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It's more than just that: for the money, their consumer GPUs don't compete in compute tasks (especially inference/training) and their Linux compute drivers are

by blihp 3y ago

It's more than just that: for the money, their consumer GPUs don't compete in compute tasks (especially inference/training) and their Linux compute drivers are a pile of steaming garbage on consumer hardware. It's really interesting/depressing to watch as they've done a nice job of supplying good open source graphics drivers. They really seem to be lacking something at a leadership level in terms of understanding GPU compute outside of specific enterprise/scientific use cases.

nr2x 3y ago
Whereas NVIDIA is basically just “we’re an AI company now”.
- ChuckNorris89 3y ago
  No, they've become a general compute company selling pickaxes for whatever the current goldrush tends to be. Now it's AI, yesterday it was crypo-currencies, the day before is was PC games and video editing. They've been trying to push their GPUs as CPU alternatives everywhere especially in the datacenters where their presence grew since the acquisition of Mellanox. They also tried to acquire ARM, to squeeze both Intel and AMD out of the CPU market completely. I hate what they've done to the PC gamers, but as a company trying to grow in more markets and make even more money, they've executed insanely well strategically, leaps ahead of AMD.
  - nr2x 3y ago
    I mean their public messaging is pure AI now, but I also think they have been very smart about running the right direction since Alexnet came out and showed what you could do with a GPU.
bushbaba 3y ago
I'd think their leadership is aware. Likely they are just picking their battles to be in strategic areas where they'll capture the most revenue to resource-investment. AMD has a lot of catching up to do and they cannot compete on all fronts at once.
- blagie 3y ago
  You'd think so, but they're not acting like it. Usually when I see this, it symptomatic of major organizational dysfunction of some type. One time, I was in a firm where 100% of the energy was spent on quarterly objectives for some executive bonus pay structure. No one cared if the organization lived or died, since there were always other jobs. Nothing AMD is doing in the GPU space is aligned with long-term survival or competitiveness.
roenxi 3y ago
I think that is underselling the big, slow push of their heterogeneous compute architecture. I don't understand the things, but as far as I can read it they've got 3.6GFLOP [0] GPU on those things as of 2022. Nvidia are effortlessly crushing AMD right now and as far as I can tell it is because they implemented a bunch of BLAS functions on the GPU (it is weirdly difficult to get a good tutorial on how to do matrix multiplication on an AMD GPU; every so often I look for one and have I think literally never found an example). But strategically, AMDs approach to GPU-CPU memory fusion is probably going to be the technically stronger approach. Assuming it works. In hindsight they should have focused on libraries to let people use their GPU, but big picture they clearly understand how important it is to embrace general purpose compute and are treating it as a high priority. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_APU#Feature_overview https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_APU#Feature_overview
- aseipp 3y ago
  > But strategically, AMDs approach to GPU-CPU memory fusion is probably going to be the technically stronger approach. Assuming it works. I mean if anything, Nvidia is already there and crushing it too. CUDA has a unified memory model on Linux today and has for years, so if you have a proper pointer created by cudaMallocManaged, it can be used transparently in both GPU and CPU code without cudaMemcpy. And on the Grace Hopper chip, the open-source driver supports heterogeneous memory management, giving both the CPU and GPU unified, coherent memory across the CPU and GPU even though they have completely separate and isolated memory chips; 512GB LPDDR5X versus 96GB HBM3. This coherency is granular down to the cache line, too. So now every memory allocator and every system call and pointer can be passed directly to the GPU or from GPU to CPU freely. And the open source driver supports HMM on normal x86_64/aarch64 Linux with consumer-level GPUs today, btw, but it's not as fast or granular. And then there are platforms like Jetson which have used single memory pools for a while; Orin uses a single shared bank of LPDDR5X chips for both CPU and GPU and will get HMM at some point in the future too I assume, though it uses a different driver. Honestly the only place AMD seems to be winning in terms of compute is on large, bespoke contracts and features like unlocked FP64 performance with parts that are unobtanium and software stacks that have dedicated support engineers. Even Intel seems to be putting up more of a direct fight against Nvidia with oneAPI...

by blihp 3y ago

nr2x 3y ago

Whereas NVIDIA is basically just “we’re an AI company now”.

ChuckNorris89 3y ago
No, they've become a general compute company selling pickaxes for whatever the current goldrush tends to be. Now it's AI, yesterday it was crypo-currencies, the day before is was PC games and video editing. They've been trying to push their GPUs as CPU alternatives everywhere especially in the datacenters where their presence grew since the acquisition of Mellanox. They also tried to acquire ARM, to squeeze both Intel and AMD out of the CPU market completely. I hate what they've done to the PC gamers, but as a company trying to grow in more markets and make even more money, they've executed insanely well strategically, leaps ahead of AMD.
- nr2x 3y ago
  I mean their public messaging is pure AI now, but I also think they have been very smart about running the right direction since Alexnet came out and showed what you could do with a GPU.

bushbaba 3y ago

I'd think their leadership is aware. Likely they are just picking their battles to be in strategic areas where they'll capture the most revenue to resource-investment. AMD has a lot of catching up to do and they cannot compete on all fronts at once.

blagie 3y ago
You'd think so, but they're not acting like it. Usually when I see this, it symptomatic of major organizational dysfunction of some type. One time, I was in a firm where 100% of the energy was spent on quarterly objectives for some executive bonus pay structure. No one cared if the organization lived or died, since there were always other jobs. Nothing AMD is doing in the GPU space is aligned with long-term survival or competitiveness.

roenxi 3y ago

I think that is underselling the big, slow push of their heterogeneous compute architecture. I don't understand the things, but as far as I can read it they've got 3.6GFLOP [0] GPU on those things as of 2022. Nvidia are effortlessly crushing AMD right now and as far as I can tell it is because they implemented a bunch of BLAS functions on the GPU (it is weirdly difficult to get a good tutorial on how to do matrix multiplication on an AMD GPU; every so often I look for one and have I think literally never found an example). But strategically, AMDs approach to GPU-CPU memory fusion is probably going to be the technically stronger approach. Assuming it works. In hindsight they should have focused on libraries to let people use their GPU, but big picture they clearly understand how important it is to embrace general purpose compute and are treating it as a high priority. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_APU#Feature_overview https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_APU#Feature_overview

aseipp 3y ago
> But strategically, AMDs approach to GPU-CPU memory fusion is probably going to be the technically stronger approach. Assuming it works. I mean if anything, Nvidia is already there and crushing it too. CUDA has a unified memory model on Linux today and has for years, so if you have a proper pointer created by cudaMallocManaged, it can be used transparently in both GPU and CPU code without cudaMemcpy. And on the Grace Hopper chip, the open-source driver supports heterogeneous memory management, giving both the CPU and GPU unified, coherent memory across the CPU and GPU even though they have completely separate and isolated memory chips; 512GB LPDDR5X versus 96GB HBM3. This coherency is granular down to the cache line, too. So now every memory allocator and every system call and pointer can be passed directly to the GPU or from GPU to CPU freely. And the open source driver supports HMM on normal x86_64/aarch64 Linux with consumer-level GPUs today, btw, but it's not as fast or granular. And then there are platforms like Jetson which have used single memory pools for a while; Orin uses a single shared bank of LPDDR5X chips for both CPU and GPU and will get HMM at some point in the future too I assume, though it uses a different driver. Honestly the only place AMD seems to be winning in terms of compute is on large, bespoke contracts and features like unlocked FP64 performance with parts that are unobtanium and software stacks that have dedicated support engineers. Even Intel seems to be putting up more of a direct fight against Nvidia with oneAPI...