So, why AMD acts like they don't care/can't care about this? Is this such a specialized area that the programmers are hard to find or fished away by Nvidia or something else is going on? If the latter, what?
Documentation for the AMD 7900XTX
91–100 of 154 posts
Re: Documentation for the AMD 7900XTX
#92So 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…
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…
Why is that, that AMD seemingly can't act like a sane individual would do?
Re: Documentation for the AMD 7900XTX
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
> have him fix it to his liking Like when he strolled into Twitter, acted like he knew better than everyone, delivered nothing and then left. There is far more to achieving things in large companies than simply having great technical skills.
Yeah, but you don't know the reasons.
Re: Documentation for the AMD 7900XTX
#94Earlier 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…
Maybe they are not allowed to compete...
Re: Documentation for the AMD 7900XTX
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. I…
> The amdgpu driver is 2d only Huh? People play 3D games on that driver. Or is the 3D part just Mesa in such cases?
It's mostly Mesa. The kernel - user space division is kinda like it would be in a microkernel OS: the kernel provides hardware access and manages permissions and resource (time, memory, energy) allocation. User space does the rest.
The kernel part is not really that small but you get the idea.
Re: Documentation for the AMD 7900XTX
#96George’s video may have helped precipitate another long post/call to action by Gnif regarding the gpu reset bugs that keep even AMD’s enterprise cards from being reliable enough for VFIO: https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/1bsjm5a/letter_to_amd_...
Re: Documentation for the AMD 7900XTX
#97So 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…
>I'm cheering him on, even though his complaints were a little melodramatic. I've really soured on him when he literally went "I'm going to fix twitter search, hire me elon" and then went to public saying "Hey, want an internship? Fix it, and then MIT license your code(so he could use it lol), and maybe we can talk - oh btw I have no real authority to give anyone an internship." He might be a brilliant programmer and…
> He might be a brilliant programmer and problem solver, but that incident left a very sour "Grifter" vibes.
Your algorithm for "who is a grifter" is buggy. You can tell someone is not a grifter based on what code they ship, not what words they say ("Cypherpunks write code" being the mantra).
Failure doesn't prove someone is a grifter, btw. Not acknowledging failure is what makes one a grifter. A grifter would continue to draw a Twitter salary without actually fixing anything and were many such cases before Musk took over! Instead, Hotz quit upon realizing that he couldn't do what he said and publicly acknowledged that he couldn't fix Twitter search.
This is also why his companies/projects have bounties instead of "internships". Their code is open source and actually writing code is a simple filter that eliminates people who don't write code but are good at _saying_ that they will. By not even guaranteeing a paid internship in exchange for a pull request, he ensures a contributor's incentives are aligned with improving the technology as opposed to gaming a hiring process. And he pays cash for bounties so you can accurately evaluate whether it's worth your time to contribute.
In other words, he learned from his failure at Twitter that if Twitter's code had been open he would have been able to make an accurate assessment of whether he could fix it by actually submitting a PR!
Re: Documentation for the AMD 7900XTX
#98I 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.
Imagine being a fan of a company when your options are VERY limited ((A or B) or C).
Making an informed decision at the time you want to buy/upgrade something is a relative simple task these days.
Re: Documentation for the AMD 7900XTX
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe your info is a bit out-of-date. FGLRX hasn't been maintained or actively developed for a quite a while and unless you're using super-duper-ancient HW no one actually uses it anymore. AMDGPU is the the current Linux driver, combined with Mesa, and certainly is not 2D only.
Aren't the relevant 3D bits in userspace (not the driver)? Isn't the concept of 3D APIs limited to stuff like Mesa, with the kernel space AMDGPU driver providing only the primitives on which the API can then be built? I could be wrong, but that's how I understood it. I things like Fglrx, the OpenGL stack was part of the driver proper IIRC. But granted, I haven't heard of or seen FGLRX in literally more than a decade,…
AMDGPU enables the whole hardware sans the video encoders. 3D is standard OpenGL, provided by Mesa.
It's fully accelerated, incl. video decoding & HDCP. Full stack sans the card firmware is open source.
The video decoder block is completely independent from HDCP block on the silicon to be able to provide open access to these parts too.
I don't know why they can't/don't open source video encoder parts. Probably some 3rd party royalties, but I'm not sure.
If you want another 3D API, you can directly build it on top of the driver. Nothing prevents that. Plus, ROCm packages are landing to "free/main" part of Debian for quite some time.
Re: Documentation for the AMD 7900XTX
#100I 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.
It's always intriguing to see other people's takes. I'm in nearly the complete opposite boat: in recent years I've switched to AMD and it feels like all of my hardware problems have gone away.
I'm assuming GP runs Windows and you run Linux. NVidia's proprietary drivers are known to be a lot more stable than AMD's. But on the other hand the open source driver and software stack for AMD (partially shared with Intel) is much more stable than NVidia's on Linux.