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> ROCm supports Vega, Vega 7nm, and CDNA just fine. yeah, but that's exactly what OP said - Vega is three generations old at this point, and that is the last

by paulmd 5y ago

> ROCm supports Vega, Vega 7nm, and CDNA just fine. yeah, but that's exactly what OP said - Vega is three generations old at this point, and that is the last consumer GPU (apart from VII which is a rebranded compute card) that ROCm supports. On the NVIDIA side, you can run at least basic tensorflow/pytorch/etc on a consumer GPU, and that option is not available on the AMD side, you have to spend $5k to get a GPU that their software actually supports. Not only that but on the AMD side it's a completely standalone compute card - none of the supported compute cards do graphics anymore. Whereas if you buy a 3090 at least you can game on it too.

Tostino 5y ago
I really don't think people appreciate the fact enough that for developers to care to learn about building software for your platform, you need to make it accessible for them to run that software. That means "run on the hardware they will already have". AMD really need to push to get ROCm compiling for RDNA based chips.
- paulmd 5y ago
  yeah, it's hard to overstate the importance of getting your hardware into people's hands to work with. A $5k buy-in before you can even play with programming on a device and figure out if your program is going to work on GPGPU at all is a big deal! CUDA being accessible on a $100 gaming GPU has enabled a lot of development, and NVIDIA also has made big efforts to get their hardware out to universities, and that has paid big dividends as well. Also, just flat-out using your own developers to write the basic code for libraries and frameworks and so on. There are tons of basic libraries like CuRAND and CUB (Cuda UnBound) and I'm sure tons of others that NVIDIA wrote not because a customer wanted that, but because it was building blocks that others could leverage into products that would sell NVIDIA hardware. In contrast AMD has fallen behind in that area, and has further fragmented their development work across a bunch of "flavor of the week" frameworks and implementations that usually get discarded within a couple years (remember HIP? remember Bolt? etc)

by paulmd 5y ago

Tostino 5y ago

I really don't think people appreciate the fact enough that for developers to care to learn about building software for your platform, you need to make it accessible for them to run that software. That means "run on the hardware they will already have". AMD really need to push to get ROCm compiling for RDNA based chips.

paulmd 5y ago
yeah, it's hard to overstate the importance of getting your hardware into people's hands to work with. A $5k buy-in before you can even play with programming on a device and figure out if your program is going to work on GPGPU at all is a big deal! CUDA being accessible on a $100 gaming GPU has enabled a lot of development, and NVIDIA also has made big efforts to get their hardware out to universities, and that has paid big dividends as well. Also, just flat-out using your own developers to write the basic code for libraries and frameworks and so on. There are tons of basic libraries like CuRAND and CUB (Cuda UnBound) and I'm sure tons of others that NVIDIA wrote not because a customer wanted that, but because it was building blocks that others could leverage into products that would sell NVIDIA hardware. In contrast AMD has fallen behind in that area, and has further fragmented their development work across a bunch of "flavor of the week" frameworks and implementations that usually get discarded within a couple years (remember HIP? remember Bolt? etc)