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Were. AMD totally squandered their advantage that they had with launching GCN early through an absolutely awful software stack.
by my123 6y ago
Were. AMD totally squandered their advantage that they had with launching GCN early through an absolutely awful software stack.
- shmerl 6y agoRDNA 2 only improved on the above. Nvidia were and remain a dead end with CUDA lock-in, but I agree that there should be more combined efforts to break it.
- my123 6y agoLol? ROCm is a mess. It's awful. And it is not even supported on RDNA and RDNA2. They even dropped Polaris support last month so that it's only supported on Vega. And that's very much not a high quality GPU compute stack, sorry... CUDA isn't a dead end and isn't going away any time soon.
- shmerl 6y agoI was talking about hardware, not about ROCm. I said above, GPU compute could benefit from a nice programming model with a modern language. That will dislodge CUDA lock-in for good. CUDA isn't dead, but there should be a bigger effort to get rid of it because it's not a proper GPU programming tool but rather a market manipulation tool by Nvidia.
- my123 6y agoNowadays, modern Nvidia hardware (Volta onwards) handles compute workloads better, notably through independent thread scheduling. RDNA2 with its cache and low main memory bandwidth didn't help either, because while the cache is there, you're going to exceed what it can absorb by a lot in compute workloads...
- shmerl 6y agoI doubt there is major difference. And if anything, AMD caught up to Nvidia in other areas. CUDA isn't used because Nvidia hardware is better. If it was about hardware, Nvidia wouldn't have used lock-in.
- my123 6y agoAMD doesn't even have the performance crown, by a long shot. NVIDIA did hold that pretty much non-stop since... Maxwell 2? As of no difference in compute workloads, I can put Blender as an example: https://techgage.com/article/blender-2-91-best-cpus-gpus-for-rendering-viewport/ https://techgage.com/article/blender-2-91-best-cpus-gpus-for... (6900 XT is 20.6 TFLOPS FP32, RTX 3090 is 35.6 TFLOPS FP32 _and_ also has the tensor cores, AMD can't win there because of sheer brute force) And AMD's software stack removes them from consideration for a huge extent of compute workloads. If they aren't ready to have a proper one, it doesn't matter how good how much their hardware is good or not, it might as well be a brick.
- shmerl 6y agoI don't see Nvidia leading in raw compute power, both in GPGPU and in gaming. At most there will be parity going forward. Which will prompt Nvidia to double down on lock-ins like CUDA. Either way, CUDA should be gone for good and replaced with something that's not tied to specific GPU. I welcome competition in hardware. I have no respect for lock-in shenanigans.
- oivey 6y agoThey’re leading right now by a bit, and when it comes to workloads involving tensor cores or ray tracing they’re burying AMD. I wish CUDA wasn’t vendor locked, too, but AMD and Intel need to start taking GPGPU software seriously. They’ve dug themselves a massive hole at this point.
- shmerl 6y agoI don't see a need to whitewash Nvidia here. They are nasty lock-in proponents. That doesn't mean AMD and Intel shouldn't invest more in improving the software side of things. Which I think they are doing (like the actual post example), so it should be getting better.