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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-i

by 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.
  - incrudible 5y ago
    > I really hate NVIDIA, it's a horrible, greedy company with a shitty attitude. NVIDIA is honest about what they are, whereas AMD brands itself as the puppy underdog that supports "open platforms" in order to sell you a product that doesn't work, but that you can "fix yourself". How's that for attitude?
  - tim-- 5y ago
    To be fair, many of the newer cards don't have any reset issues, and work perfectly fine with pass thru. The new AMD graphics cards have drivers that ship as part of the Linux driver, and work perfectly fine. Better than Nvidia under a number of circumstances (where is Nvidia with Wayland support?) Hopefully rocm 5 will bring support for RDNA 2 cards, but I said that about rocm 4 too. https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/issues/1180#issuecomment-942101147 https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/issues/1180#issuec... 6000-series cards work under WSL with Windows using DirectML, so it can't be too far away. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/ai/directml/gpu-tensorflow-wsl https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/ai/directml/gpu-ten...
    - tambre 5y ago
      > where is Nvidia with Wayland support? They released drivers at the end of October that support GBM. Since XWayland 21.1.3 hardware acceleration for X should work too. I haven't tried myself though, since Nouveau is enough for my basic desktop usage.

by mastax 5y ago

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.
- incrudible 5y ago
  > I really hate NVIDIA, it's a horrible, greedy company with a shitty attitude. NVIDIA is honest about what they are, whereas AMD brands itself as the puppy underdog that supports "open platforms" in order to sell you a product that doesn't work, but that you can "fix yourself". How's that for attitude?
- tim-- 5y ago
  To be fair, many of the newer cards don't have any reset issues, and work perfectly fine with pass thru. The new AMD graphics cards have drivers that ship as part of the Linux driver, and work perfectly fine. Better than Nvidia under a number of circumstances (where is Nvidia with Wayland support?) Hopefully rocm 5 will bring support for RDNA 2 cards, but I said that about rocm 4 too. https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/issues/1180#issuecomment-942101147 https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/issues/1180#issuec... 6000-series cards work under WSL with Windows using DirectML, so it can't be too far away. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/ai/directml/gpu-tensorflow-wsl https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/ai/directml/gpu-ten...
  - tambre 5y ago
    > where is Nvidia with Wayland support? They released drivers at the end of October that support GBM. Since XWayland 21.1.3 hardware acceleration for X should work too. I haven't tried myself though, since Nouveau is enough for my basic desktop usage.