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AMD may get across the CUDA moat

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Re: AMD may get across the CUDA moat

#101

Yup, thank the hobbyists. Pytorch is allowing other hardware. Stable diffusion working on m chips, intel arc, and Amd. Now what I'd like to see is real benchmarks for compute power. Might even get a few startups to compete in this new area.

Re: startups, Geohotz raised a few million for this already. https://tinygrad.org/

Obligatory Lex Fridman podcast, where he discusses it: https://youtu.be/dNrTrx42DGQ?t=2408

Re: AMD may get across the CUDA moat

#102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't he do what he always does. Rake in a ton of money, fart around and then cash out exclaiming it's everyone else's fault? The way he stole Fail0verflow's work with the PS3 security leak after failing to find a hypervisor exploit for months absolutely soured any respect I had for him at the time

Yep, did exactly that. IMO he threw a fit, even though AMD was working with him squashing bugs. https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/issues/2198#issuec...

[deleted]

Re: AMD may get across the CUDA moat

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't he do what he always does. Rake in a ton of money, fart around and then cash out exclaiming it's everyone else's fault? The way he stole Fail0verflow's work with the PS3 security leak after failing to find a hypervisor exploit for months absolutely soured any respect I had for him at the time

Yep, did exactly that. IMO he threw a fit, even though AMD was working with him squashing bugs. https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/issues/2198#issuec...

To be fair, kernel crashes from running an AMD provided demo loop isn’t something he should have to work with them on. That’s borderline incompetence. His perspective was around integration into his product, where every AMD bug is a bug in his product. They deserve criticism, and responded accordingly (actual resources to get their shit together). It’s not like GPU accelerated ML is some new thing.

Re: AMD may get across the CUDA moat

#104
post #52

I was able to use ROCm recently with Pytorch and after pulling some hair it worked quite well. The Radeon GPU I had on hand was a bit old and underpowered (RDNA2) and it only supported matmul on fp64, but for the job I needed done I saw a 200x increase in it/s over CPU despite the need to cast everywhere, and that made me super happy. Best of all is that I simply set the device to `torch.device('cuda')` rather than o…

> Best of all is that I simply set the device to `torch.device('cuda')` rather than openCL, which does wonders for compatibility

Man oh man where did we go wrong that cuda is the more compatible option over OpenCL?

Re: AMD may get across the CUDA moat

#105
post #52

I was able to use ROCm recently with Pytorch and after pulling some hair it worked quite well. The Radeon GPU I had on hand was a bit old and underpowered (RDNA2) and it only supported matmul on fp64, but for the job I needed done I saw a 200x increase in it/s over CPU despite the need to cast everywhere, and that made me super happy. Best of all is that I simply set the device to `torch.device('cuda')` rather than o…

Sigh. It's great that these container images exist to give people an easy on-ramp, but they definitely don't work for every use case (especially once you're in embedded where space matters and you might not be online to pull multi-gb updates from some registry). So it's important that vendors don't feel let off the hook to provide sane packaging just because there's an option to use a kitchen-sink container image the…

I know it's still different than what you're looking for, so you probably already know this, but many projects like this have the Dockerfile on github which shows exactly how they set up the image. For example:

https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm-docker/blob/master...

They also have some for Fedora. Looks like for this you need to install their repo:

    curl -sL https://repo.radeon.com/rocm/rocm.gpg.key | apt-key add - \
    && printf "deb [arch=amd64] https://repo.radeon.com/rocm/apt/$ROCM_VERSION/ jammy main" | tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/rocm.list \
    && printf "deb [arch=amd64] https://repo.radeon.com/amdgpu/$AMDGPU_VERSION/ubuntu jammy main" | tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/amdgpu.list \
then install Python, a couple other dependencies (build-essential, etc) and then the package in question: rocm-dev

So they are doing the packaging. There might even be documentation elsewhere for that type of setup.

Re: AMD may get across the CUDA moat

#106
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use a rolling distro (OpenSUSE Tumbleweed) and have had zero issues with my NVIDIA card despite it pulling the kernel and driver updates as they get released. The driver repo is maintained by NVIDIA itself, which is amazing.

Do you use wayland, multiple monitors, and/or play games or is it just for ML/AI?

I do all of those things with my 3070 and it works just fine. Most of them will depend on your DE's Wayland implementation.

I'm not here to desparage anyone experiencing issues, but my experience on the NixOS rolling-release channel has also been pretty boring. There was a time when my old 1050 Ti struggled, but the modern upstream drivers feel just as smooth as my Intel system does.

Re: AMD may get across the CUDA moat

#107

People complain about Nvidia being anticompetitive with CUDA, but I don't really see it. They saw a gap in the standards for on-GPU compute and put tons of effort into a proprietary alternative. They tied CUDA to their own hardware, which sorta makes technical sense given the optimizations involved, but it's their choice anyway. They still support the open standards, but many prefer CUDA and will pay the Nvidia premi…

CUDA was released in 2007 and the development of it started even earlier - possibly even in the 90s. Back then nobody else cared about GPU compute. OpenCL came out 2 years after that.

Re: AMD may get across the CUDA moat

#108
post #52

I was able to use ROCm recently with Pytorch and after pulling some hair it worked quite well. The Radeon GPU I had on hand was a bit old and underpowered (RDNA2) and it only supported matmul on fp64, but for the job I needed done I saw a 200x increase in it/s over CPU despite the need to cast everywhere, and that made me super happy. Best of all is that I simply set the device to `torch.device('cuda')` rather than o…

> Best of all is that I simply set the device to `torch.device('cuda')` rather than openCL, which does wonders for compatibility Man oh man where did we go wrong that cuda is the more compatible option over OpenCL?

It must be a misnomer on PyTorch's side. Clearly it's neither CUDA nor OpenCL.

AMD should just get it's shit together. This is ridiculous. Not the name, but the fact that you can only do FP64 on a GPU. Everybody is moving to FP16 and AMD is stuck on doubles?

Re: AMD may get across the CUDA moat

#109
post #26

CUDA is the only reason I have an Nvidia card, but if more projects start migrating to a more agnostic environment, I'll be really grateful. Running Nvidia in Linux isn't as much fun. Fedora and Debian can be incredibly reliable systems, but when you add an Nvidia card, I feel like I am back in Windows Vista with kernel crashes from time to time.

I see these complains from time to time and I never understand them. I've literally been running nvidia on linux since the TNT2 days and have _never_ had this sort of issue. That's across many drivers and many cards over the many many years.

Same but linux experience is a steep and bumpy function of hardware.

My guess: something like laptop GPU switching failed badly in the nvidia binary, earning it a reputation.

Re: AMD may get across the CUDA moat

#110

Yup, thank the hobbyists. Pytorch is allowing other hardware. Stable diffusion working on m chips, intel arc, and Amd. Now what I'd like to see is real benchmarks for compute power. Might even get a few startups to compete in this new area.

Pytorch is just using Google's OpenXLA now, & OpenXLA is the actual cross platform thing, no? I'm not very well versed in this area, so pardon if mistaken. https://pytorch.org/blog/pytorch-2.0-xla-path-forward/

You can use OpenXLA, but it's not the default. The main use-case for OpenXLA is running PyTorch on Google TPUs. OpenXLA also supports GPUs, but I am not sure how many people use that. Afaik JAX uses OpenXLA as backend to run on GPUs.

If you use model.compile() in PyTorch, you use TorchInductor and OpenAIs Triton by default.

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