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AMD funded a drop-in CUDA implementation built on ROCm: It's now open-source

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Re: AMD funded a drop-in CUDA implementation built on ROCm: It's now open-source

#301

Post by pjmlp »

BizarroLand wrote: post #267
pjmlp wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no competition when games only come to Linux by "emulating" Windows. The only thing it has going for it is being a free beer UNIX clone for headless environments, and even then, isn't that relevant on cloud environments where containers and managed languages abstract everything they run on.

Thanks to the Steam Deck, more and more games are being ported for Linux compatibility by default. Maybe some Microsoft owned games makers will never make the shift, but if the majority of others do then that's the death knell.

Nah, everyone is relying on Proton, there are hardly any native GNU/Linux games being ported, not even Android/NDK ones, where SDL, OpenGL, Vulkan, C, C++ are present, and would be extremely easy to port.

Re: AMD funded a drop-in CUDA implementation built on ROCm: It's now open-source

#302

Post by kllrnohj »

swozey wrote: post #191
toxik wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is AMD just a puppet org to placate antitrust fears? Why are they like this?

Is this really a theory? If so my $8 AMD stock from, 2015? is currently worth $176 so they should make more shell companies they're doing great. I guess that might answer my "Why would AMD find that having a CUDA competitor isn't a business case unless they couldn't do it or the cards underperformed significantly."

For some reason AMD's GPU division continues to be run, well, horribly. The CPU division is crushing it, but the GPU division is comically bad. During the great GPU shortage AMD had multiple opportunities to capture chunks of the market and secure market share, increasing the priority for developers to acknowledge and target AMD's GPUs. What did they do instead? Not a goddamn thing, they followed Nvidia's pricing and managed to sell jack shit (like seriously the RX 580 is still the first AMD card to show up on the steam hardware survey).

They're not going big enough dies at the top end to compete with nvidia for the halo, and they're refusing to undercut at the low end where nvidia's reputation for absurd pricing is at an all time high. AMD's GPU division is a clown show, it's impressively bad. Even though the hardware itself is fine they just can't stop either making terrible product launches, awful pricing strategies, or just brain dead software choices like shipping a feature that triggered anti-cheat, getting their customers predictably banned & angering game devs in the process

And relevant to this discussion Nvidia's refusal to add VRAM to their lower end cards is a prime opportunity for AMD to go after the lower-end compute / AI interested crowd who will become the next generation software devs. What are they doing with this? Well, they're not making ROCm available to basically anyone, that's apparently the winning strategy. ROCm 6.0 only supports the 7900 XTX and the... Radeon VII. The weird one-off Vega 20 refresh. Of all the random cards to support, why the hell would you pick that one???

Re: AMD funded a drop-in CUDA implementation built on ROCm: It's now open-source

#303

Post by gdiamos »

enonimal wrote: post #91

From the ARCHITECTURE.md: > Those pointers point to undocumented functions forming CUDA Dark API. It's impossible to tell how many of them exist, but debugging experience suggests there are tens of function pointers across tens of tables. A typical application will use one or two most common. Due to they undocumented nature they are exclusively used by Runtime API and NVIDIA libraries (and in by CUDA applications in…

These were a huge pain in the ass when I tried this 20 years ago on Ocelot.

Eventually one of the NVIDIA engineers just asked me to join and I did. :-P

Re: AMD funded a drop-in CUDA implementation built on ROCm: It's now open-source

#304

Post by throwawaymaths »

Symmetry wrote: post #54
throwawaymaths wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC (this could be old news) AMD GPUs are preferred in the supercomputer segment because they offer better flops/unit energy. However without a cuda-like you're missing out on the AI part of supercompute, which is increasing proportion. The margins on supercompute-related sales are very high. Simplifying, but you can basically take a consumer chip, unlock a few things, add more memory capacity, relicense, and your m…

It's more that the resource balance in AMD's compute line of GPUs (the CDNA ones) has been more focused on the double precision operations that most supercomputer code makes heavy use of.

Thanks for clarifying! I had a feeling I had my story slightly wrong

Re: AMD funded a drop-in CUDA implementation built on ROCm: It's now open-source

#305

Post by tester756 »

lambdaone wrote: post #75

It seems to me that AMD are crazy to stop funding this. CUDA-on-ROCm breaks NVIDIA's moat, and would also act as a disincentive for NVIDIA to make breaking changes to CUDA; what more could AMD want? When you're #1, you can go all-in on your own proprietary stack, knowing that network effects will drive your market share higher and higher for you for free. When you're #2, you need to follow de-facto standards and work…

If you see:

1) billions of dollar at the stake

2) one of the most successful leadership

3) during hottest peroid of their business where they heard about Nvidia's moat probably thousands of times during last 18 months...

and you call some decision "crazy", then you probably do not have the same informations that they do

or they underperformed, who knows, but I bet on #1 reason.

