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It's something that has very little uptake because it's not supported on mainline GPUs? I want to use it for compute on something like a rx 6800 and to my know

It's something that has very little uptake because it's not supported on mainline GPUs? I want to use it for compute on something like a rx 6800 and to my knowledge can't

rjzzleep 5y ago
I was going to post exactly the same. And if you look at the github issues of their project you will see that very often it looks outsourced support teams comment on these issues with the standard: we will discuss this internally and get back to you kind of response that enterprises twitter support usually gives. Not really what you expect from quality engineering. At the end of the day these kind of companies don't understand the value of development and engineering clients as customers. It's unfortunate really. EDIT: here's an example: ROCmSupport commented on Feb 22 • Hi @powderluv Thanks for reaching us. I can not comment on RDNA2 support right now. We are working on adding a few more new hardware into ROCm environment. Please stay tuned via our documentation. Thank you. @ROCmSupport ROCmSupport closed this on Feb 22 https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/issues/1390#issuecomment-783128924 https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/issues/1390#issuec...
- nicolaslem 5y ago
  On the other hand AMD has a fraction of the engineering resources Intel and Nvidia have. They need to make some choice and looking back at the last few years it seems that their choice to focus their efforts on hardware and gaming paid off.
  - to11mtm 5y ago
    ATI/AMD has always had finicky drivers and engineering decisions IMO. I guess on the plus side they at least have a more open driver than NVidia (AFAIK nouveau doesn't get any support from them, at least AMD tries to maintain their open source driver on some level.) And yet, every time I've tried an ATI/AMD Card, the driver experience even in windows has been pretty off-putting, and while I suppose we are finally at a point where one is less likely to be impacted by their issues with 768p overscan on TVs, I wonder what zany quirk they'll come up with next.
    - ahartmetz 5y ago
      > AMD tries to maintain their open source driver on some level. I think you somehow mistyped "AMD has open source drivers of absofuckinglutely excellent quality supporting hardware of the last ten years or so". No really, they are great. For graphics, that is.
  - dagmx 5y ago
    On the flip side, I think that they haven't focused on a compelling compute story means that anyone doing anything other than pure gaming is better served by an Nvidia card.
    - jagger27 5y ago
      This is why I'm excited about Intel getting into the market.
    - edgyquant 5y ago
      Yeah I bought an AMD card a few years when they released the new architecture to support them. I ended up grabbing an nvidia card because I don’t play many games but I want to be able to run tensorflow etc but after a year AMD still had little support for any machine learning.
- dylan604 5y ago
  Sounds like a race from support staff to see how many tickets they can close to make themselves look good for the PM at the next review
- jacquesm 5y ago
  That's not a valid reason to close a ticket. You close a ticket because the matter is resolved. We work with an internal rule with respect to comments on documents: if you open it the default is that you are going to be the one to close it when you are satisfied your concerns have been addressed. This sometimes gets overruled but that definitely isn't the norm.
sorenjan 5y ago
There's also no Windows support, so you cant use it to make consumer programs, or on your gaming rig without dual boot. It's made for data centers with bespoke software, not really for distribution.
dogma1138 5y ago
It’s worst because it has no intermediate state there is no guarantee for forward compatibility (backward compatibility is also kinda broken). Shipping anything with HIP will be a pain. With CUDA you simply target a specific CUDA version and there is full forward and backwards compatibility on any hardware that supports that version.
bubblethink 5y ago
AMD is much smaller in comparison, and their main focus with ROCM is to get pytorch and tensorflow to work with enterprise GPUs. Everything else is long tail in terms of scale.
- vardump 5y ago
  Sadly this is why I (and many others) keep begrudgingly choosing Nvidia cards instead. Once the developers are familiar with CUDA, what are the chances you'd choose ROCm for deployment? Yeah, not great. Consumer cards' ROCm support is strategic.
- enos_feedler 5y ago
  If this is the goal they are better off working with Google on MLIR since they are also focusing on hw acceleration of pytorch and tensorflow code
- Gigachad 5y ago
  This doesn't mean anything to potential customers. If I was in the market for GPU compute, nvidia is the only real option. AMD has had some PR person commenting on github that they have "big news coming very soon" for navi users but it's been over a year now and still no news.
slavik81 5y ago
It's not officially supported, but I think it would work if you installed the official ROCm 4.5 packages. The RX 6800 is listed as gfx1030 [1], which has been shipping in most libraries since ROCm 4.2. I've heard there were a few bugs, but I've been using it for months without encountering any issues myself. (I work for AMD on ROCm. All opinions are my own.) [1]: https://llvm.org/docs/AMDGPUUsage.html#processors https://llvm.org/docs/AMDGPUUsage.html#processors
- techdragon 5y ago
  Can you please emphasise to your management chain how important the need for less terrible support and developer relations vis GitHub is. They can close support questions but basically anything in these repos gets closed as fast as possible even feature requests and other things that should be left open. I doubt they have the funding to meaningfully impact the overall hardware and software support matrix but if they could just make the GitHub repo feel less like I’m back in my days working at a call centre raising tickets to a second level support team in a foreign country who’s only business KPI was tickets closed per day.
  - slavik81 5y ago
    I agree with you. The communication between AMD and the community has been less than ideal. I think it's worth noting, though, it's not always as bad as the example in the sibling comment. The RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm repo catches a lot of questions about big features and the future direction of the project. Those are particularly difficult to answer as an engineer. As much as I'd like to, I can't make a product announcement in a GitHub issue. If you have a specific technical problem and you open an issue on the repo for the corresponding component, you'll probably have a better experience. Some teams are more responsive than others, but that will at least maximize your odds of successful resolution.
zwaps 5y ago
AMD's support - not just for new or old GPUs, but in terms of all sorts of compatibility changes, usability parity and regressions is staggeringly bad. Given that compute is important, and many people use their GPUs for compute of some sort, I simply can not understand how that part is so poorly executed on the part of AMD that, in terms of actual application, you might call it entirely absent. I mean, this is a company that produces compute cards, which supposedly someone in the world must buy and use... but who? Why? I have never seen anyone, and for good reason. And it seems like AMD just... doesn't care? Like, it's just not a part of their organizational strategy... Compute is on the powerpoint slides, but... no one (can) use it? It's been going on for years now and I don't get it.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  Especially not with NVidia leaving the front door wide open with their licensing terms and other oversights. But as long as AMD doesn't care enough NVidia will grow and become more and more entrenched. It would take a small miracle to displace them by now.
a_bonobo 5y ago
I tink the main workhorse supercomputer GPUs are not out yet. They announced the MI200 GPU with 128GB of memory, two supercomputers (Setonix, Frontier) are suppose to include them but both will only be launched next year https://www.tomshardware.com/news/setonix-supercomputer-mi200-gpu https://www.tomshardware.com/news/setonix-supercomputer-mi20...
- touisteur 5y ago
  Also announced very recently the MI250 with 47 FP32 TFLOPS? Just the morning before the GTC keynote? NVIDIA Lovelace is supposed to be in 2022 (I think?) so it's a good time to ship GPGPU HW but wait and see if AMD can ship them, at what prices, and if their library ecosystem (not even thinking rocm or hip... But even blas, miopen would be enough to start...) has full optimized support.

