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AMD may get across the CUDA moat

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Re: AMD may get across the CUDA moat

#141

Post by LtWorf »

PH95VuimJjqBqy wrote: post #63
javchz wrote: 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.

I've had kernel panics that disappeared when I started using the on board intel graphics instead of the nvidia.

Your statement makes no sense. It's like a smoker claiming that since he didn't die of lung cancer, smoke is 100% safe.

Re: AMD may get across the CUDA moat

#143

Post by roenxi »

Eisenstein wrote: post #87
mandevil wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't the hobbyists who are making sure that PyTorch and other frameworks runs well on these chips, but teams of engineers who work for NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, etc. who are doing this as their primary assigned jobs, in exchange for money from their employer, who are paying those salaries because they want to sell chips into the enormous demand for running PyTorch faster. Hobbyist and open-source are definitely not syn…

People don't usually get employed to make things with no demand, and people who work for companies with a budget line don't really care how much the nVidia tax is. You can thank hobbyists for creating a lot of demand for compatability with other cards.

There is huge demand for AMD cards that can efficiently multiply matrices together. The issue is that while there are currently isolated cases where people can make them do that, it doesn't seem to be possible at the scale that it needs to happen at.

AMD are being dragged along by the market. Willingly, they aren't fighting it, but their focus has been on other areas.

Re: AMD may get across the CUDA moat

#144

Post by hackerlight »

klysm wrote: post #7
binarymax wrote: post #6

And the question for most that remains once AMD catches up: will the duopoly result in lower prices to a reasonable level for hobbyists or bootstrapped startups, or will AMD just gouge like NVidia?

A simplistic economic take would suggest that the competition would result in lower prices, but given two players in the market who knows.

Looking at the CPU market, competition did lead to lower prices: AMD are the best, but their CPUs are very reasonably priced because Intel is close behind.

In the gaming market for GPUs, Nvidia has no competition except in some niche areas. Overall, their lead in upscaling software is too commanding so they can price how they want. Customers are paying 15-20% premiums for the same raw hardware performance, all to access Nvidia's DLSS, because there's no good competition.

Re: AMD may get across the CUDA moat

#145

Post by withwarmup »

CUDA is the result of years of NVIDIA supporting the ecosystem, some people likes to complain because they bought hardware that was cheaper but can't use it for what they want to use it, when you buy NVIDIA, you aren't buying only the hardware, but the insane amount of work they have put into the ecosystem, the same goes for Intel, mkl and scikit-learn intelex aren't free to develop.

AMD has the hardware but the support for HPC is non-existent outside of the joke that is bliss and AOCL.

I really wish for more competitors to enter the market in HPC, but AMD has a shitload of work to do.

Re: AMD may get across the CUDA moat

#146

Post by aftbit »

distract8901 wrote: post #130
javchz wrote: 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.

My Arch system would occasionally boot to a black screen. When this happened, no amount of tinkering could get it back. I had to reinstall the whole OS. Turns out it was a conflict between nvidia drivers and my (10 year old) Intel integrated GPU. But once I switched to an AMD card, everything works flawlessly. Ubuntu based systems barely worked at all. Incredibly unstable and would occasionally corrupt the output and…

As a counter-argument, I ran Arch Linux + nvidia GPUs + Intel CPUs between 2012 and 2020, and still run Arch + nvidia (now with AMD CPU) to this day. I won't say it has been bug free at all, but it generally works pretty well. If you find a problem in Arch that you cannot fix without reinstalling, you do not sufficiently understand the problem or Arch itself. "Installing" Arch is refreshingly manual and "simple" compared to the magic that is other Linux distros or the closed source OSes.

Re: AMD may get across the CUDA moat

#147

Post by aftbit »

IntelMiner wrote: post #59
kinematikk wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a source on the stealing part? A quick Google search didn't result in anything

Marcan (of Asahi Linux fame) has talked about it many times before. But an abridged version Fail0verflow demoed how they were able to derive the private signing keys for the Sony Playstation 3 console at I believe CCC Geohot after watching the livestream raced into action to demo a "hello world!" jailbreak application and absolutely stole their thunder without giving any credit

This apparently worked pretty well for him, as I still remember him primarily as "that guy who hacked PS3". Some people let someone else do the hard technical core, then do all the other easy but boring stuff and claim 100% credit.

Re: AMD may get across the CUDA moat

#149

Post by hot_gril »

killerstorm wrote: post #138
zirgs wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not true. People got interested in general-purpose GPU compute (GPGPU) in early 2000s when video cards with programmable shaders became available. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General-purpose_computing_on_g... People made a programming language & a compiler/runtime for GPGPU in 2004: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrookGPU

Everything has old beginnings that the specialists will remember, but GPU compute really reached mass popularity and became a large selling point for Nvidia in the 2010s.

Re: AMD may get across the CUDA moat

#150

Post by [deleted] »

hot_gril wrote: post #80
fluxem wrote: post #65

I call it the 90% problem. If AMD works for 90% of my projects, I would still buy NVIDIA, which works for 100%, even though I’m paying a premium

I'm lazy, so it's 99% for me. I don't even mess with AMD CPUs; I know they're not exactly the same instruction set as Intel, and more importantly they work with a different (and less mainstream) set of mobos, so I don't want em. If AMD manages to pull more customers their way, that's great, it just means lower Intel premium for me.

[deleted]
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