressive, and so on.

AMD doesn't seem to want to be part of future computer usages, it's a shame. "Armies prepare to fight their last war, rather than their next war".

Re: PyTorch 1.8, with AMD ROCm support

#75
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AMD only cares about data center. Anything below that, they don't care. They don't care about supporting anything other than linux. God forbid some person try to experiment with their hardware/software as a hobby before putting it to use in a work setting.

Eh, not sure if that's correct. Their Ryzen consumer CPUs work amazingly well on Windows. The gaming graphics cards also still target Windows. And if they do care about the data center that much and ROCm becomes a thing for compute, they will want as many people as possible to be able to experiment with ROCm at home. So that they demand data centers with ROCm.

> And if they do care about the data center that much and ROCm becomes a thing for compute, they will want as many people as possible to be able to experiment with ROCm at home. So that they demand data centers with ROCm.

The engineers know this and have tried to explain this to upper management, but upper management only listens to "customer interviews" which consists of management from data centers. Upper management does not care about what engineers hear from customers because those are not the customers they care about.

Re: PyTorch 1.8, with AMD ROCm support

#76
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AMD only cares about data center. Anything below that, they don't care. They don't care about supporting anything other than linux. God forbid some person try to experiment with their hardware/software as a hobby before putting it to use in a work setting.

Eh, not sure if that's correct. Their Ryzen consumer CPUs work amazingly well on Windows. The gaming graphics cards also still target Windows. And if they do care about the data center that much and ROCm becomes a thing for compute, they will want as many people as possible to be able to experiment with ROCm at home. So that they demand data centers with ROCm.

ROCm has been a thing for four years now, Cuda had been around almost a decade before ROCm was conceived, and AMD still doesn't show any interest in an accessible compute platform for all developers and users. I think they should focus on OpenCL and Sycl.

Re: PyTorch 1.8, with AMD ROCm support

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s worse.... > It’s Linux only so no Mac, Windows or WSL. I don't see really a problem here. You want Office or Photoshop? It runs on Mac and Windows only, so you better get one. You want ROCm? Get Linux for exactly the same reason.

It's a big problem if you want to use GPGPU in a product shipped to customers, or if you want to do some GPU programming on your own computer in your free time. Keep in mind that not only is it Linux only, it doesn't work on consumer hardware either.

> It's a big problem if you want to use GPGPU in a product shipped to customers,

So ship linux version and let the customers decide whether they want it or not.

If you are doing server product, it is even handy; just ship docker image or docker-compose/set of k8s pods, if it needs them.

> or if you want to do some GPU programming on your own computer in your free time.

You can install Linux very easily; it's not that it is some huge expense.

> it doesn't work on consumer hardware either.

It does, just not on the current gen one or even currently purchasable one. I agree, this is a problem.

Re: PyTorch 1.8, with AMD ROCm support

#78
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, not sure if that's correct. Their Ryzen consumer CPUs work amazingly well on Windows. The gaming graphics cards also still target Windows. And if they do care about the data center that much and ROCm becomes a thing for compute, they will want as many people as possible to be able to experiment with ROCm at home. So that they demand data centers with ROCm.

ROCm has been a thing for four years now, Cuda had been around almost a decade before ROCm was conceived, and AMD still doesn't show any interest in an accessible compute platform for all developers and users. I think they should focus on OpenCL and Sycl.

Well it's a chicken and egg problem.

Without major library support nobody cares about ROCm, if nobody cares about ROCm AMD management will focus on other things.

But PyTorch just laid that egg.

Re: PyTorch 1.8, with AMD ROCm support

#79

PyTorch is the most impressive piece of software engineering that I know of. So yeah, it's a nice interface for writing fast numerical code. And for zero effort you can change between running on CPUs, GPUs and TPUs. There's some compiler functionality in there for kernel fusing and more. Oh, and you can autodiff everything. There's just an incredible amount of complexity being hidden behind behind a very simple inter…

OTOH PyTorch seems to be highly explosive if you try to use it outside the mainstream use (i.e. neural networks). There's sadly no performant autodiff system for general purpose Python. Numba is fine for performance, but does not support autodiff. JAX aims to be sort of general purpose, but in practice it is quite explosive when doing something other than neural networks. A lot of this is probably due to supporting C…

Wait wat, jax and also pytorch is used in a lot more areas then NN's. Jax is even consider to do better in that department in terms on performance then all of julia so wat are u talking about

Re: PyTorch 1.8, with AMD ROCm support

#80
post #50
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any If it exists, I wanna buy it

I used the Intel neural compute sticks [1] for my porn detection service [2] and they worked great. Could import and run models on a Pi with ease [1] https://blog.haschek.at/2018/fight-child-pornography-with-ra... [2] https://nsfw-categorize.it/

Very interesting project and article. You should consider submitting it to HN for its own post (if you have not done so already).
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