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?
AMD may get across the CUDA moat
181–190 of 312 posts
Re: AMD may get across the CUDA moat
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe the fp64 limitation came from the laptop-grade GPU I had rather than inherent to AMD or ROCm. The API level I could target was at least two or three versions behind the latest they have to offer.
Might very well be true. I don't blame anyone for not diving deeper into figuring out why this stuff doesn't work. But this is one of the great strengths of CUDA: I can develop a kernel on my workstation, my boss can demo it on his laptop and we can deploy it on Jetsons or the multi-gpu cluster with minimal changes and i can be sure that everything runs everywhere.
I just don't understand the details enough to understand why things are problematic without CUDA :(
Re: AMD may get across the CUDA moat
#183Off topic, but I am also looking with great interest at Apple Silicon SOCs with large internal RAM. The internal bandwidth also keeps getting better which is important for running trained LLMs.
Back on topic: I don’t own any current Intel computers but using Colab and services like Lambda Labs GPU VPSs is simple and flexible. A few people here mentioned if AMD can’t handle 100% of their workload they will stick with Intel and NVidia - understandable position, but there are workarounds.
Re: AMD may get across the CUDA moat
#184Earlier 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
> 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 That sounds interesting. I tried googling about it but can't really find much other than that failoverflow found a key and didn't release it, and then geohot released his own subsequently. I'd love to hear more about how directly he "stole" the…
Re: AMD may get across the CUDA moat
#185Yup, 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/
Re: AMD may get across the CUDA moat
#186Re: AMD may get across the CUDA moat
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Nvidia has 80% market share of the discrete GPU desktop market and at least 90% market share of cloud/datacenter.
Nvidia GPUs are used almost exclusively for every cloud powered AI service and to train virtually every ML model in existence. Almost always on Linux.
Do you really think any of this would be possible if what you are describing was anything approaching the typical experience starting at the /driver/ level?
Nvidia would have never achieved their market dominance nor held on to it this long if the issues you’ve experienced impacted anything approaching a statistically significant number of users or applications.
Nvidia gets a lot of hate on HN and elsewhere (much of it fair) but I will never understand the people who claim it doesn’t work and get the job done (often very well).
Re: AMD may get across the CUDA moat
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Good to hear more than a cheap snub. OpenAI Triton as the reason other GPUs work is a real non-shit answer, it seems. And interesting to hear JAX too. Thank you for being robustly useful & informative.
Re: AMD may get across the CUDA moat
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
The hardware can be fast, actually. Here’s an example of relatively modern industrial x86: https://www.onlogic.com/ml100g-41/ That thing is probably faster than half of currently sold laptops. However, containers or Ubuntu Linux don’t perform great in that environment. Ubuntu is for desktops, containers are for cloud data centers. An offline stand-alone device is different. BTW, end users don’t typically aware that t…
Tell that to their (much larger, more profitable, and better-funded) server org. This is far from true.
Re: AMD may get across the CUDA moat
#190I 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…
Have you gotten it to work with Whisper by any chance?
There’s getting something to “work”, which is often enough of a challenge with ROCm. Then there’s getting it to work well (next challenge).
Then there’s getting it to work as well as Nvidia/CUDA.
With Whisper, as one example, you should be running it with ctranslate2[0]. Of all the platforms on their supported list you won’t find ROCm.
When you really start to look around you’ll find that ROCm is (at best) still very much in the “get it to work (sometimes)” stage. In most cases it’s still a long way away from getting it to work well, and even further away from making it actually competitive with Nvidia for serious use cases and applications.
People get excited about the progress ROCm has made getting basic things to work with PyTorch and this is good - progress is progress. But saving 20% on the hardware when the equivalent Nvidia product is often somewhere between 5-10x as performant (at a fraction of the development time) because of vastly superior software support you realize pretty quickly Nvidia is actually a bargain compared to AMD.
I’m desperately rooting for Nvidia to have some actual competition but after six years of ROCm and my own repeated failed attempts to have it make any sense overall I’m only more and more skeptical that real competition in the space will come from AMD.