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Documentation for the AMD 7900XTX

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Re: Documentation for the AMD 7900XTX

#81

Post by sspiff »

rstat1 wrote: post #74
trws wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do need to rework their development processes. It’s worth noting though that there are two (kinda three) different drivers with very different quality and different teams behind them. There’s the binary driver, on windows and the fglrx driver for Linux, that contains the full OpenGL stack and all the proprietary stuff. That’s been maintained and extended since the ATI days by a team primarily based in Markham. I…

I believe your info is a bit out-of-date. FGLRX hasn't been maintained or actively developed for a quite a while and unless you're using super-duper-ancient HW no one actually uses it anymore. AMDGPU is the the current Linux driver, combined with Mesa, and certainly is not 2D only.

Aren't the relevant 3D bits in userspace (not the driver)?

Isn't the concept of 3D APIs limited to stuff like Mesa, with the kernel space AMDGPU driver providing only the primitives on which the API can then be built? I could be wrong, but that's how I understood it.

I things like Fglrx, the OpenGL stack was part of the driver proper IIRC.

But granted, I haven't heard of or seen FGLRX in literally more than a decade, and describing AMDGPU as 2D only is misleading or pedantic.

Re: Documentation for the AMD 7900XTX

#82

Post by [deleted] »

sspiff wrote: post #81
rstat1 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe your info is a bit out-of-date. FGLRX hasn't been maintained or actively developed for a quite a while and unless you're using super-duper-ancient HW no one actually uses it anymore. AMDGPU is the the current Linux driver, combined with Mesa, and certainly is not 2D only.

Aren't the relevant 3D bits in userspace (not the driver)? Isn't the concept of 3D APIs limited to stuff like Mesa, with the kernel space AMDGPU driver providing only the primitives on which the API can then be built? I could be wrong, but that's how I understood it. I things like Fglrx, the OpenGL stack was part of the driver proper IIRC. But granted, I haven't heard of or seen FGLRX in literally more than a decade,…

[deleted]

Re: Documentation for the AMD 7900XTX

#83

Post by imtringued »

sashank_1509 wrote: post #36
atq2119 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm hoping AMD gets their act together and that they open up their drivers and stack. Their entire stack on Linux is open-source. That part isn't a problem.

Nope, they basically open sourced their api which is kind of a worthless proposition. You would think this is malicious, trying to pretend as open source, but the whole thing is done so ineptly, it is just incompetence. Likely management has no idea what open source means and thinks releasing api code means open source and is good enough for customers to use your GPU. More concretely, what they open sourced calls clo…

You do realize that the driver is responsible for compiling your kernel into machine code for your particular GPU? Calling that an API is strange.

Re: Documentation for the AMD 7900XTX

#84

Post by imtringued »

ein0p wrote: post #35
wmf wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making GPUs work properly requires years of effort so she needs a time machine to go back and start earlier.

[flagged]

He already has both money and a financial incentive to make it work. What he needs is access to the code.

Re: Documentation for the AMD 7900XTX

#85

Post by dannyw »

NicoJuicy wrote: post #43
roenxi wrote: post #8

So for reference, this geohot is George Hotz who has a company Tiny Corp [0] in the space. Among a long list of things, he had a moment in the spotlight recently for a long rant [1] where he "gave up on AMD" because their drivers sucked more than he expected. The situation is reasonably complex - AMD have some programmers working on ROCm who seemed to be operating at standard fare when that is really not what AMD nee…

That's not really on how I see it. He's trying to do everything on AMD's consumer based GPU's, while he's comparing it with NVidia's enterprise GPU's with the same expectations. That's just not how it works in real life. But if he succeeds, yeah, he could save tons of money and his hardware for ML could actually be completed.

NVIDIA’s consumer GPUs are highly reliable and support the same CUDA capabilities as the enterprise products.

This is something NVIDIA gets right. Meanwhile, ROCm isn’t even supported on certain lower end AMD consumer chips.

