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Aiter: AI Tensor Engine for ROCm

rocm.blogs.amd.com

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Re: Aiter: AI Tensor Engine for ROCm

#11

Post by fc417fc802 »

fock wrote: post #9
barrenko wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really do not understand why can't they just work with existing OSS developers pulling their hair out trying to make AMD devices work and instead do it this way. It's like Mozilla with the questionable decisions.

I think they are taken over by exactly the same people leading the AI-hype. Funny how in this article they are a) not advertising clearly what they are doing, b) solving a small subset of problems in a way noone asked for (I think most people just want ROCm to work at all...) and c) just adding to a complex product without any consideration of actually integrating with its environment. I guess it's vibecoding "AI"...

> I think most people just want ROCm to work at all

I think most people don't want to have to think about vendor lock-in related bullshit. Most people just want their model to run on whatever hardware they happen to have available, don't want to have to worry about whether or not future hardware purchases will be compatible, and don't want to have to rewrite everything in a different framework.

Most people fundamentally don't care about ROCm or CUDA or OneAPI or whatever else beyond a means to an end.

Re: Aiter: AI Tensor Engine for ROCm

#12

Post by microtonal »

fock wrote: post #9
barrenko wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really do not understand why can't they just work with existing OSS developers pulling their hair out trying to make AMD devices work and instead do it this way. It's like Mozilla with the questionable decisions.

I think they are taken over by exactly the same people leading the AI-hype. Funny how in this article they are a) not advertising clearly what they are doing, b) solving a small subset of problems in a way noone asked for (I think most people just want ROCm to work at all...) and c) just adding to a complex product without any consideration of actually integrating with its environment. I guess it's vibecoding "AI"...

solving a small subset of problems in a way noone asked for

What do you mean? Having ROCm fused MoE and MLA kernels as a counterpart to kernels for CUDA is very useful. AMD needs to provide this if they want to keep AMD accelerators competitive with new models.

Re: Aiter: AI Tensor Engine for ROCm

#13

Post by microtonal »

Tpt wrote: post #4

If I understand correctly, this library provides some Torch kernels customized for AMD hardware. Why haven't they just upstreamed them to PyTorch for better adoption? Also, they seem to demo usage with Torch default eager execution mode and not Torch JIT/TorchScript. Is this library compatible with TorchScript?

I think a lot of stuff will get upstreamed eventually. PyTorch just moves slower and since it’s a stable library, I think it cannot rapidly adopt something like fused MoE until the dust has settled a little and it’s clear what the API would look like long-term.

I think it’s ok that stuff is tried first in Torch extensions. That’s how Flash Attention started after all and the same is true for newer kernels in CUDA-land (fused MoE, MLA, Marlin, etc.).

With regards to TorchScript, that’s really legacy - torch.compile is where it’s at. This post seems to suggest that the kernels work with torch.compile: https://rocm.blogs.amd.com/artificial-intelligence/DeepSeekR...

Re: Aiter: AI Tensor Engine for ROCm

#14

Post by roenxi »

barrenko wrote: post #6
Tpt wrote: post #4

If I understand correctly, this library provides some Torch kernels customized for AMD hardware. Why haven't they just upstreamed them to PyTorch for better adoption? Also, they seem to demo usage with Torch default eager execution mode and not Torch JIT/TorchScript. Is this library compatible with TorchScript?

I really do not understand why can't they just work with existing OSS developers pulling their hair out trying to make AMD devices work and instead do it this way. It's like Mozilla with the questionable decisions.

There are a lot of OSS developers, I doubt AMD has the resources to do that. And realistically they don't need to, I wandered over to watch some George Hotz videos the other day and it looked like the AMD driver situation has improved to the point where specialist AMD access isn't needed to debug any more. Which is a huge change and very exciting for me personally because it means I might be able to jump back to an AMD card and ditch the mess that is Nvidia on Linux.