It's something that has very little uptake because it's not supported on mainline GPUs? I want to use it for compute on something like a rx 6800 and to my knowledge can't

rjzzleep 5y ago

I was going to post exactly the same. And if you look at the github issues of their project you will see that very often it looks outsourced support teams comment on these issues with the standard: we will discuss this internally and get back to you kind of response that enterprises twitter support usually gives. Not really what you expect from quality engineering. At the end of the day these kind of companies don't understand the value of development and engineering clients as customers. It's unfortunate really. EDIT: here's an example: ROCmSupport commented on Feb 22 • Hi @powderluv Thanks for reaching us. I can not comment on RDNA2 support right now. We are working on adding a few more new hardware into ROCm environment. Please stay tuned via our documentation. Thank you. @ROCmSupport ROCmSupport closed this on Feb 22 https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/issues/1390#issuecomment-783128924 https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/issues/1390#issuec...

nicolaslem 5y ago
On the other hand AMD has a fraction of the engineering resources Intel and Nvidia have. They need to make some choice and looking back at the last few years it seems that their choice to focus their efforts on hardware and gaming paid off.
- to11mtm 5y ago
  ATI/AMD has always had finicky drivers and engineering decisions IMO. I guess on the plus side they at least have a more open driver than NVidia (AFAIK nouveau doesn't get any support from them, at least AMD tries to maintain their open source driver on some level.) And yet, every time I've tried an ATI/AMD Card, the driver experience even in windows has been pretty off-putting, and while I suppose we are finally at a point where one is less likely to be impacted by their issues with 768p overscan on TVs, I wonder what zany quirk they'll come up with next.
  - ahartmetz 5y ago
    > AMD tries to maintain their open source driver on some level. I think you somehow mistyped "AMD has open source drivers of absofuckinglutely excellent quality supporting hardware of the last ten years or so". No really, they are great. For graphics, that is.
- dagmx 5y ago
  On the flip side, I think that they haven't focused on a compelling compute story means that anyone doing anything other than pure gaming is better served by an Nvidia card.
  - jagger27 5y ago
    This is why I'm excited about Intel getting into the market.
  - edgyquant 5y ago
    Yeah I bought an AMD card a few years when they released the new architecture to support them. I ended up grabbing an nvidia card because I don’t play many games but I want to be able to run tensorflow etc but after a year AMD still had little support for any machine learning.
dylan604 5y ago
Sounds like a race from support staff to see how many tickets they can close to make themselves look good for the PM at the next review
jacquesm 5y ago
That's not a valid reason to close a ticket. You close a ticket because the matter is resolved. We work with an internal rule with respect to comments on documents: if you open it the default is that you are going to be the one to close it when you are satisfied your concerns have been addressed. This sometimes gets overruled but that definitely isn't the norm.

