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AMD has "tensor cores" (called something different but they're very similar matrix accelerator units) in CDNA. RNDA3 is supposed to have "something", it has th

by paulmd 4y ago

AMD has "tensor cores" (called something different but they're very similar matrix accelerator units) in CDNA. RNDA3 is supposed to have "something", it has the same instruction as CDNA, it's supposed to be less than a full unit but presumably there wouldn't be an instruction without some level of hardware acceleration either. The bigger problem is that AMD doesn't want to pay to keep up on the software side... at the end of the day when you're coming from behind you just have to pay someone to port key pieces of software to your platform. AMD has really coasted for a long time on letting the open-source community do their work for them, but that's not going to fly with things like PyTorch or other key pieces of software... if AMD wants the sales and the adoption of their hardware, it's just going to have to pay someone to write the software, so that people who want to do research and not PyTorch maintenance can justify buying the hardware. I am not particularly interested in the perceived historical justifications for the current situation, it doesn't matter to the businesses who might be AMD's customers. And actually in many ways they've gotten even shakier recently, what with dropping RDNA support from their NN/ML package. As a cold statement of reality, this is table stakes going forward and if AMD doesn't want to do it they won't get the sales. It's not even just PyTorch either, it's... everything. AMD is just coming from a million miles behind on the software, and "welp just write it yourself if you want to use our hardware" is not an attitude that is conductive to selling hardware.

rektide 4y ago
Which libraries is AMD dropping RDNA support in? That seems very inadvised. Nvidia's libraries being usable by a broad range of developers on a wide range of hardware is critical to their wide adoption. AMD cannot expect to have real adoption if only their fancy enterprise grade unobtanium cards support ML systems. AMD needs a wide & engaged community trying to yse their stuff to figure out what software/drivers they simply have to build.
- paulmd 4y ago
  Talking specifically about ROCm here, their ML package. God this is such a tough paragraph to write accurately. AMD themselves have conflicting information all over their docs and repos and half of it is not even marked as "outdated"... https://docs.amd.com/bundle/ROCm-Getting-Started-Guide-v5.2.3 https://docs.amd.com/bundle/ROCm-Getting-Started-Guide-v5.2.... The official supported platforms at this point are RDNA2 (pro), GFX9 (pro), and CDNA. Consumer versions of these (RDNA2, Radeon VII, and Vega 56/64) probably work, although Vega 56/64 are an older version with much less hardware support as well. RDNA2 support is also "partial" and ymmv, things are often broken even on supported cards. If RDNA2 works, then RDNA1 may work, but again, mega ymmv, things may not even be great with RDNA2 yet. The "hardware guide" link talks about supporting Vega 10 (that's V56/64) and says GFX8 (Polaris) and GFX7 (Hawaii) are supported... but that doc is tagged 5.0 and 5.1 was the release that dropped the other stuff. So I'd say Vega 64/56 chips are probably broken at this point, on the current builds. Up until earlier this year though, it was unsupported on any consumer card except Radeon VII. They dropped Hawaii/Polaris/Vega support about 6 months before they started adding partial RDNA2 support back. And in contrast... NVIDIA's shit runs on everything, going back 10 years or more. At least to Kepler, if not Fermi or Tesla uarch (GTX 8800 series). It may not run great, but CUDA is CUDA, feature support has been a nearly forward ratchet, and they've had PTX to provide a rosetta stone in between the various architectural changes. I mean... at the end of the day the hardware hasn't changed that much, surely you can provide a shader fallback (which is required anyway since RDNA2 doesn't have tensor acceleration). I don't get what the deal is tbh. https://www.techpowerup.com/288864/amd-rocm-4-5-drops-polaris-architecture-support https://www.techpowerup.com/288864/amd-rocm-4-5-drops-polari... https://www.phoronix.com/news/Radeon-ROCm-5.1 https://www.phoronix.com/news/Radeon-ROCm-5.1
  - rektide 4y ago
    Yeah there was unbelievably terrible lag getting Polaris/RDNA2 generation going. It was jaw droppingly slow to happen! But it did finally happen. I was afraid all RDNA[n] were going fully unsupported, which felt like a sure invitation of death. Sounds like there's still a lot of uncertainty, but it also doesnt sound as bad as I'd first feared; it seems like RDNA2+ could probably hopefully possibly work decent well. As opposed to, you have to buy unobtanium hard to find stupidly expensive cards. Seems like it's still playing out, & we dont know what RDNA2+ is good for yet, but it doesnt sound like the walk towards certain death this originally sounded like. Thanks for the intense hard to develop reply. A lot of in-flight status updates to gather. Appreciated. Really should be better established, what AMD is shooting for & what we can expect.

