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It's good that AMD is providing support for some of their customers since OpenCL is being removed in 3.0. I hope that this is just the start of far greater inve

by mastax 5y ago

It's good that AMD is providing support for some of their customers since OpenCL is being removed in 3.0. I hope that this is just the start of far greater investment into their software ecosystem. It was understandable that AMD invested less in drivers and support software when they were almost bankrupt but that excuse is drying up. There are rumors that future AMD GPU architectures will be quite good and it would be a shame for that advantage to be wasted by a lack of software support.

AnthonyMouse 5y ago
They should really get together with Intel on an open standard, now that Intel is doing real GPUs. They both have a shared interest in people not being stuck on proprietary Nvidia interfaces.
- WithinReason 5y ago
  Currently Vulkan Compute seems to be the most general compute platform.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- xvilka 5y ago
  The only hope for opensource only if NVIDIA as a company ceases to exist - go bankrupt, for example. They are inherently hostile to FOSS and will never change (they didn't change in last decades, why they would in the future).
  - AnthonyMouse 5y ago
    AMD and Intel benefit from having the same open source interface to their GPUs even if Nvidia doesn't use it, because it doubles the amount of target hardware for developers. Also remember that AMD and Intel both make discrete GPUs and iGPUs but AMD has much more share in discrete GPUs and Intel has much more share in iGPUs, so this helps them both. And then if either of them managed to hit one out of the park on the hardware side it would benefit both. A really interesting possibility there is to put a strong GPU in a HEDT CPU socket with a lot of memory channels to feed it, because then it shares a memory controller with the CPU and doesn't have to copy over PCIe. That could drive demand, and Nvidia can't do that on a PC without an x86 license but AMD and Intel both can.
  - roenxi 5y ago
    They may literally be the last holdout among the hardware manufacturers. 15 years ago nearly every vendor was the same. They've all caved over time - can't fight OSS forever.
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      Except they all end up going shareware like model where the FOSS alone is useless without the proprietary magic dust.
      - AnthonyMouse 5y ago
        Are you trying to claim that e.g. the AMD open source drivers can't be usefully improved by the community?
        pjmlp 5y ago
        Yes, unless the community is now expert in GPU firmware and hardware design.
- scoopertrooper 5y ago
  I don't see it happening. AMD like Nvidia want to keep their big corporate clients locked into their ecosystem. If Intel were clever like a fox, they'd invest heavily in making oneAPI work well on both Nvidia and AMD platforms. As a new market entrant they have nothing to lose, but everything to gain by luring companies into a vendor agnostic solution. They've already starting doing this to a degree, but only in partnership with some university. This should be one of their major KPIs, they've got plenty of cash laying about. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=oneAPI-AMD-Radeon-GPUs https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=oneAPI-A...
  - AnthonyMouse 5y ago
    AMD's biggest problem right now is overcoming Nvidia's inertia for compute. This is the classic case where open standards happen. Everybody but the incumbent joins in, then all of them put together is a large enough target to attract developers. Then the open standard and the proprietary one coexist as long as any of the vendors implementing the open standard is competitive, but if the vendor with the proprietary standard stumbles in any way, developers abandon them. Hardware vendors don't really need lock in. People buy your hardware again because you make it faster every year. And if your hardware stops being competitive then the lock in won't save you.
