3 ms·

I've been following AMD's efforts, and I think what you say obscures the practical points. In fact, I prefer OpenCL to CUDA. However, that it is not only a mat

I've been following AMD's efforts, and I think what you say obscures the practical points. In fact, I prefer OpenCL to CUDA. However, that it is not only a matter of "a few people"'s effort is that AMD had a few people on BLAS libraries since forever, and their stuff is almost unusable for DL, let alone a match for CUDA. Add to that that Nvidia provided cuDNN that everyone uses. That it is not a matter of just a few people can be seen from the fact that AMD still does not provide an alternative, even a toy one, that works. Everythinig in AMD/OpenCL world relies on a few 3-rd party open-source efforts. Some of those work OK, some are cool, some are great, some are garbage, but there is no ecosystem anywhere near Nvidia's. They have HIP (and they have OpenCL) but these are only general purpose compilers. They have nothing when it comes to the libraries.

Eridrus 9y ago
It's pointless to keep arguing about who did what, but I will mention that the ROCm folks have significant headcount and are porting all the major libraries to HIP: https://rocm.github.io/dl.html https://rocm.github.io/dl.html In comparison, NVIDIA had all this effort done for them by the library developers.
- dragandj 9y ago
  As someone who has several top of the line GPUs from 3 years ago that are not even properly supported by ROCm, and someone who invested time in OpenCL 2.0 only to be told by AMD that OpenCL 1.2 is what I'm going to get on ROCm because they don't care, I tend to have a cynical view on this. I'll just say that there is a reason the projects you linked have only a handful of stars on GitHub, despite having significant headcount and supposed megacorp backing. People have been burned by AMD so many times that rarely anyone cares any more. I do, but I'm not very optimistic...
  - Eridrus 9y ago
    Personally, I'm waiting for these projects to get upstreamed, I have no interest in running an AMD fork, and thankfully they seem to be trying to get it upstreamed, but that will also depend on the libraries caring enough. I think everyone in the deep learning space is interested in AMD succeeding so that we're not all locked into NVIDIA or Google's TPUs, but everyone wants someone else to take the leap first and pay that cost. I'm certainly not going to buy any AMD GPUs before these versions have been upstreamed and a few people have kicked the tires, the lost productivity just isn't worth it.

Eridrus 9y ago

It's pointless to keep arguing about who did what, but I will mention that the ROCm folks have significant headcount and are porting all the major libraries to HIP: https://rocm.github.io/dl.html https://rocm.github.io/dl.html In comparison, NVIDIA had all this effort done for them by the library developers.

dragandj 9y ago
As someone who has several top of the line GPUs from 3 years ago that are not even properly supported by ROCm, and someone who invested time in OpenCL 2.0 only to be told by AMD that OpenCL 1.2 is what I'm going to get on ROCm because they don't care, I tend to have a cynical view on this. I'll just say that there is a reason the projects you linked have only a handful of stars on GitHub, despite having significant headcount and supposed megacorp backing. People have been burned by AMD so many times that rarely anyone cares any more. I do, but I'm not very optimistic...
- Eridrus 9y ago
  Personally, I'm waiting for these projects to get upstreamed, I have no interest in running an AMD fork, and thankfully they seem to be trying to get it upstreamed, but that will also depend on the libraries caring enough. I think everyone in the deep learning space is interested in AMD succeeding so that we're not all locked into NVIDIA or Google's TPUs, but everyone wants someone else to take the leap first and pay that cost. I'm certainly not going to buy any AMD GPUs before these versions have been upstreamed and a few people have kicked the tires, the lost productivity just isn't worth it.