In theory they might not even need to be involved in optimising compute kernels, there is probably some PhD student who'll do the work because they want to be a kernel-optimising specialist. In practice a few strategic applications of paid talent is all they really need to do. Everyone wants to diversify off Nvidia so there is a lot of interest in supporting AMD if they are willing to push out firmware that multiplies matrices without crashing. Which has been a weird sticking point for AMD for a surprising amount of time.

Re: Aiter: AI Tensor Engine for ROCm

#16

Post by Rounin »

dailykoder wrote: post #5

Still waiting for ROCm on my cheap Radeon RX 7600. Would be nice to play around with it a little. I know that this card is nothing fancy. There is somewhere a github issue where they announced to port it for linux to consumer cards, but last time I checked (a few days ago) it still wasn't available

You should be able to make it think you have another card: export HSA_OVERRIDE_GFX_VERSION=10.3.0 The possible values are said to be: # gfx1030 = "10.3.0" # gfx900 = "9.0.0" # gfx906 = "9.0.6" # gfx908 = "9.0.8" # gfx90a = "9.0.a"

Re: Aiter: AI Tensor Engine for ROCm

#17

Post by kouteiheika »

Tpt wrote: post #4

If I understand correctly, this library provides some Torch kernels customized for AMD hardware. Why haven't they just upstreamed them to PyTorch for better adoption? Also, they seem to demo usage with Torch default eager execution mode and not Torch JIT/TorchScript. Is this library compatible with TorchScript?

> Why haven't they just upstreamed them to PyTorch for better adoption?

They don't seem to care, or don't understand how to get broader adoption.

For some reason AMD's management is dead set on targeting only the high end part of the market. Like, for example, look at this blog post. Which model they're testing? DeepSeek R1, the 671B behemoth that no normal person can run. Or look at any of their tutorials/docs and see which GPUs they support - it's always only either the unobtanium-grade enterprise GPUs, or high end workstation cards that no one buys. And if your strategy is to target only the super rich entities then a little jank in the software isn't really all that punishing - if you can afford to drop a few million on GPUs then you can also afford to hire someone to spend a few weeks getting AMD's software to work/get it tuned by tweaking two dozen environment variables they do seem to like so much/etc.

Re: Aiter: AI Tensor Engine for ROCm

#18

Post by imtringued »

Tpt wrote: post #4

If I understand correctly, this library provides some Torch kernels customized for AMD hardware. Why haven't they just upstreamed them to PyTorch for better adoption? Also, they seem to demo usage with Torch default eager execution mode and not Torch JIT/TorchScript. Is this library compatible with TorchScript?

That would make the kernels the PyTorch Foundations's problem and they would have to set up CI infrastructure around AMD GPUs to maintain these kernels. For whatever reason, AMD really wants to keep everything in-house even though that has been a losing strategy so far.

Re: Aiter: AI Tensor Engine for ROCm

#19

Post by imtringued »

fock wrote: post #9
barrenko wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really do not understand why can't they just work with existing OSS developers pulling their hair out trying to make AMD devices work and instead do it this way. It's like Mozilla with the questionable decisions.

I think they are taken over by exactly the same people leading the AI-hype. Funny how in this article they are a) not advertising clearly what they are doing, b) solving a small subset of problems in a way noone asked for (I think most people just want ROCm to work at all...) and c) just adding to a complex product without any consideration of actually integrating with its environment. I guess it's vibecoding "AI"...

They are imitating Nvidia's TensorRT with AITER. Basically AMD wants to have "CUDA, but not CUDA".

Re: Aiter: AI Tensor Engine for ROCm

#20

Post by fancyfredbot »

Wow, it sure sounds like a mess under there. They used 4 different languages?

Using one high level language and assembly sounds fine, but four feels incoherent. Would love to know why this has had happened.

"This infrastructure is built upon a variety of underlying technologies, including Triton, CK (Compute Kernel), ASM (Assembly), and HIP (Heterogeneous Interface for Portability)."

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