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AMD may get across the CUDA moat

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Re: AMD may get across the CUDA moat

#171

Post by rcxdude »

mathisfun123 wrote: post #136
mikepurvis wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure this is worth an argument over semantics, but modern "embedded" development is a lot bigger than just microcontrollers and wearables. IMO as soon as you're deploying a computer into any kind of "appliance", or you're offline for periods of time, or you're running on batteries or your primary network connection is wireless... then yeah, you're starting to hit the requirements associated with embedded and need…

> IMO as soon as you're deploying a computer into any kind of "appliance", or you're offline for periods of time, or you're running on batteries or your primary network connection is wireless yes and in those instances you do not reach for pytorch/tensorflow on top of ubuntu on top of x86 with a discrete gpu and 32gb of ram. instead you reach for C and micro or some arm soc that supports baremetal or at most rtos. th…

Not that I want to encourage gatekeeping in the first place, but you'll have more success if you have a clue what the other person is talking about in the first place (and some idea of what embedded looks like outside of tiny micros, and how the concerns about abstractions extend beyond matters of how much computational power is available).

Re: AMD may get across the CUDA moat

#172

Post by janalsncm »

mandevil wrote: post #55
IronWolve wrote: post #2

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.

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…

Special mention to Facebook and Google AI research teams that maintain PyTorch and Tensorflow respectively. And also to ptrblck on the PyTorch forums [1] who has the answer to basically every question it seems. He alone is probably responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars of productivity gain.

[1] https://discuss.pytorch.org/u/ptrblck/summary

Re: AMD may get across the CUDA moat

#173

Post by [deleted] »

roenxi wrote: post #143
Eisenstein wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: AMD may get across the CUDA moat

#174

Post by hotstickyballs »

mikepurvis wrote: post #121
xahrepap wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Oh yeah, I mean... having the source for the container build is kind of table stakes at this point. No one would accept a 10gb mystery meat blob as the basis of their production system. It's bad enough that we still accept binary-only drivers and proprietary libraries like TensorRT. I think my issue is more just with the mindset that it's okay to have one narrow slice of supported versions of everything that are "kno…

If anything, the situation with tensor rt shows that companies are absolutely willing to accept a multi gig meat blob

Re: AMD may get across the CUDA moat

#175

Post by ngcc_hk »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #32
sumtechguy wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is oligopoly pricing. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/o/oligopoly.asp With that few competitors pricing would not change much.

That's mostly when there isn't a lot of price elasticity of demand. If you're Comcast and Verizon, each customer wants one internet connection and you're not going to change the size of the market much by offering better prices. If you're AMD and NVIDIA and lowering the price would double the number of customers, you might very well want to do that, unless you're supply constrained -- which has been the issue because…

Actually there is already a market like this they are in - game. Most Gpu used are low to mid-range see steam. The AI has to and will go down to that level for using or gaming. You cannot just have game for intel … you did. Then steam work hard and realize the steam deck. You can have total different software like j and a did. Hence you really can’t have 1 N to rule for long. Do thank for it and all the fish, without it we might be still doing Gpu for numerical computing research.

Re: AMD may get across the CUDA moat

#176

Post by Blammar »

runiq wrote: post #160
withwarmup wrote: post #145

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 supp…

Yeah, that's a pretty shortsighted take of things. Do you really believe that Nvidia hasn't taken steps do make sure their moat is as wide as possible?

The thing about owning the CUDA spec is that Nvidia can add new features quickly without having to argue with other hardware vendors. I find that a positive thing overall.

Also, I choose to pay the ~$120 Windows tax once (per box), everything works very well, and I don't have the driver issues that some fraction of other users seem to have with Linux and Nvidia cards. Seems like a good use of my time.

Re: AMD may get across the CUDA moat

#177

Post by chaostheory »

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.

Yeah with my CUDA setup, it feels like I just ducktaped my deployment. I am very hesitant to make changes and it’s not easy to replicate

Re: AMD may get across the CUDA moat

#178

Post by johngossman »

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.

I can only point you to cloud financial results and the huge cost of the AI race. Note also the story recently about OpenAI looking at building their own chips. Companies absolutely care immensely about the cost of GPUs. It's billions of dollars.

Re: AMD may get across the CUDA moat

#179

Post by arcanus »

withwarmup wrote: post #145

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 supp…

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

You are probably two years behind the state of the art. The world's largest supercomputer, OLCF's Frontier, runs AMD CPUs and GPUs. It's emphatically using ROCm, not just BLIS and AOCL. See for example: https://docs.olcf.ornl.gov/systems/frontier_user_guide.html

That's hardly non-existent support for HPC.

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