Live data from Hacker News

What Is AMD ROCm?

threedots.ovh

21–30 of 57 posts

Re: What Is AMD ROCm?

#21
post #5

Having to choose between Steam support and ROCm drivers is a pain - it stops tinkering. Almost everyone on Linux will have experience of breaking their drivers at some point, and installing another alternate set is a big risk. It seems silly to not have OpenCL and HIP access without having to use this alternate stack.

Shouldn't it work on top of the open source drivers?

Re: What Is AMD ROCm?

#23
post #5

Having to choose between Steam support and ROCm drivers is a pain - it stops tinkering. Almost everyone on Linux will have experience of breaking their drivers at some point, and installing another alternate set is a big risk. It seems silly to not have OpenCL and HIP access without having to use this alternate stack.

The ROCm and AMDGPU PRO stacks were unified with ROCm 4.5 and AMDGPU 21.40. I would expect Steam to work. That was just a couple weeks ago, but have you tried it out?

Isn't 4.5 also the version, that kicked Vega64 to the curb?

So even if I wanted, I can't. Sincerely, I'm fed up with AMD's attitude towards compute.

Re: What Is AMD ROCm?

#24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ROCm and AMDGPU PRO stacks were unified with ROCm 4.5 and AMDGPU 21.40. I would expect Steam to work. That was just a couple weeks ago, but have you tried it out?

Isn't 4.5 also the version, that kicked Vega64 to the curb? So even if I wanted, I can't. Sincerely, I'm fed up with AMD's attitude towards compute.

> Isn't 4.5 also the version, that kicked Vega64 to the curb?

ROCm 4.5 is the _last_ version to support the Vega10 ASIC (MI25, Vega56, Vega64).

https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/#amd-instinct-mi25...

The next ROCm release after 4.5 is sometime in Q1 next year. So it's on planned death really soon.

It is transitioning to _that_ comical AMD "enabled in the codebase but not tested and not supported" state, rotting slowly like Polaris support did.

Re: What Is AMD ROCm?

#25
post #2

It's something that has very little uptake because it's not supported on mainline GPUs? I want to use it for compute on something like a rx 6800 and to my knowledge can't

AMD is much smaller in comparison, and their main focus with ROCM is to get pytorch and tensorflow to work with enterprise GPUs. Everything else is long tail in terms of scale.

Sadly this is why I (and many others) keep begrudgingly choosing Nvidia cards instead.

Once the developers are familiar with CUDA, what are the chances you'd choose ROCm for deployment? Yeah, not great.

Consumer cards' ROCm support is strategic.

Re: What Is AMD ROCm?

#26
I have been using ROCm for 2y+. The investment in this infrastructure was a big mistake. The biggest burner was the need to do a clean install on each new ROCm release. Clean here means manually finding and deleting all traces from the previous ROCm version, and recompilation of apps like pytorch. Good upgrades took hours, bad ones days ... . Finally I settled to freeze the system and not touch it anymore until retirement of the cards, hopefully soon.

Re: What Is AMD ROCm?

#27

I tried ROCm. I bought a supported card (RX570/RX580 series). Within 12 months, AMD dropped support. Newer versions of ROCm didn't work with the card. Older versions didn't actually work either, since all other tooling assumed newer versions. Dependency hell. When things kinda started working in one context, where I could use old tooling (not the one I wanted to use ROCm in), it CUPy was slower than CPU, and then har…

Yeah Nvidia is so far ahead at this point I wouldn't really risk it on anything else. The problem is that all that troubleshooting adds up fast and the whole DL golden years were built on CUDA. TensorFlow and PyTorch both "support" ROCm and HIP but you run into weird issues very often. A lot of public repository for recent architectures also come with their own CUDA kernels that you need to compile to the vendor lock-in is very strong in my opinion.

And even if AMD's offering was not an absolute dumpster fire, Google, Microsoft and Amazon all have their own accelerator that are maturing and will be more cost effective on the long run.

Re: What Is AMD ROCm?

#28

I tried ROCm. I bought a supported card (RX570/RX580 series). Within 12 months, AMD dropped support. Newer versions of ROCm didn't work with the card. Older versions didn't actually work either, since all other tooling assumed newer versions. Dependency hell. When things kinda started working in one context, where I could use old tooling (not the one I wanted to use ROCm in), it CUPy was slower than CPU, and then har…

Khrono's SYCL is the open alternative to CUDA. It's what Intel is using for their oneAPI, there's a CUDA backend and even a HIP backend.

Re: What Is AMD ROCm?

#29
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand AMD has a fraction of the engineering resources Intel and Nvidia have. They need to make some choice and looking back at the last few years it seems that their choice to focus their efforts on hardware and gaming paid off.

On the flip side, I think that they haven't focused on a compelling compute story means that anyone doing anything other than pure gaming is better served by an Nvidia card.

This is why I'm excited about Intel getting into the market.

Re: What Is AMD ROCm?

#30
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't 4.5 also the version, that kicked Vega64 to the curb? So even if I wanted, I can't. Sincerely, I'm fed up with AMD's attitude towards compute.

> Isn't 4.5 also the version, that kicked Vega64 to the curb? ROCm 4.5 is the _last_ version to support the Vega10 ASIC (MI25, Vega56, Vega64). https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/#amd-instinct-mi25... The next ROCm release after 4.5 is sometime in Q1 next year. So it's on planned death really soon. It is transitioning to _that_ comical AMD "enabled in the codebase but not tested and not supported" state, rotti…

The MI25 line predates when I joined AMD, so I don't know much about it. Were they for sale to the general public?

I was concerned about that as well, but I don't personally know anyone who owns a gfx900 card. I'm a little unclear on what impact it will have on the community.

Post reply on HN