Re: Documentation for the AMD 7900XTX

#86

Post by fragmede »

infogulch wrote: post #77
hughesjj wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I was feeling similar vibes back when Lex Friedman interviewed him for some self driving stuff back in the day (...I've soured on lex too since he's not really an interviewer/journalist so much as a host/promoter and rarely gets to anything interesting in his talks imo). His work for jailbreaking/actually being able to own the devices we pay for back in the iPhone+PS3 days was and is still inspiring, but I thin…

This is a great take. We need more people that are willing and able to jump in and wreck new bullshit machines as they crop up in diverse industries. They can even keep their boastful grandstanding attitude as compensation.

No thanks. We do need people to wreck the bullshit machines, but they don't have to be total asshats. That's not inherent to being that smart.

Re: Documentation for the AMD 7900XTX

#87

Post by spirobelv2 »

lannisterstark wrote: post #53
roenxi wrote: post #8

So for reference, this geohot is George Hotz who has a company Tiny Corp [0] in the space. Among a long list of things, he had a moment in the spotlight recently for a long rant [1] where he "gave up on AMD" because their drivers sucked more than he expected. The situation is reasonably complex - AMD have some programmers working on ROCm who seemed to be operating at standard fare when that is really not what AMD nee…

>I'm cheering him on, even though his complaints were a little melodramatic. I've really soured on him when he literally went "I'm going to fix twitter search, hire me elon" and then went to public saying "Hey, want an internship? Fix it, and then MIT license your code(so he could use it lol), and maybe we can talk - oh btw I have no real authority to give anyone an internship." He might be a brilliant programmer and…

I have really soured on you after reading this comment. It added zero value

Re: Documentation for the AMD 7900XTX

#88

Post by mkj »

shmerl wrote: post #59

Oh, this is a very neat tip: umr --list-blocks Getting versions of all these IP blocks for a specific card can be confusing. UMR repo for the reference: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/tomstdenis/umr

Oh, Tom St Denis (of libtomcrypt) is working for AMD? That's promising.

Re: Documentation for the AMD 7900XTX

#89

Post by benreesman »

roenxi wrote: post #8

So for reference, this geohot is George Hotz who has a company Tiny Corp [0] in the space. Among a long list of things, he had a moment in the spotlight recently for a long rant [1] where he "gave up on AMD" because their drivers sucked more than he expected. The situation is reasonably complex - AMD have some programmers working on ROCm who seemed to be operating at standard fare when that is really not what AMD nee…

I’m going remind everyone that AMD and NVIDIA are atypically competition avoidant, but I don’t want to defend a generalization that broadcast let’s be specific: Hopper and MI300 are on paper just straight up competitive, both super scarce, high-margin cards that really love PyTorch, (which really loves NVIDIA, even TPU is, not the fist among equals).

But all the MI300 is going to supercomputer and adjacent things, and all the Hopper is going to giant tech LLM type stuff, it’s not the same people bidding on those bins of those.

Oh, and their respective CEOs are closely blood-related and in a trivially first name if not family gathering basis.

The people root for George generally think this isn’t real capitalism. We think it’s a trend towards the failure to enforce anti-trust laws.

Re: Documentation for the AMD 7900XTX

#90

Post by Foobar8568 »

KeplerBoy wrote: post #80
DiabloD3 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slight mistake in your description: CUDA is an out of date API that was replaced by Khronos's own official compute APIs. Khronos is a standards consortium that Nvidia is a founding member of. Although the marketing department at Nvidia still pushes for greenfield CUDA codebases, no new code should be written in it, and they should opt for open source international standards only. Khronos APIs are implemented by over…

Why do I have the feeling that CUDA will outlive whatever Khronos has proposed (do you refer to Sycl)?

How may standards Khronos endorced over the years/decades on compute? From an uneducated and external view, it seems every 2-5years there is a new standard.
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