Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What Is AMD ROCm?

threedots.ovh

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 57 posts

Re: What Is AMD ROCm?

#41

Post by jacquesm »

blip54321 wrote: post #20

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…

Intel has done pretty much the same thing with their Xeon-phi series. Promising on paper but without the long term support and dedication from the mothership such efforts are doomed to fail. NVidia really gets it: people care about results, not necessarily how they get there and if that is done in the most 'pure' way possible, if it 'just works' that's good enough.

Re: What Is AMD ROCm?

#42

Post by jacquesm »

supernovae wrote: post #40
zmachinaz wrote: post #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 retir…

this is a problem with nvidia too.. i just made all my infra easy to reprovision and start clean and workloads ran as containers..

Interesting, can you describe this in a bit more detail? It runs completely counter to my experience, so far NVidia for me has just been a long string of 'boring' in that it just works. Even applications written for older cards and older versions of CUDA have continued to work just fine.

Re: What Is AMD ROCm?

#43

Post by jacquesm »

rjzzleep wrote: post #3
VHRanger wrote: 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

I was going to post exactly the same. And if you look at the github issues of their project you will see that very often it looks outsourced support teams comment on these issues with the standard: we will discuss this internally and get back to you kind of response that enterprises twitter support usually gives. Not really what you expect from quality engineering. At the end of the day these kind of companies don't…

That's not a valid reason to close a ticket. You close a ticket because the matter is resolved. We work with an internal rule with respect to comments on documents: if you open it the default is that you are going to be the one to close it when you are satisfied your concerns have been addressed. This sometimes gets overruled but that definitely isn't the norm.

Re: What Is AMD ROCm?

#44

Post by jacquesm »

zwaps wrote: post #35
VHRanger wrote: 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's support - not just for new or old GPUs, but in terms of all sorts of compatibility changes, usability parity and regressions is staggeringly bad. Given that compute is important, and many people use their GPUs for compute of some sort, I simply can not understand how that part is so poorly executed on the part of AMD that, in terms of actual application, you might call it entirely absent. I mean, this is a comp…

Especially not with NVidia leaving the front door wide open with their licensing terms and other oversights. But as long as AMD doesn't care enough NVidia will grow and become more and more entrenched. It would take a small miracle to displace them by now.

Re: What Is AMD ROCm?

#45

Post by blihp »

slavik81 wrote: post #13
stuaxo wrote: 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?

Is there some reason AMD seems uninterested (at best) in supporting an open source compute stack? Not everyone is running one of the distros supported by ROCm which will discourage more than a few users.

Re: What Is AMD ROCm?

#46

Post by slavik81 »

my123 wrote: post #33
slavik81 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Were they for sale to the general public? The MI25 wasn't targeted at the general public, but it wasn't hard to buy one. And the customer products using that same die, Vega 56 and 64, were sold quite a bit. What affected the community severely might be the combination of both GFX8 and gfx900 going away, leaving only MI50 (Vega20, also used in Radeon VII consumer variant) and no support (only unofficial enablement)…

Thank you. I found your post helpful for better understanding the situation.

Re: What Is AMD ROCm?

#47

Post by rocmasdf »

zmachinaz wrote: post #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 retir…

Could you describe what is involved in installing a ROCm release from scratch? (I've mostly stayed in CUDA-land, but I'm curious and intrigued about the idea of ROCm, and AMD GPUs, though your experience suggests there is much room for improvement...)

Re: What Is AMD ROCm?

#48

Post by Gigachad »

bubblethink wrote: post #8
VHRanger wrote: 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.

This doesn't mean anything to potential customers. If I was in the market for GPU compute, nvidia is the only real option. AMD has had some PR person commenting on github that they have "big news coming very soon" for navi users but it's been over a year now and still no news.

Re: What Is AMD ROCm?

#49

Post by Gigachad »

blihp wrote: post #45
slavik81 wrote: post #13

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?

Is there some reason AMD seems uninterested (at best) in supporting an open source compute stack? Not everyone is running one of the distros supported by ROCm which will discourage more than a few users.

AMD isn't even interested in supporting their best selling cards with ROCm. The whole thing seems to be illogical and against their own interests.

Re: What Is AMD ROCm?

#50

Post by rasz »

blihp wrote: post #45
slavik81 wrote: post #13

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?

Is there some reason AMD seems uninterested (at best) in supporting an open source compute stack? Not everyone is running one of the distros supported by ROCm which will discourage more than a few users.

AMD is not a software company. They barely support their current products. Everything is slow and full of bugs. Afaik they had a thing where they fired GPU driver developers before deciding to rewrite everything from scratch - losing expertise and institutional knowledge, new ones were slower for a long timer. They even managed to fuck up AMD Platform !Security! Processor (PSP) chipset driver allowing attackers dumping of random memory pages.
Post reply on HN