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What Is AMD ROCm?

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Re: What Is AMD ROCm?

#51

Post by AnthonyMouse »

blip54321 wrote: post #20

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 har…

> 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.

Their problem has been that as little as five years ago they were a dying company. They didn't have the resources to do this right.

That's no longer the case, but once you have the money there is still a lag between then and when the release funded by that money comes out. And even then they're fighting an uphill battle against the perceptions created during their dark age.

Probably the biggest thing they have working for them is Nvidia's behavior. Proprietary everything and single vendor lock in makes everybody chafe, so as soon as they can produce something usable, everyone will want to use it.

Re: What Is AMD ROCm?

#52

Post by pjmlp »

sorenjan wrote: post #28
blip54321 wrote: post #20

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 har…

Khrono's SYCL is the open alternative to CUDA. It's what Intel is using for their oneAPI, there's a CUDA backend and even a HIP backend.

It is not a real alternative, as it lacks the polyglot ecosystem and tooling from CUDA.

It it is the usual Khronos defines the base stuff and hopes for the best regarding their partners.

Re: What Is AMD ROCm?

#53

Post by touisteur »

a_bonobo wrote: post #39
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 tink the main workhorse supercomputer GPUs are not out yet. They announced the MI200 GPU with 128GB of memory, two supercomputers (Setonix, Frontier) are suppose to include them but both will only be launched next year https://www.tomshardware.com/news/setonix-supercomputer-mi20...

Also announced very recently the MI250 with 47 FP32 TFLOPS? Just the morning before the GTC keynote? NVIDIA Lovelace is supposed to be in 2022 (I think?) so it's a good time to ship GPGPU HW but wait and see if AMD can ship them, at what prices, and if their library ecosystem (not even thinking rocm or hip... But even blas, miopen would be enough to start...) has full optimized support.

Re: What Is AMD ROCm?

#54

Post by gspr »

jjoonathan wrote: post #34
blip54321 wrote: post #20

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 har…

Yep. This is the same lesson that I learned in 2013 and again in 2015 with OpenCL, both for professional apps and for programming. On the professional app side, there was a lot of "support" for OpenCL that had caveats severe enough to make it unusable. Sure, blender supports OpenCL! You just have to make a custom build and then the GPU target is slower than the CPU target. Sure, Adobe apps support OpenCL -- but any G…

I'm not nearly as invested as you, but for my first "real" GPU compute project of any significant size and impact, I shocked my colleagues and picked OpenCL. All our hardware is nVidia, but I thought I'd make an effort to fight that vendor lock-in. And I find OpenCL quite pleasant! But… my god. OpenCL is a second-class citizen (at best!) on all three of the major platforms. The situation is dire. But the solution can't be to leave the world to CUDA.

Re: What Is AMD ROCm?

#55

Post by bilog »

esistgut wrote: post #21
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.

Shouldn't it work on top of the open source drivers?

It does, a least in my case (AMD RX580 with distro amdgpu driver).

Re: What Is AMD ROCm?

#56

Post by blip54321 »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #51
blip54321 wrote: post #20

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 har…

> 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. Their problem has been that as little as five years ago they were a dying company. They didn't have the resources to do this right. That's no longer the case, but once you have the money there is still a lag between then and when the release funded by that money comes out. And even then they're…

I'd take "usable." If AMD was half the performance of NVidia, but open, stable, compatible, and robust, that would reach that bar for me, and I think for a lot of people.

I think that will be an increasingly hard bar to clear, as software becomes coupled to CUDA, though. AMD will be chasing a losing race. They won once with Intel, but this one feels harder....

Re: What Is AMD ROCm?

#57

Post by supernovae »

jacquesm wrote: post #42
supernovae wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is a problem with nvidia too.. i just made all my infra easy to reprovision and start clean and workloads ran as containers..

Interesting, can you describe this in a bit more detail? It runs completely counter to my experience, so far NVidia for me has just been a long string of 'boring' in that it just works. Even applications written for older cards and older versions of CUDA have continued to work just fine.

It was so bad, we just moved to immutable GPU infrastructure regardless of physical or virtual. When a new release of all the nvidia stuff comes out, we re-image the machine and install it.

Cuda on linux with ml/gpu workloads is still kind of a hotmess and i'd say we're far from finding a winner like some suggest here.

It's gotten better... but still far easier to treat it like a mess and start fresh with any install

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