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Documentation for the AMD 7900XTX

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Re: Documentation for the AMD 7900XTX

#41

Post by jimbob45 »

georgehotz wrote: post #32
MuffinFlavored wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem is if I spend an evening trying to do anything with OpenCL or ROCm the kernel hard-locks and I go to bed early. In a race against NVIDIA where every comment on here is about just how much better CUDA is than any alternative, why doesn't literally what you just said "also" have the attention of Lisa Su?

I have had multiple replies from Lisa Su on both Twitter and by e-mail. It doesn't help. AMD is structurally incapable of fixing these issues. They don't even have a 7900XTX in CI. Crashing the firmware is so trivial there's no way anyone fuzzed anything. They debug by the application, adding mitigations at many layers of the stack to make it work. While this strategy is fine for the 20 mainstream games that come out…

They don't even have a 7900XTX in CI.

You read stories in the glory days of Microsoft where they would bend over backwards to ensure backwards compatibility [0]. Going from that to what you say is depressing. It’s actually hard for me to accept your statement because such a failure would not only require QA/the PM to be totally ignorant of current testing best practices, but also require HR to have catastrophically misidentified both those people and the people who supervise them.

Keep up the great work.

[0]https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20191119-00/?p=10...

Re: Documentation for the AMD 7900XTX

#42

Post by greenavocado »

DiabloD3 wrote: post #40
ultra_nick wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NVidia is making boatloads of money because their driver works and they have a software library called CUDA that accelerates neural networks. Nobody expects AMD to match them, but George thought they could at least write a GPU driver. If AMD can get that driver out, then George could provide a competitor to CUDA (for neutral networks only). They'd both make boatloads of money. However, AMD was less capable than expec…

Slight mistake in your description: CUDA is an out of date API that was replaced by Khronos's own official compute APIs. Khronos is a standards consortium that Nvidia is a founding member of. Although the marketing department at Nvidia still pushes for greenfield CUDA codebases, no new code should be written in it, and they should opt for open source international standards only. Khronos APIs are implemented by over…

Show me the announcement deprecating CUDA

Re: Documentation for the AMD 7900XTX

#43

Post by NicoJuicy »

roenxi wrote: post #8

So for reference, this geohot is George Hotz who has a company Tiny Corp [0] in the space. Among a long list of things, he had a moment in the spotlight recently for a long rant [1] where he "gave up on AMD" because their drivers sucked more than he expected. The situation is reasonably complex - AMD have some programmers working on ROCm who seemed to be operating at standard fare when that is really not what AMD nee…

That's not really on how I see it.

He's trying to do everything on AMD's consumer based GPU's, while he's comparing it with NVidia's enterprise GPU's with the same expectations.

That's just not how it works in real life. But if he succeeds, yeah, he could save tons of money and his hardware for ML could actually be completed.

Re: Documentation for the AMD 7900XTX

#44

Post by glimshe »

I used to be an AMD diehard fan. Bought their processors and GPUs for close to 20 years until I simply couldn't take it anymore - 5 years ago I started buying NVIDIA GPUs with Intel CPUs and honestly never looked back. Sure I pay more, but it's worth paying more for reliability and software support. Anything else and I'm losing money out of ideology to give to a business that doesn't have its act together.

Re: Documentation for the AMD 7900XTX

#46

Post by mshockwave »

DiabloD3 wrote: post #40
ultra_nick wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NVidia is making boatloads of money because their driver works and they have a software library called CUDA that accelerates neural networks. Nobody expects AMD to match them, but George thought they could at least write a GPU driver. If AMD can get that driver out, then George could provide a competitor to CUDA (for neutral networks only). They'd both make boatloads of money. However, AMD was less capable than expec…

Slight mistake in your description: CUDA is an out of date API that was replaced by Khronos's own official compute APIs. Khronos is a standards consortium that Nvidia is a founding member of. Although the marketing department at Nvidia still pushes for greenfield CUDA codebases, no new code should be written in it, and they should opt for open source international standards only. Khronos APIs are implemented by over…

With my past experience in Khronos, NVIDIA is indeed a member and they sent decent guys to the meetings -- but only for strategic reasons, rather than "advocating for open standards" as you described. My experiences there actually told me the opposite that they will never drop CUDA. Objectively they also have incentive to do so: fighting with 100-ish companies to ratify something is always slower than rolling out an feature in an ecosystem you have total control of.

