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AMD funded a drop-in CUDA implementation built on ROCm: It's now open-source

phoronix.com

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Re: AMD funded a drop-in CUDA implementation built on ROCm: It's now open-source

#121

Post by incrudible »

fariszr wrote: post #10
btown wrote: post #8

Why would this not be AMD’s top priority among priorities? Someone recently likened the situation to an Iron Age where NVIDIA owns all the iron. And this sounds like AMD knowing about a new source of ore and not even being willing to sink a single engineer’s salary into exploration. My only guess is they have a parallel skunkworks working on the same thing, but in a way that they can keep it closed-source - that this…

According to the article, AMD seems to have pulled the plug on this as they think it will hinder ROCMv6 adoption, which still btw only supports two consumer cards out of their entire line up[1] 1. https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-ROCm-6.0-Released

That is really out of touch. ROCm is garbage as far as I am concerned. A drop in replacement, especially one that seems to perform quite well, is really interesting however.

Re: AMD funded a drop-in CUDA implementation built on ROCm: It's now open-source

#122

Post by Cu3PO42 »

I'm really rooting for AMD to break the CUDA monopoly. To this end, I genuinely don't know whether a translation layer is a good thing or not. On the upside it makes the hardware much more viable instantly and will boost adoption, on the downside you run the risk that devs will never support ROCm, because you can just use the translation layer.

I think this is essentially the same situation as Proton+DXVK for Linux gaming. I think that that is a net positive for Linux, but I'm less sure about this. Getting good performance out of GPU compute requires much more tuning to the concrete architecture, which I'm afraid devs just won't do for AMD GPUs through this layer, always leaving them behind their Nvidia counterparts.

However, AMD desperately needs to do something. Story time:

On the weekend I wanted to play around with Stable Diffusion. Why pay for cloud compute, when I have a powerful GPU at home, I thought. Said GPU is a 7900 XTX, i.e. the most powerful consumer card from AMD at this time. Only very few AMD GPUs are supported by ROCm at this time, but mine is, thankfully.

So, how hard could it possibly to get Stable Diffusion running on my GPU? Hard. I don't think my problems were actually caused by AMD: I had ROCm installed and my card recognized by rocminfo in a matter of minutes. But the whole ML world is so focused on Nvidia that it took me ages to get a working installation of pytorch and friends. The InvokeAI installer, for example, asks if you want to use CUDA or ROCm, but then always installs the CUDA variant whatever you answer. Ultimately, I did get a model to load, but the software crashed my graphical session before generating a single image.

The whole experience left me frustrated and wanting to buy an Nvidia GPU again...

Re: AMD funded a drop-in CUDA implementation built on ROCm: It's now open-source

#123

Post by Jorropo »

throwoutway wrote: post #104
hjabird wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with effectively supporting CUDA is that encourages CUDA adoption all the more strongly. Meanwhile, AMD will always be playing catch-up, forever having to patch issues, work around Nvidia/AMD differences, and accept the performance penalty that comes from having code optimised for another vendor's hardware. AMD needs to encourage developers to use their own ecosystem or an open standard.

Is it? Apple Silicon exists, but Apple created a translation layer above it so the transition could be smoother.

This is extremely different, apple was targeting end consumers that just want their app to run. The performance between apple rosetta and native cpu were still multiple times different.

People writing CUDA apps don't just want stuff to run, performance is an extremely important factor else they would target CPUs which are easier to program for.

From their readme: > On Server GPUs, ZLUDA can compile CUDA GPU code to run in one of two modes: > Fast mode, which is faster, but can make exotic (but correct) GPU code hang. > Slow mode, which should make GPU code more stable, but can prevent some applications from running on ZLUDA.

Re: AMD funded a drop-in CUDA implementation built on ROCm: It's now open-source

#124

Post by smoldesu »

hd4 wrote: post #60

The interest in this thread tells me there are a lot of people who are not cool with the CUDA monopoly.