    - touisteur 5y ago
      But wasn't it already tried with OpenCL... And quite failed to just do that? For now, in parallel to efforts to reach parity to cuda or something, I'd rather have them optimize the mother out of the necessary libraries (tensor basic blocks, basically reaching cudnn/tensorrt-level, crazy limit-of-hardware BLAS stuff, and most of the API landscape)... 47tflops that I can't use because I have to reimplement and optimize the basics isn't that interesting, except for supercompute.
      - AnthonyMouse 5y ago
        OpenCL was created by Apple, then Apple abandoned it. AMD picked it up, but at the time AMD didn't have competitive hardware and therefore didn't have the resources to make it good, and Intel wasn't in the GPU game then. Now AMD has money and Intel has even more money and they could certainly produce a competitive solution together if they tried.
- mastax 5y ago
  Well ROCm and HIP are "open" and run on AMD and Nvidia GPUs. I'm sure AMD would've been happy for Intel to build on that. But they didn't. "oneAPI is a cross-industry, open, standards-based unified programming model..." I'm sure they'd be happy for AMD to build on that. But they won't. I think they'll both push their own APIs as the portable standard, but they can't rely on their competitors to contribute. Intel has much more developer grunt and a much more confident start, though they're a latecomer to GPUs.
  - roenxi 5y ago
    Are ROCm and HIP considered any good? I've long since given up trying to figure out what ROCm is and what "installing it" means but I suppose it might be time for another attempt. I see PyTorch supports it now.
    - incrudible 5y ago
      > Are ROCm and HIP considered any good? I don't even care - yet. AMD hardware support has been criminal. Maybe in a few years we can talk about a parole hearing, then another year of probation, then we can talk about reintegration into society.
    - iforgotpassword 5y ago
      I don't. Imo it's still a clusterduck. Issues with modern kernels. Pull requests by volunteers that fix these issues go ignored for months. Like GP said, before the ryzen launch I could see why software is in such a bad state, but today there is no excuse for being that understaffed. Also their hardware is notoriously buggy. PCIe passthrough especially, google the PCI reset bug if you wanna know more. There is a project called vendor reset on github that reverse engineered the issues and works around them. The author is sure the issue can be fixed by a firmware update to those cards, but although initially AMD engineers showed interest, further attempts at coordinating proper fixes with them failed. Requests for documentation of affected cards were denied. Compare to Intel where you can freely download all the documentation about their GPUs, with registers, internal state, everything you'd need to write a driver from scratch. People want to fix AMD's shit for free but they don't want that. We recently had calls with NVIDIA, AMD and Intel regarding their enterprise gpu offerings. NVIDIA and Intel were quick to respond and offer a meeting, AMD took forever. Followup questions, even very technical were answered within two days by Intel with concise to the point answers, no bullshit. With AMD they bounced around for two weeks until we got somewhat useful answers. I really hate NVIDIA, it's a horrible, greedy company with a shitty attitude. I was excited about ryzen. I'm almost an AMD fan boy in the desktop space. I like competition, when the underdog rises from the ashes. But oh boy, AMD GPUs in the server/enterprise space a a clustersuck; buggy hardware, shitty drivers, clueless salesreps. You really have no choice but NVIDIA if you don't want to hire an expert working in getting these cards to work with anything more advanced than having them encode video in hardware or something. We really hope Intel will deliver.
xbmcuser 5y ago
AMD didn't have the money to spend on software as much as Nvidia and intel were able to now that they do they seem to be investing heavily into software. Xilinx acquisition should also help with that.