Re: Documentation for the AMD 7900XTX

#47

Post by modeless »

NicoJuicy wrote: post #43
roenxi wrote: post #8

So for reference, this geohot is George Hotz who has a company Tiny Corp [0] in the space. Among a long list of things, he had a moment in the spotlight recently for a long rant [1] where he "gave up on AMD" because their drivers sucked more than he expected. The situation is reasonably complex - AMD have some programmers working on ROCm who seemed to be operating at standard fare when that is really not what AMD nee…

That's not really on how I see it. He's trying to do everything on AMD's consumer based GPU's, while he's comparing it with NVidia's enterprise GPU's with the same expectations. That's just not how it works in real life. But if he succeeds, yeah, he could save tons of money and his hardware for ML could actually be completed.

This is wrong for two reasons. One, he claims that AMD's enterprise GPUs are also unreliable. Two, he is comparing vs. 4090 which is a consumer GPU and CUDA is very reliable as it is on all of Nvidia's consumer hardware.

Re: Documentation for the AMD 7900XTX

#48

Post by [deleted] »

glimshe wrote: post #44

I used to be an AMD diehard fan. Bought their processors and GPUs for close to 20 years until I simply couldn't take it anymore - 5 years ago I started buying NVIDIA GPUs with Intel CPUs and honestly never looked back. Sure I pay more, but it's worth paying more for reliability and software support. Anything else and I'm losing money out of ideology to give to a business that doesn't have its act together.

[deleted]

Re: Documentation for the AMD 7900XTX

#49

Post by trws »

roenxi wrote: post #8

So for reference, this geohot is George Hotz who has a company Tiny Corp [0] in the space. Among a long list of things, he had a moment in the spotlight recently for a long rant [1] where he "gave up on AMD" because their drivers sucked more than he expected. The situation is reasonably complex - AMD have some programmers working on ROCm who seemed to be operating at standard fare when that is really not what AMD nee…

They do need to rework their development processes. It’s worth noting though that there are two (kinda three) different drivers with very different quality and different teams behind them.

There’s the binary driver, on windows and the fglrx driver for Linux, that contains the full OpenGL stack and all the proprietary stuff. That’s been maintained and extended since the ATI days by a team primarily based in Markham. It’s garbage. It’s been garbage since the 90s. This is not new or surprising. It’s unstable, poorly maintained and just generally a bad time. It was also the reason OpenCL required an X session run as root with no access control and sometimes a stub dvi cable on the card for many years. It is a source of endless sadness and despair.

The other driver is the HSA/ROCM driver on Linux, which can be used with the amdgpu upstream kernel driver and is itself upstream. The amdgpu driver is 2d only, but has been developed in the open, and stable, for a long, long time. It’s maintained by a completely separate set of teams mostly in (last I knew) Germany and Austin. The HSA driver has likewise been immensely more stable than the binary drivers since it was introduced. There are potential problems with it, but I’ve managed to recover every single one I’ve run into without a reboot, and I’ve been doing GPU compute with AMD, NVIDIA and intel since 2008. When it was the binary driver, we needed reboots every time an AMD GPU locked up. I’m not saying there’s no problem here, but he’s reporting problems I’ve never seen in thousands of hours of high-load compute both personally and for work with the driver one ought to use for ROCM. There are other problems, but HSA/amdgpu drivers have not been high on that list for me. Possibly because I was so used to how bad the other ones were I guess…

Re: Documentation for the AMD 7900XTX

#50

Post by andrewmcwatters »

roenxi wrote: post #8

So for reference, this geohot is George Hotz who has a company Tiny Corp [0] in the space. Among a long list of things, he had a moment in the spotlight recently for a long rant [1] where he "gave up on AMD" because their drivers sucked more than he expected. The situation is reasonably complex - AMD have some programmers working on ROCm who seemed to be operating at standard fare when that is really not what AMD nee…

It was particularly hard to listen to himself admit that he basically became unpaid QA for AMD.

Like, dude, you’re making the same junior mistake people writing apps for the App Store make.

It’s not your platform.

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