Those people should have spoken up when their hardware manufacturers abandoned OpenCL. The industry set itself 5-10 years behind by ignoring open GPGPU compute drivers while Nvidia slowly built their empire. Just look at how long it's taken to re-impliment a fraction of the CUDA featureset on a small handful of hardware.

CUDA shouldn't exist. We should have hardware manufacturers working together, using common APIs and standardizing instead of going for the throat. The further platforms drift apart, the more valuable Nvidia's vertical integration becomes.

Re: AMD funded a drop-in CUDA implementation built on ROCm: It's now open-source

#125

Post by incrudible »

alberth wrote: post #102
btown wrote: post #8

Why would this not be AMD’s top priority among priorities? Someone recently likened the situation to an Iron Age where NVIDIA owns all the iron. And this sounds like AMD knowing about a new source of ore and not even being willing to sink a single engineer’s salary into exploration. My only guess is they have a parallel skunkworks working on the same thing, but in a way that they can keep it closed-source - that this…

DirectX vs OpenGL. This brings back memories of late 90s / early 00s of Microsoft pushing hard their proprietary graphic libraries (DirectX) vs open standards (OpenGL). Fast forward 25-years and even today, Microsoft still dominates in PC gaming as a result. There's a bad track record of open standard for GPUs. Even Apple themselves gave up on OpenGL and has their own proprietary offering (Metal).

To add to that, Linux gaming today is dominated by a wrapper implementing DirectX.

Re: AMD funded a drop-in CUDA implementation built on ROCm: It's now open-source

#127

Post by smokel »

phh wrote: post #35
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #17

ROCm is not spelled out anywhere in their documentation and the best answers in search come from Github and not AMD official documents "Radeon Open Compute Platform" https://github.com/ROCm/ROCm/issues/1628 And they wonder why they are losing. Branding absolutely matters.

I have no idea what CUDA stands for, and I live just fine without knowing it.

Compute Unified Device Architecture [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUDA

Re: AMD funded a drop-in CUDA implementation built on ROCm: It's now open-source

#128

Post by voakbasda »

kkielhofner wrote: post #42
fariszr wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to the article, AMD seems to have pulled the plug on this as they think it will hinder ROCMv6 adoption, which still btw only supports two consumer cards out of their entire line up[1] 1. https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-ROCm-6.0-Released

With the most recent card being their one year old flagship ($1k) consumer GPU... Meanwhile CUDA supports anything with Nvidia stamped on it before it's even released. They'll even go as far as doing things like adding support for new GPUs/compute families to older CUDA versions (see Hopper/Ada and CUDA 11.8). You can go out and buy any Nvidia GPU the day of release, take it home, plug it in, and everything just work…

In the embedded space, Nvidia regularly drops support for older hardware. The last supported kernel for their Jetson TX2 was 4.9. Their newer Jetson Xavier line is stuck on 5.10.

The hardware may be great, but their software ecosystem is utter crap. As long as they stay the unchallenged leader in hardware, I expect Nvidia will continue to produce crap software.

I would push to switch our products in a heartbeat, if AMD actually gets their act together. If this alternative offers a path to evaluate our current application software stack on an AMD devkit, I would buy one tomorrow.

Re: AMD funded a drop-in CUDA implementation built on ROCm: It's now open-source

#129

Post by monocasa »

tikkabhuna wrote: post #68
blagie wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've been at mercy of Intel x86 APIs for a long time. Didn't kill them. What happens here is that the original vendor loses control of the API once there are multiple implementations. That's the best possible outcome for AMD. In either case, they have a limited window to be adopted, and that's more important. The abstraction layer here helps too. AMD code is !@#$%. If this were adopted, it makes it easier to fix t…

My understanding is that with AMD64 there's a circular dependency where AMD need Intel for x86 and Intel need AMD for x86_64?

That's true now, but AMD has been making x86 compatible CPUs since the original 8086.
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