sorenjan 5y ago

There's also no Windows support, so you cant use it to make consumer programs, or on your gaming rig without dual boot. It's made for data centers with bespoke software, not really for distribution.

dogma1138 5y ago

It’s worst because it has no intermediate state there is no guarantee for forward compatibility (backward compatibility is also kinda broken). Shipping anything with HIP will be a pain. With CUDA you simply target a specific CUDA version and there is full forward and backwards compatibility on any hardware that supports that version.

bubblethink 5y ago

AMD is much smaller in comparison, and their main focus with ROCM is to get pytorch and tensorflow to work with enterprise GPUs. Everything else is long tail in terms of scale.

vardump 5y ago
Sadly this is why I (and many others) keep begrudgingly choosing Nvidia cards instead. Once the developers are familiar with CUDA, what are the chances you'd choose ROCm for deployment? Yeah, not great. Consumer cards' ROCm support is strategic.
enos_feedler 5y ago
If this is the goal they are better off working with Google on MLIR since they are also focusing on hw acceleration of pytorch and tensorflow code
Gigachad 5y ago
This doesn't mean anything to potential customers. If I was in the market for GPU compute, nvidia is the only real option. AMD has had some PR person commenting on github that they have "big news coming very soon" for navi users but it's been over a year now and still no news.

slavik81 5y ago

It's not officially supported, but I think it would work if you installed the official ROCm 4.5 packages. The RX 6800 is listed as gfx1030 [1], which has been shipping in most libraries since ROCm 4.2. I've heard there were a few bugs, but I've been using it for months without encountering any issues myself. (I work for AMD on ROCm. All opinions are my own.) [1]: https://llvm.org/docs/AMDGPUUsage.html#processors https://llvm.org/docs/AMDGPUUsage.html#processors

techdragon 5y ago
Can you please emphasise to your management chain how important the need for less terrible support and developer relations vis GitHub is. They can close support questions but basically anything in these repos gets closed as fast as possible even feature requests and other things that should be left open. I doubt they have the funding to meaningfully impact the overall hardware and software support matrix but if they could just make the GitHub repo feel less like I’m back in my days working at a call centre raising tickets to a second level support team in a foreign country who’s only business KPI was tickets closed per day.
- slavik81 5y ago
  I agree with you. The communication between AMD and the community has been less than ideal. I think it's worth noting, though, it's not always as bad as the example in the sibling comment. The RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm repo catches a lot of questions about big features and the future direction of the project. Those are particularly difficult to answer as an engineer. As much as I'd like to, I can't make a product announcement in a GitHub issue. If you have a specific technical problem and you open an issue on the repo for the corresponding component, you'll probably have a better experience. Some teams are more responsive than others, but that will at least maximize your odds of successful resolution.

zwaps 5y ago

AMD's support - not just for new or old GPUs, but in terms of all sorts of compatibility changes, usability parity and regressions is staggeringly bad. Given that compute is important, and many people use their GPUs for compute of some sort, I simply can not understand how that part is so poorly executed on the part of AMD that, in terms of actual application, you might call it entirely absent. I mean, this is a company that produces compute cards, which supposedly someone in the world must buy and use... but who? Why? I have never seen anyone, and for good reason. And it seems like AMD just... doesn't care? Like, it's just not a part of their organizational strategy... Compute is on the powerpoint slides, but... no one (can) use it? It's been going on for years now and I don't get it.

jacquesm 5y ago
Especially not with NVidia leaving the front door wide open with their licensing terms and other oversights. But as long as AMD doesn't care enough NVidia will grow and become more and more entrenched. It would take a small miracle to displace them by now.

a_bonobo 5y ago

I tink the main workhorse supercomputer GPUs are not out yet. They announced the MI200 GPU with 128GB of memory, two supercomputers (Setonix, Frontier) are suppose to include them but both will only be launched next year https://www.tomshardware.com/news/setonix-supercomputer-mi200-gpu https://www.tomshardware.com/news/setonix-supercomputer-mi20...

touisteur 5y ago
Also announced very recently the MI250 with 47 FP32 TFLOPS? Just the morning before the GTC keynote? NVIDIA Lovelace is supposed to be in 2022 (I think?) so it's a good time to ship GPGPU HW but wait and see if AMD can ship them, at what prices, and if their library ecosystem (not even thinking rocm or hip... But even blas, miopen would be enough to start...) has full optimized support.