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At my previous employer, we bought two Radeon VIIs (in addition to NVIDIA GPUs). The last time I tried it (just over ~6 months ago), there were still many bugs.

At my previous employer, we bought two Radeon VIIs (in addition to NVIDIA GPUs). The last time I tried it (just over ~6 months ago), there were still many bugs. Things would just crash and burn very frequently (odd shape errors, random crashes, etc.). Two colleagues reported some of those bugs in ROCm, but the bug reports were largely ignored. Maybe out-of-the-box support for PyTorch will result in more polish. Who knows? Another issue is that AMD has not yet implemented support for consumer GPUs after Vega. You'd think that targeting researchers on a budget (most of academia) would help them improving the ecosystem and weed out bugs. But they only seem interested in targeting large data centers. It's all a shame, because as you say, AMD graphics on Linux is awesome. And I think many Linux enthusiasts and researchers would be happy to use and improve ROCm to break NVIDIA's monopoly. Only if AMD actually cared.

wing-_-nuts 6y ago
Yeah I think having support for consumer level cards is really important because it makes it easier to have a pipeline of students who are familiar with your tech. These same folks advocate for AMD in the workplace and contribute to OSS on behalf of AMD. Forcing this to be a 'datacenter only' solution is really short sighted.
slavik81 6y ago
So, just up front: these are my personal opinions. I do not speak on behalf of AMD as a company. I'm just a software developer who works on ROCm. I joined AMD specifically because I wanted to help ROCm succeed. If the problems you encountered are related to a particular ROCm software library, I would encourage you to open an issue on the library's GitHub page. You will get the best results if you can get your problem directly in front of the people responsible for fixing it. Radeon VII is one of the core supported platforms and bugs encountered with it should be taken seriously. In fact, if you want to point me at the bug reports, I will personally follow up on them. ROCm has improved tremendously over the past 6 months, and I expect it to continue to improve. There have been growing pains, but I believe in the long-term success of this project.
- h0l0gr4ph1c 6y ago
  As someone who bought a RX580 for playing with Deep learning with ROCm (It was supported at the time). After posting to one or two bug threads, I had the same experience as the gp -- our issues were ignored. The issues have recently closed as the RX580 is no longer supported. As for long term success, good luck, but once bitten twice shy.
  - slavik81 6y ago
    I empathize. There have been plenty of mistakes. Trust is difficult to earn, and clearly we have not acted in a manner deserving of yours. When I first encountered ROCm, my impressions were mixed. The idea thrilled me, but the execution did not. I planned to ignore ROCm until it was clear that it would meet my needs. Obviously, my plans changed, but I haven't forgotten the perspective I had as a potential user. There are still rough edges and I know that nobody gets third chances, so it's good that you're cautious. We are steadily improving and I believe we will do better in supporting our users going forward, but to earn that trust back, we will have to prove it through our actions.

wing-_-nuts 6y ago

Yeah I think having support for consumer level cards is really important because it makes it easier to have a pipeline of students who are familiar with your tech. These same folks advocate for AMD in the workplace and contribute to OSS on behalf of AMD. Forcing this to be a 'datacenter only' solution is really short sighted.

slavik81 6y ago

So, just up front: these are my personal opinions. I do not speak on behalf of AMD as a company. I'm just a software developer who works on ROCm. I joined AMD specifically because I wanted to help ROCm succeed. If the problems you encountered are related to a particular ROCm software library, I would encourage you to open an issue on the library's GitHub page. You will get the best results if you can get your problem directly in front of the people responsible for fixing it. Radeon VII is one of the core supported platforms and bugs encountered with it should be taken seriously. In fact, if you want to point me at the bug reports, I will personally follow up on them. ROCm has improved tremendously over the past 6 months, and I expect it to continue to improve. There have been growing pains, but I believe in the long-term success of this project.

h0l0gr4ph1c 6y ago
As someone who bought a RX580 for playing with Deep learning with ROCm (It was supported at the time). After posting to one or two bug threads, I had the same experience as the gp -- our issues were ignored. The issues have recently closed as the RX580 is no longer supported. As for long term success, good luck, but once bitten twice shy.
- slavik81 6y ago
  I empathize. There have been plenty of mistakes. Trust is difficult to earn, and clearly we have not acted in a manner deserving of yours. When I first encountered ROCm, my impressions were mixed. The idea thrilled me, but the execution did not. I planned to ignore ROCm until it was clear that it would meet my needs. Obviously, my plans changed, but I haven't forgotten the perspective I had as a potential user. There are still rough edges and I know that nobody gets third chances, so it's good that you're cautious. We are steadily improving and I believe we will do better in supporting our users going forward, but to earn that trust back, we will have to prove it through our actions.