Re: AMD funded a drop-in CUDA implementation built on ROCm: It's now open-source

#307

Post by sophrocyne »

Cu3PO42 wrote: post #122

I'm really rooting for AMD to break the CUDA monopoly. To this end, I genuinely don't know whether a translation layer is a good thing or not. On the upside it makes the hardware much more viable instantly and will boost adoption, on the downside you run the risk that devs will never support ROCm, because you can just use the translation layer. I think this is essentially the same situation as Proton+DXVK for Linux g…

Hey there -

I'm a maintainer (and CEO) of Invoke.

It's something we're monitoring as well.

ROCm has been challenging to work with - we're actively talking to AMD to keep apprised of ways we can mitigate some of the more troublesome experiences that users have with getting Invoke running on AMD (and hoping to expand official support to Windows AMD)

The problem is that a lot of the solutions proposed involve significant/unsustainable dev effort (i.e., supporting an entirely different inference paradigm), rather than "drop in" for the existing Torch/diffusers pipelines.

While I don't know enough about your set up to offer immediate solutions, if you join the discord, am sure folks would be happy to try walking through some manual troubleshooting/experimentation to get you up and running - discord.gg/invoke-ai

Re: AMD funded a drop-in CUDA implementation built on ROCm: It's now open-source

#308

Post by kkielhofner »

Certhas wrote: post #117
kkielhofner wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the most recent card being their one year old flagship ($1k) consumer GPU... Meanwhile CUDA supports anything with Nvidia stamped on it before it's even released. They'll even go as far as doing things like adding support for new GPUs/compute families to older CUDA versions (see Hopper/Ada and CUDA 11.8). You can go out and buy any Nvidia GPU the day of release, take it home, plug it in, and everything just work…

The most recent "card" is their MI300 line. It's annoying as hell to you and me that they are not catering to the market of people who want to run stuff on their gaming cards. But it's not clear it's bad strategy to focus on executing in the high-end first. They have been very successful landing MI300s in the HPC space... Edit: I just looked it up: 25% of the GPU Compute in the current Top500 Supercomputers is AMD ht…

Indeed, but this is extremely short-sighted.

You don't win an overall market by focusing on several hundred million dollar bespoke HPC builds where the platform (frankly) doesn't matter at all. I'm working on a project on an AMD platform on the list (won't say - for now) and needless to say you build whatever you have to what's there, regardless of what it takes and the operators/owners and vendor support teams pour in whatever resources are necessary to make it work.

You win a market a generation at a time - supporting low end cards for tinkerers, the educational market, etc. AMD should focus on the low-end because that's where the next generation of AI devs, startups, innovation, etc is coming from and for now that's going to continue to be CUDA/Nvidia.

Re: AMD funded a drop-in CUDA implementation built on ROCm: It's now open-source

#309

Post by swozey »

kllrnohj wrote: post #302
swozey wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this really a theory? If so my $8 AMD stock from, 2015? is currently worth $176 so they should make more shell companies they're doing great. I guess that might answer my "Why would AMD find that having a CUDA competitor isn't a business case unless they couldn't do it or the cards underperformed significantly."

For some reason AMD's GPU division continues to be run, well, horribly. The CPU division is crushing it, but the GPU division is comically bad. During the great GPU shortage AMD had multiple opportunities to capture chunks of the market and secure market share, increasing the priority for developers to acknowledge and target AMD's GPUs. What did they do instead? Not a goddamn thing, they followed Nvidia's pricing and…

> The (AMD) CPU division is crushing it

I worked at a baremetal CDN with 60 pops and a few years ago we had to switch to AMD because of PCIE bandwidth over to our smartNICs and nvmeOF sort of things. We'd long hit limits on Intel before the Epyc stuff came out so we had to have more servers running than we wanted because we had to limit how much we did with one server to not hit the limits and cause everything to lock.

And we were excited, not a single apprehension. Epyc crushed the server market, everyone is using them. Well, it's going ARM now but Epyc will still be around awhile.

Re: AMD funded a drop-in CUDA implementation built on ROCm: It's now open-source

#310

Post by beebeepka »

latchkey wrote: post #264
beebeepka wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it true MI300 line is 3-4x cheaper for similar performance than whatever nvidia is selling in highest segment?

I probably can't comment on that, but what I can comment on is this: H100's are hard to get. Nearly impossible. CoreWeave and others have scooped them all up for the foreseeable future. So, if you are looking at only price as the factor, then it becomes somewhat irrelevant, if you can't even buy them [0]. I don't really understand the focus on price because of this fact. Even if you do manage to score yourself some H…

Pretty sweet. I do envy you. For what it's worth, I would prefer AMD to charge as much as possible for these little beasts.
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