by mastax 5y ago

AnthonyMouse 5y ago

They should really get together with Intel on an open standard, now that Intel is doing real GPUs. They both have a shared interest in people not being stuck on proprietary Nvidia interfaces.

WithinReason 5y ago
Currently Vulkan Compute seems to be the most general compute platform.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
xvilka 5y ago
The only hope for opensource only if NVIDIA as a company ceases to exist - go bankrupt, for example. They are inherently hostile to FOSS and will never change (they didn't change in last decades, why they would in the future).
- AnthonyMouse 5y ago
  AMD and Intel benefit from having the same open source interface to their GPUs even if Nvidia doesn't use it, because it doubles the amount of target hardware for developers. Also remember that AMD and Intel both make discrete GPUs and iGPUs but AMD has much more share in discrete GPUs and Intel has much more share in iGPUs, so this helps them both. And then if either of them managed to hit one out of the park on the hardware side it would benefit both. A really interesting possibility there is to put a strong GPU in a HEDT CPU socket with a lot of memory channels to feed it, because then it shares a memory controller with the CPU and doesn't have to copy over PCIe. That could drive demand, and Nvidia can't do that on a PC without an x86 license but AMD and Intel both can.
- roenxi 5y ago
  They may literally be the last holdout among the hardware manufacturers. 15 years ago nearly every vendor was the same. They've all caved over time - can't fight OSS forever.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    Except they all end up going shareware like model where the FOSS alone is useless without the proprietary magic dust.
    - AnthonyMouse 5y ago
      Are you trying to claim that e.g. the AMD open source drivers can't be usefully improved by the community?
      - pjmlp 5y ago
        Yes, unless the community is now expert in GPU firmware and hardware design.
scoopertrooper 5y ago
I don't see it happening. AMD like Nvidia want to keep their big corporate clients locked into their ecosystem. If Intel were clever like a fox, they'd invest heavily in making oneAPI work well on both Nvidia and AMD platforms. As a new market entrant they have nothing to lose, but everything to gain by luring companies into a vendor agnostic solution. They've already starting doing this to a degree, but only in partnership with some university. This should be one of their major KPIs, they've got plenty of cash laying about. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=oneAPI-AMD-Radeon-GPUs https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=oneAPI-A...
- AnthonyMouse 5y ago
  AMD's biggest problem right now is overcoming Nvidia's inertia for compute. This is the classic case where open standards happen. Everybody but the incumbent joins in, then all of them put together is a large enough target to attract developers. Then the open standard and the proprietary one coexist as long as any of the vendors implementing the open standard is competitive, but if the vendor with the proprietary standard stumbles in any way, developers abandon them. Hardware vendors don't really need lock in. People buy your hardware again because you make it faster every year. And if your hardware stops being competitive then the lock in won't save you.
  - touisteur 5y ago
    But wasn't it already tried with OpenCL... And quite failed to just do that? For now, in parallel to efforts to reach parity to cuda or something, I'd rather have them optimize the mother out of the necessary libraries (tensor basic blocks, basically reaching cudnn/tensorrt-level, crazy limit-of-hardware BLAS stuff, and most of the API landscape)... 47tflops that I can't use because I have to reimplement and optimize the basics isn't that interesting, except for supercompute.
    - AnthonyMouse 5y ago
      OpenCL was created by Apple, then Apple abandoned it. AMD picked it up, but at the time AMD didn't have competitive hardware and therefore didn't have the resources to make it good, and Intel wasn't in the GPU game then. Now AMD has money and Intel has even more money and they could certainly produce a competitive solution together if they tried.
mastax 5y ago
Well ROCm and HIP are "open" and run on AMD and Nvidia GPUs. I'm sure AMD would've been happy for Intel to build on that. But they didn't. "oneAPI is a cross-industry, open, standards-based unified programming model..." I'm sure they'd be happy for AMD to build on that. But they won't. I think they'll both push their own APIs as the portable standard, but they can't rely on their competitors to contribute. Intel has much more developer grunt and a much more confident start, though they're a latecomer to GPUs.
- roenxi 5y ago
  Are ROCm and HIP considered any good? I've long since given up trying to figure out what ROCm is and what "installing it" means but I suppose it might be time for another attempt. I see PyTorch supports it now.
  - incrudible 5y ago
    > Are ROCm and HIP considered any good? I don't even care - yet. AMD hardware support has been criminal. Maybe in a few years we can talk about a parole hearing, then another year of probation, then we can talk about reintegration into society.
  - iforgotpassword 5y ago
    I don't. Imo it's still a clusterduck. Issues with modern kernels. Pull requests by volunteers that fix these issues go ignored for months. Like GP said, before the ryzen launch I could see why software is in such a bad state, but today there is no excuse for being that understaffed. Also their hardware is notoriously buggy. PCIe passthrough especially, google the PCI reset bug if you wanna know more. There is a project called vendor reset on github that reverse engineered the issues and works around them. The author is sure the issue can be fixed by a firmware update to those cards, but although initially AMD engineers showed interest, further attempts at coordinating proper fixes with them failed. Requests for documentation of affected cards were denied. Compare to Intel where you can freely download all the documentation about their GPUs, with registers, internal state, everything you'd need to write a driver from scratch. People want to fix AMD's shit for free but they don't want that. We recently had calls with NVIDIA, AMD and Intel regarding their enterprise gpu offerings. NVIDIA and Intel were quick to respond and offer a meeting, AMD took forever. Followup questions, even very technical were answered within two days by Intel with concise to the point answers, no bullshit. With AMD they bounced around for two weeks until we got somewhat useful answers. I really hate NVIDIA, it's a horrible, greedy company with a shitty attitude. I was excited about ryzen. I'm almost an AMD fan boy in the desktop space. I like competition, when the underdog rises from the ashes. But oh boy, AMD GPUs in the server/enterprise space a a clustersuck; buggy hardware, shitty drivers, clueless salesreps. You really have no choice but NVIDIA if you don't want to hire an expert working in getting these cards to work with anything more advanced than having them encode video in hardware or something. We really hope Intel will deliver.

xbmcuser 5y ago

AMD didn't have the money to spend on software as much as Nvidia and intel were able to now that they do they seem to be investing heavily into software. Xilinx acquisition should also help with that.