41–50 of 176 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sadly common at hardware companies. The most extreme case I've heard of is ASML, who supposedly doesn't keep any machines of their own. They test against "almost-ready" machines right before they go out the door to customers.
ASML might be an extreme outlier though, don't those things cost like $50 million+ each?
> It’s not just that it’s immature software, they need to change how they do development. I remember geohot saying something similar about a year ago
Anyone who looks at the mess that is ROCm and the design choices they made could easily see that. GPU support lagged behind for years, no support for APUs and no guaranteed forward compatibility were clear signs that as a whole they have no idea what they are doing when it comes to building and shipping a software ecosystem. To that you can add the long history of both AMD and ATI before they merged releasing dog shi…
This particular difference stems the fact that NVIDIA has PTX and AMD does not have any such thing. Ie this kind of backwards compatibility will never be possible on AMD.
Sounds like a buy signal for AMD. If you run the right branch and set the right env cars, the thing flies.
Would be a a buy signal if their actions (better drivers) show that they are seriously working on improving software. "This could be great _if_ you go through the trouble of doing it right!" is not persuasive, and any sane person would go with green if they know they have the choice between troubleshooting shitty software and things just working. Look at the george hotz archive youtube channel and watch the videos wh…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
AMD's software for consumer GPUs demonstrates a lack of seriousness. ROCm only officially supports RDNA2 and RDNA3 GPUs (their last two generations of hardware), and for some reason most of them are supported on only Windows ( https://rocm.docs.amd.com/projects/install-on-windows/en/lat... ) and not Linux ( https://rocm.docs.amd.com/projects/install-on-linux/en/lates... ), where most AI training and inference occurs.…
In practice, consumer Navi 21 based cards (RX 6900XT etc) and Navi 31 cards (RX 7900 XTX etc) are compatible with Pytorch on Linux. What they write about ROCm and Windows is equivocation. They target only one app: Blender. Pytorch+ROCm+Windows does not work. I had bought a 6900XT myself around launch time (the RTX3080 I ordered was not coming, it was the chip shortage times...) and it took around 2 years for Pytorch…
> Give AMD Engineers more compute and engineering resources to fix and improve the AMD ecosystem, they have very few internal gpu boxes relative to what Nvidia provides to their engineers. This is real. We’ve found ourselves having to give hardware to engineers at AMD because they’re unable to get allocation of it internally.
This seems so insane, is anyone actually doing the work to provide an alternative to CUDA? Maybe Google?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sadly common at hardware companies. The most extreme case I've heard of is ASML, who supposedly doesn't keep any machines of their own. They test against "almost-ready" machines right before they go out the door to customers.
ASML might be an extreme outlier though, don't those things cost like $50 million+ each?
They have spare parts you'd bet, and I'd bet they have some SLA agreement with each customer where an engineer is basically on call nearby in case a single thing dosnt work or a random part breaks or needs servicing.
Asianometry did a great video on the cost of downtime when it comes to ASML device in any fab. While I am not directly in this field and can't speak to the accuracy of the numbers john gives, he does not seem one to just make stuff up as his quality of video production for niche topics is quite good.
> It’s not just that it’s immature software, they need to change how they do development. I remember geohot saying something similar about a year ago
Anyone who looks at the mess that is ROCm and the design choices they made could easily see that. GPU support lagged behind for years, no support for APUs and no guaranteed forward compatibility were clear signs that as a whole they have no idea what they are doing when it comes to building and shipping a software ecosystem. To that you can add the long history of both AMD and ATI before they merged releasing dog shi…
This is likely self inflicted. They decided to make two different architectures. One is CDNA for HPC and the other is RDNA for graphics. They are reportedly going to rectify this with UDNA in the future. However, that is what they really should have done from the start. Nvidia builds 1 architecture with different chips based on it to accommodate everything and code written for one easily works on another as it is the same architecture. This is before even considering that they have PTX to be an intermediate language that serves a similar purpose to Java byte code in allowing write once, run anywhere.
> It’s not just that it’s immature software, they need to change how they do development. I remember geohot saying something similar about a year ago
I expect everyone has been saying it for a while, the calls are just getting more strident and public as it becomes clear that AMD's failures are strategic rather than tactical. And as people try to build business on their half-hearted attempts. I still think it is a mistake to say that CUDA is a moat. IMO the problem here is that AMD still doesn't seem to think that GPGPU compute is a thing. They don't seem to under…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
AMD's software for consumer GPUs demonstrates a lack of seriousness. ROCm only officially supports RDNA2 and RDNA3 GPUs (their last two generations of hardware), and for some reason most of them are supported on only Windows ( https://rocm.docs.amd.com/projects/install-on-windows/en/lat... ) and not Linux ( https://rocm.docs.amd.com/projects/install-on-linux/en/lates... ), where most AI training and inference occurs.…
In practice, consumer Navi 21 based cards (RX 6900XT etc) and Navi 31 cards (RX 7900 XTX etc) are compatible with Pytorch on Linux. What they write about ROCm and Windows is equivocation. They target only one app: Blender. Pytorch+ROCm+Windows does not work. I had bought a 6900XT myself around launch time (the RTX3080 I ordered was not coming, it was the chip shortage times...) and it took around 2 years for Pytorch…
That said, I would not expect it to stay working for long as long as ROCm is a dependency since AMD drops support for its older GPUs quickly while Nvidia continues to support older GPUs with less frequent legacy driver updates.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In practice, consumer Navi 21 based cards (RX 6900XT etc) and Navi 31 cards (RX 7900 XTX etc) are compatible with Pytorch on Linux. What they write about ROCm and Windows is equivocation. They target only one app: Blender. Pytorch+ROCm+Windows does not work. I had bought a 6900XT myself around launch time (the RTX3080 I ordered was not coming, it was the chip shortage times...) and it took around 2 years for Pytorch…
in practice everyone who wants to do ML at home buys nvidia and pays the premium
I remember CUDA being much more buggy back then but it still worked pretty good.
Back then AMD wasn't considered a real competition for ML/AI hardware.
Glad as always to see more competition in the market to drive innovations. AMD seems to be letting larger VRAM onto consumer cards, which is nice to see, just hope the AI/ML experience can get better for their software ecosystem.