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What Is AMD ROCm?

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Re: What Is AMD ROCm?

#11

Post by dylan604 »

rjzzleep wrote: post #3
VHRanger wrote: post #2

It's something that has very little uptake because it's not supported on mainline GPUs? I want to use it for compute on something like a rx 6800 and to my knowledge can't

I was going to post exactly the same. And if you look at the github issues of their project you will see that very often it looks outsourced support teams comment on these issues with the standard: we will discuss this internally and get back to you kind of response that enterprises twitter support usually gives. Not really what you expect from quality engineering. At the end of the day these kind of companies don't…

Sounds like a race from support staff to see how many tickets they can close to make themselves look good for the PM at the next review

Re: What Is AMD ROCm?

#12

Post by dagmx »

nicolaslem wrote: post #7
rjzzleep wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going to post exactly the same. And if you look at the github issues of their project you will see that very often it looks outsourced support teams comment on these issues with the standard: we will discuss this internally and get back to you kind of response that enterprises twitter support usually gives. Not really what you expect from quality engineering. At the end of the day these kind of companies don't…

On the other hand AMD has a fraction of the engineering resources Intel and Nvidia have. They need to make some choice and looking back at the last few years it seems that their choice to focus their efforts on hardware and gaming paid off.

On the flip side, I think that they haven't focused on a compelling compute story means that anyone doing anything other than pure gaming is better served by an Nvidia card.

Re: What Is AMD ROCm?

#13

Post by slavik81 »

stuaxo wrote: post #5

Having to choose between Steam support and ROCm drivers is a pain - it stops tinkering. Almost everyone on Linux will have experience of breaking their drivers at some point, and installing another alternate set is a big risk. It seems silly to not have OpenCL and HIP access without having to use this alternate stack.

The ROCm and AMDGPU PRO stacks were unified with ROCm 4.5 and AMDGPU 21.40. I would expect Steam to work. That was just a couple weeks ago, but have you tried it out?

Re: What Is AMD ROCm?

#15

Post by techdragon »

slavik81 wrote: post #10
VHRanger wrote: post #2

It's something that has very little uptake because it's not supported on mainline GPUs? I want to use it for compute on something like a rx 6800 and to my knowledge can't

It's not officially supported, but I think it would work if you installed the official ROCm 4.5 packages. The RX 6800 is listed as gfx1030 [1], which has been shipping in most libraries since ROCm 4.2. I've heard there were a few bugs, but I've been using it for months without encountering any issues myself. (I work for AMD on ROCm. All opinions are my own.) [1]: https://llvm.org/docs/AMDGPUUsage.html#processors

Can you please emphasise to your management chain how important the need for less terrible support and developer relations vis GitHub is. They can close support questions but basically anything in these repos gets closed as fast as possible even feature requests and other things that should be left open.

I doubt they have the funding to meaningfully impact the overall hardware and software support matrix but if they could just make the GitHub repo feel less like I’m back in my days working at a call centre raising tickets to a second level support team in a foreign country who’s only business KPI was tickets closed per day.

Re: What Is AMD ROCm?

#16

Post by slavik81 »

techdragon wrote: post #15
slavik81 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not officially supported, but I think it would work if you installed the official ROCm 4.5 packages. The RX 6800 is listed as gfx1030 [1], which has been shipping in most libraries since ROCm 4.2. I've heard there were a few bugs, but I've been using it for months without encountering any issues myself. (I work for AMD on ROCm. All opinions are my own.) [1]: https://llvm.org/docs/AMDGPUUsage.html#processors

Can you please emphasise to your management chain how important the need for less terrible support and developer relations vis GitHub is. They can close support questions but basically anything in these repos gets closed as fast as possible even feature requests and other things that should be left open. I doubt they have the funding to meaningfully impact the overall hardware and software support matrix but if they…

I agree with you. The communication between AMD and the community has been less than ideal.

I think it's worth noting, though, it's not always as bad as the example in the sibling comment. The RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm repo catches a lot of questions about big features and the future direction of the project. Those are particularly difficult to answer as an engineer. As much as I'd like to, I can't make a product announcement in a GitHub issue.

If you have a specific technical problem and you open an issue on the repo for the corresponding component, you'll probably have a better experience. Some teams are more responsive than others, but that will at least maximize your odds of successful resolution.

Re: What Is AMD ROCm?

#18

Post by slavik81 »

karmakaze wrote: post #17

Add an indication as to where 'ROCm' comes from. Wikipedia redirects to [0]. Still have no clue where the 'm' comes from (is it the last letter of platfor'm'?) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPUOpen#Radeon_Open_Compute_(R...

It used to be "Radeon Open Compute platform" with the m coming from platform. It's now "Radeon Open Ecosystem" with the c and the m from ecosystem [1].

The old expansion still shows up in a few places where it's difficult to remove.

[1]: https://github.com/ROCmSoftwarePlatform/rocBLAS#rocblas

Re: What Is AMD ROCm?

#19

Post by karmakaze »

slavik81 wrote: post #18
karmakaze wrote: post #17

Add an indication as to where 'ROCm' comes from. Wikipedia redirects to [0]. Still have no clue where the 'm' comes from (is it the last letter of platfor'm'?) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPUOpen#Radeon_Open_Compute_(R...

It used to be "Radeon Open Compute platform" with the m coming from platform. It's now "Radeon Open Ecosystem" with the c and the m from ecosystem [1]. The old expansion still shows up in a few places where it's difficult to remove. [1]: https://github.com/ROCmSoftwarePlatform/rocBLAS#rocblas

Ah so (R)adeon (O)pen E(c)osyste(m) stylized ROCm. I can see why it's not often spelled out, thanks.

Re: What Is AMD ROCm?

#20

Post by blip54321 »

I tried ROCm. I bought a supported card (RX570/RX580 series). Within 12 months, AMD dropped support. Newer versions of ROCm didn't work with the card. Older versions didn't actually work either, since all other tooling assumed newer versions. Dependency hell. When things kinda started working in one context, where I could use old tooling (not the one I wanted to use ROCm in), it CUPy was slower than CPU, and then hard crashed my computer randomly. I read a web page that the card can either act as HIP or a graphics card, but not both at the same time. I have no idea if that's right, but if it is, it's dumb.

AMD had no support. Card maker said this didn't fall under warranty. I got burned over and over.

I bought NVidia. It just worked.

I'm working on a potentially major piece of infrastructure, and AMD is accumulating debt. If it worked out-of-the-gate, I imagine we would have kept support. Within 6 more months, we'll be NVidia-specific. AMD will be that much further in the hole for support.

I'd love for ROCm to win, since I think open is critical here. On the other hand, I can't imagine it will. AMD would need to run this as a loss leader for a while, and engineer this at a level to get this competitive with NVidia.

A half-baked product like ROCm seems like a money hole for everyone involved. Customers get burned, and I can't imagine AMD comes out positive.

In the meantime, NVidia is minting gold here.

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