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AMD may get across the CUDA moat

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Re: AMD may get across the CUDA moat

#221

Post by mschuetz »

ur-whale wrote: post #16

> AMD May Get Across the CUDA Moat I really wish they would, and properly, as in: fully open solution to match CUDA. CUDA is a cancer on the industry.

What's wrong with CUDA? I avoided it for years because it's proprietory but about one year ago I started using it because all the alternatives (OpenGL/Vulkan compute, OpenCL, WebGPU, ...) couldn't quite do what I wanted, and it turned out to be a game changer. Nothing comes close to it. Now I'm hooked because there simply isn't an alternative that's as easy to use, yet powerfull and fast.

I wish there was an open alternative, but NVIDIA did several things right that others, especially Khronos, do not: The UX is top-notch. It makes the common cases easy yet still fast, and from there you can optimize to your hearts content. Khronos, however, usually completely over-engineers things and makes the common case hard and cumbersome with massive entry barriers.

Re: AMD may get across the CUDA moat

#222

Post by iopq »

mgaunard wrote: post #193
mikepurvis wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't know what world you live in, but this is a problem for any software development. You need to ensure that there is only one version of any library used globally throughout the code and that the set of versions is compatible with each other, and preferably you also want everything to be built against the same toolchain with the same flags. That usually means onboarding third-party libraries into your own build…

In NixOS, I can install multiple versions of libraries

Or rather, I install no versions of libraries because NixOS will put them all in the store in different folders, and will compile the executable to use the correct path (or patch the elf when needed)

it has an issue with pip because it's allergic to just randomly executing things as part of package management, but pip in general is wtf

Re: AMD may get across the CUDA moat

#223

Post by iopq »

cannonpalms wrote: post #189
Const-me wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Ubuntu is for desktops Tell that to their (much larger, more profitable, and better-funded) server org. This is far from true.

It also works much better as a server. Snaps work really well for things like certbot

On Desktop you have to worry about things like... UIs, sound, Wine, etc.

Re: AMD may get across the CUDA moat

#224

Post by mschuetz »

nextaccountic wrote: post #191
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.

> 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. What AMD really needs is to have 100% feature parity with CUDA without changing a single line of code. Maybe for this to happen it needs to add hardware features or something (I see people saying that CUDA as an API is very tailored to the capabilities of nvidia GPUs), I don't…

Not just feature parity, but proper UX. Things need to just work, without spending hours or days to make them work.

Re: AMD may get across the CUDA moat

#225

Post by iopq »

KeplerBoy wrote: post #132
omneity wrote: post #128

Earlier 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.

Sorry, still trying to install some dependencies for DNN and CUDA, not sure why it says my Clang version is too new (!)

Re: AMD may get across the CUDA moat

#226

Post by tibbydudeza »

redeeman wrote: post #74
tibbydudeza wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Price difference between 13900K and AMD Ryzen 9 7950x is not big - the latest 7950X3D is about on par with the higher clocked 13900KS as well.

because intel lowered their prices

I was on the market last month - Intel was the better choice because AM5 boards and DDR5 was too expensive.

Ryzen 9 7950X — $799 on release Intel 13900K - $589.

Re: AMD may get across the CUDA moat

#227

Post by Flameancer »

gymbeaux wrote: post #155
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 often have issues booting to the installer or first boot after install with an NVidia GPU. Pop_OS, Fedora and OpenSUSE work out of the box. Those are all Wayland I believe. Debian/Ubuntu distros are a bad time. I think they’re still X11. It’s ironic because X11 is supposed to be the more stable window manager.

I think they moved to Wayland on 23.04 or 23.10. I just recently installed both to try and get a 7800xt working with PyTorch and the default was Wayland.

Re: AMD may get across the CUDA moat

#228

Post by iopq »

aftbit wrote: post #146
distract8901 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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" comp…

I tried using an Nvidia card with OBS to record my screen and it kind of freezes in Wine. I switched from x11 to Wayland and now Wine shows horizontal lines (!) and performs like crap.

Even my 4GB RX 570 from years ago gives a better experience doing this. You just install OBS from flathub, Wayland works, everything works without any setup or tinkering. You click record and you can record your gameplay footage.

Re: AMD may get across the CUDA moat

#229

Post by mschuetz »

raggi wrote: post #148

Can we just get wgsl compute good enough and over the line instead, and do away with these moats?

Not happening. WGSL wants to support the lowest common denominator, so it'll always mainly be a 5-year old mobile-phone API. Also if you want to beat CUDA, you'll need some functionality that's completely missing in compute shaders, especially WGSL. Like pointers and pointer casting (and that glsl buffer reference extension is the worst emulation of that feature I've every seen).

Re: AMD may get across the CUDA moat

#230

Post by iopq »

kkielhofner wrote: post #187
LtWorf wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Describing kernel panics and general nightmare scenarios as the general course with Nvidia doesn’t make sense either. 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…

Nvidia is bad when combined with Wine/Firefox/Chrome on Wayland

Which is literally only 1% of users anyway

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