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Documentation for the AMD 7900XTX

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Re: Documentation for the AMD 7900XTX

#111

Post by moooo99 »

ein0p wrote: post #61
threeseed wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> have him fix it to his liking Like when he strolled into Twitter, acted like he knew better than everyone, delivered nothing and then left. There is far more to achieving things in large companies than simply having great technical skills.

IDK, dude’s provably pretty capable as long as you don’t attempt to drown him in a bureaucratic swamp. Betcha he’d fix it pretty good.

idk, but Twitter under early Musk leadership sounded like anything but a bureaucratic swamp and he still absolutely and predictably failed. However, Twitter was a pretty different problem domain to what he was initially known for

Re: Documentation for the AMD 7900XTX

#112

Post by moooo99 »

glimshe wrote: post #44

I used to be an AMD diehard fan. Bought their processors and GPUs for close to 20 years until I simply couldn't take it anymore - 5 years ago I started buying NVIDIA GPUs with Intel CPUs and honestly never looked back. Sure I pay more, but it's worth paying more for reliability and software support. Anything else and I'm losing money out of ideology to give to a business that doesn't have its act together.

I'm surprised to read such a take given pretty much every enthusiast I know went through the reverse cycle over the last 5 years when it comes to CPUs. I don't know anyone right now who is running Intel on their desktop computer. Even on mobile Intel seems to be loosing grounds. Only the GPU department is an uphill battle for AMD where they can't compete with any of NVIDIAs high end offerings.

However, observing Intels cards from an average consumers perspective, they really showed what difference good software makes when it comes to having great performance hardware.

Re: Documentation for the AMD 7900XTX

#113

Post by post_break »

glimshe wrote: post #44

I used to be an AMD diehard fan. Bought their processors and GPUs for close to 20 years until I simply couldn't take it anymore - 5 years ago I started buying NVIDIA GPUs with Intel CPUs and honestly never looked back. Sure I pay more, but it's worth paying more for reliability and software support. Anything else and I'm losing money out of ideology to give to a business that doesn't have its act together.

Meanwhile my 7800x3d and 7900xt sip power compared to the new Intel chips pulling 400w on the processor alone. I also have 20GB of vram future proofing me for some time.

Re: Documentation for the AMD 7900XTX

#114

Post by smallmancontrov »

CaptainOfCoit wrote: post #109
lofaszvanitt wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is that, that AMD seemingly can't act like a sane individual would do?

One individual doesn't suffer from the problem of being pulled in multiple different directions by multiple people. A company is not typically led by one person "dictator-style" but instead groups of people who try to make decisions together, sometimes not agreeing.

Sure, but I don't think this is "too many cooks in the kitchen," I think it's the opposite: hardware companies tend to be structurally incapable of spending as much as they should on software because everyone in the hardware space has the same bias. The economics of the space select for it in the short term and against it in the long term, creating the neverending foot-gun party we observe.

Re: Documentation for the AMD 7900XTX

#116

Post by nextaccountic »

viraptor wrote: post #105
orbital-decay wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What might that be, for example? "Organizationally unable to make competent software, perfectly able to make great hardware" seems to be the common case with hardware companies, if not de facto standard. Exceptions are rare.

Apart from "trying to implement this will cost us more in CUDA API copying lawsuits then it could earn", I don't know. But it's not just that they can't make competent software. It's that everyone tells them they should try, that it looks like a pile of money ready to pick up, that people try doing it on their own... and AMD does nothing. They're not even taking the chance to fail/succeed. Can you imagine that Lisa S…

They are already trying to copy CUDA API with rocm and HIP. If this is lawsuit worthy, they may already be hit with a lawsuit at any moment.

Re: Documentation for the AMD 7900XTX

#117

Post by pixelpoet »

mshockwave wrote: post #46
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…

With my past experience in Khronos, NVIDIA is indeed a member and they sent decent guys to the meetings -- but only for strategic reasons, rather than "advocating for open standards" as you described. My experiences there actually told me the opposite that they will never drop CUDA. Objectively they also have incentive to do so: fighting with 100-ish companies to ratify something is always slower than rolling out an…

Not just that, but they get to abuse their near monopoly to strongarm many companies into using Cuda. Can't say more unfortunately...

Re: Documentation for the AMD 7900XTX

#118

Post by dralley »

ultra_nick wrote: post #31
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…

NVidia is making boatloads of money because their driver works and they have a software library called CUDA that accelerates neural networks. Nobody expects AMD to match them, but George thought they could at least write a GPU driver. If AMD can get that driver out, then George could provide a competitor to CUDA (for neutral networks only). They'd both make boatloads of money. However, AMD was less capable than expec…

>However, AMD was less capable than expected and their drivers were too buggy to run neural networks like those needed for the MLPerf benchmark. So now, it appears that AMD, Tinybox, and investors like me won't be making boatloads of money.

This is where the melodrama kicks in.

They reverse-reversed course less than a week later and now they're back on AMD again.

AMD plans go "on hold" - March 19: https://twitter.com/__tinygrad__/status/1770151484363354195

AMD plans restarted - March 25: https://twitter.com/__tinygrad__/status/1772139983731831051

Re: Documentation for the AMD 7900XTX

#119

Post by atq2119 »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #67
atq2119 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that's a problem, but it's also a bit of an unfair dunk. After all, your CPU almost certainly runs firmware with all the same issues. Not to mention all other GPUs from all other vendors. Despite all of the noise-making, I don't think anybody has really convincingly made the case that the firmware quality is the main issue here, as opposed to the quality of the rest of the stack.

> After all, your CPU almost certainly runs firmware with all the same issues. CPUs don't really have firmware in the same sense. CPUs expose basic primitives (machine instructions). Modern CPUs will translate them to micro-ops in microcode instead of executing them directly, but the mapping is relatively simple and bugs are correspondingly uncommon. The GPU firmware is doing something complicated, and therefore bugg…

> CPUs don't really have firmware in the same sense.

How would you classify e.g. the Intel Management Engine and the firmware that runs on it?

Re: Documentation for the AMD 7900XTX

#120

Post by dotnet00 »

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…

He's given me grifter vibes for a while, so it's nice to see that others are catching on too.

Feels like the usual trend of someone actually skilled in one specific thing (hacking) letting the social media notoriety get to his head and thinking he's just as much of a genius at everything else.

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