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The tiny corp raised $5.1M

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Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#61

Post by cma »

godelski wrote: post #46

> There’s a [Radeon RX 7900 XTX 24GB] already on the market. For $999, you get a 123 TFLOP card with 24 GB of 960 GB/s RAM. This is the best FLOPS per dollar today, and yet…nobody in ML uses it. > I promise it’s better than the chip you taped out! It has 58B transistors on TSMC N5, and it’s like the 20th generation chip made by the company, 3rd in this series. Why are you so arrogant that you think you can make a bet…

Nvidia has stuff like hardware sparsity support. Modern methods (RigL) can let you train sparse for a 2X speedup.

Memory bandwidth (sparsity helps) and networking connectivity (Nvidia bought Mellanox and other networking companies) are important too. They are also using a lot of die space on raytracing stuff that they don't waste on the datacenter versions presumably.

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#62

Post by hedgehog »

godelski wrote: post #46

> There’s a [Radeon RX 7900 XTX 24GB] already on the market. For $999, you get a 123 TFLOP card with 24 GB of 960 GB/s RAM. This is the best FLOPS per dollar today, and yet…nobody in ML uses it. > I promise it’s better than the chip you taped out! It has 58B transistors on TSMC N5, and it’s like the 20th generation chip made by the company, 3rd in this series. Why are you so arrogant that you think you can make a bet…

I know a fair amount about this problem, my last startup built a working prototype of a performance-portable deep learning framework that got good performance out of AMD cards. The compiler stack is way harder than most people appreciate because scheduling operations for GPUs is very specific to the workload, hardware, and app constraints. The two strongest companies I'm aware of that are working in this area now are Modular.AI and OctoML. On the new chip side Cerebras and Tenstorrent both look quite interesting. It's pretty hard to really beat NVIDIA for developer support though, they've invested a lot of work into the CUDA ecosystem over the years and it shows.

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#63

Post by SXX »

nwienert wrote: post #12
freediver wrote: post #2

True entrepreneur. Having a vision and ignoring naysayers. Go George!

Gotta have money to start to keep taking risks

While it's not available to many of us (and especially those outside of US) it doesn't take that much money to just tinker with whatever you want. Just have to cut time wasted on news and politics, socialising and literally anything outsidie of being hacker or entrepreneur.

Most people just would never take that risk and will stick to their well-paying job.

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#64

Post by nalzok »

> The main advantage is in the tinygrad IR. It has 12 operations, all of which are ADD/MUL only. `x[3]` is supported, `x[y]` is not.

Can someone educate me why that is the case? Does `x[y]` require a Turing-complete kernel to compute?

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#65

Post by Shekelphile »

patentatt wrote: post #4

If they can achieve something competitive with CUDA for $5m, why hasn't AMD done it yet?

I doubt they have even spent $5M on developing ROCm even though it's been a thing for nearly 10 years. AMD is just notoriously stingy about investing in things outside their core business.

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#66

Post by SXX »

1letterunixname wrote: post #27
crpowers wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AMD has been tackling exactly the wrong problems. They poured their money into a porting solution for developers to take CUDA code and run it on their GPUs. I guess they didn't find it worth it to really compete. I doubt it's about being able to tackle this problem with $5m, but rather convincing the company they can win.

I still don't understand what problem they're trying to solve in EPYC in the hypervisor space with encryption. They should've been adding tensor cores and neural acceleration to their CPUs. The need for headed graphics cards is moot and wasteful. NVIDIA solved this with the A100. NVIDIA may spin into a mainstream enterprise CPU and systems vendor as a sales channel for converged CPU-GPU solutions beyond what they're…

If you talking of AMD SEV it's actually a useful technology. Confidential virtual machines not only protects you from possible spying on AWS or Azure, but also make it possible to have some decentralized / P2P compute more feasible.

Of course nothing is perfect and you can never have 100% trust to someone else hardware, but it's defenetely step in right direction.

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#67

Post by meragrin_ »

tzhenghao wrote: post #34
thatguyknows wrote: post #24

I was always surprised at how AMD hasn't already thrown a bunch of money at this problem. Maybe they have and are just incompetent in this area. My prediction is AMD is already working on this internally, except more oriented around PyTorch not Hotz's Tinygrad, which I doubt will get much traction.

I think AMD is going down a different path, ie. ROCm then partnering with ML frameworks further up the stack for first class support. https://pytorch.org/blog/pytorch-for-amd-rocm-platform-now-a...

Now only if they would support their hardware and Windows.

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#68

Post by impulser_ »

Why wouldn't AMD throw a few million at this? Worst case they lose a small amount of money, but best case they finally get good software for their hardware.

The past decade or so, they haven't been able to create any good software for their hardware. They made small improvements but the competition, Nvidia, has also made improvements to their already good software.

It too the point where their software is the reason why most people/companies don't use their products. Their drivers for their customer products are just as bad.

They are very competitive in hardware, but Nvidia dominates them at software which make companies buy Nvidia. No one wants to deal with the pain of AMD software.

AMD is a better company to work with than Nvidia, but it not worth it when it comes to dealing with their software lol.

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#69

Post by brrrrrm »

nalzok wrote: post #64

> The main advantage is in the tinygrad IR. It has 12 operations, all of which are ADD/MUL only. `x[3]` is supported, `x[y]` is not. Can someone educate me why that is the case? Does `x[y]` require a Turing-complete kernel to compute?

layer of indirection introduces scatter/gather and other dynamic loads, which is tricky to optimize

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#70

Post by daveed »

I don't want to cast any judgement, I just want to ask what the initial product is. The claim is they sell computers, and there's a link to the tinybox. There's a $100 preorder, for a 15k computer (I guess I'd have to pay 14.9k eventually?).

And then we get a computer that... how do I interact with it? Will it have its own OS? Some flavor of linux? Is the intent to work on it directly, or use it as an inference server, and talk over a network?

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