by paulmd 4y ago

rektide 4y ago

Which libraries is AMD dropping RDNA support in? That seems very inadvised. Nvidia's libraries being usable by a broad range of developers on a wide range of hardware is critical to their wide adoption. AMD cannot expect to have real adoption if only their fancy enterprise grade unobtanium cards support ML systems. AMD needs a wide & engaged community trying to yse their stuff to figure out what software/drivers they simply have to build.

paulmd 4y ago
Talking specifically about ROCm here, their ML package. God this is such a tough paragraph to write accurately. AMD themselves have conflicting information all over their docs and repos and half of it is not even marked as "outdated"... https://docs.amd.com/bundle/ROCm-Getting-Started-Guide-v5.2.3 https://docs.amd.com/bundle/ROCm-Getting-Started-Guide-v5.2.... The official supported platforms at this point are RDNA2 (pro), GFX9 (pro), and CDNA. Consumer versions of these (RDNA2, Radeon VII, and Vega 56/64) probably work, although Vega 56/64 are an older version with much less hardware support as well. RDNA2 support is also "partial" and ymmv, things are often broken even on supported cards. If RDNA2 works, then RDNA1 may work, but again, mega ymmv, things may not even be great with RDNA2 yet. The "hardware guide" link talks about supporting Vega 10 (that's V56/64) and says GFX8 (Polaris) and GFX7 (Hawaii) are supported... but that doc is tagged 5.0 and 5.1 was the release that dropped the other stuff. So I'd say Vega 64/56 chips are probably broken at this point, on the current builds. Up until earlier this year though, it was unsupported on any consumer card except Radeon VII. They dropped Hawaii/Polaris/Vega support about 6 months before they started adding partial RDNA2 support back. And in contrast... NVIDIA's shit runs on everything, going back 10 years or more. At least to Kepler, if not Fermi or Tesla uarch (GTX 8800 series). It may not run great, but CUDA is CUDA, feature support has been a nearly forward ratchet, and they've had PTX to provide a rosetta stone in between the various architectural changes. I mean... at the end of the day the hardware hasn't changed that much, surely you can provide a shader fallback (which is required anyway since RDNA2 doesn't have tensor acceleration). I don't get what the deal is tbh. https://www.techpowerup.com/288864/amd-rocm-4-5-drops-polaris-architecture-support https://www.techpowerup.com/288864/amd-rocm-4-5-drops-polari... https://www.phoronix.com/news/Radeon-ROCm-5.1 https://www.phoronix.com/news/Radeon-ROCm-5.1
- rektide 4y ago
  Yeah there was unbelievably terrible lag getting Polaris/RDNA2 generation going. It was jaw droppingly slow to happen! But it did finally happen. I was afraid all RDNA[n] were going fully unsupported, which felt like a sure invitation of death. Sounds like there's still a lot of uncertainty, but it also doesnt sound as bad as I'd first feared; it seems like RDNA2+ could probably hopefully possibly work decent well. As opposed to, you have to buy unobtanium hard to find stupidly expensive cards. Seems like it's still playing out, & we dont know what RDNA2+ is good for yet, but it doesnt sound like the walk towards certain death this originally sounded like. Thanks for the intense hard to develop reply. A lot of in-flight status updates to gather. Appreciated. Really should be better established, what AMD is shooting for & what we can expect.