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This project has been unmaintained for a while. Both Intel and AMD have the opportunity to create some actual competition for NVIDIA in the GPGPU space. Intel,

This project has been unmaintained for a while. Both Intel and AMD have the opportunity to create some actual competition for NVIDIA in the GPGPU space. Intel, at least, I can forgive since they only just entered the market. Why AMD has struggled so hard to get anything going for so long, I don't know...

easythrees 3y ago
AMD has HIP.
- trostaft 3y ago
  Yes, but I don't think its debatable to say that the entire ecosystem is firmly behind NVIDIA's. Usually it comes as a surprise when something does support their framework, whether directly ROCm or even HIP which should be easier.... I shouldn't be surprised that AMD's ecosystem is lagging behind, since their GPU division spent a good decade suffering to be even relevant. Not to mention that NVIDIA has spent a lot of effort on their HPC tools. I don't want this to be too negative towards AMD, they have been steadily growing in this space. Some things do work well, e.g. stable diffusion is totally fine on AMD GPUs. So they seem to be catching up. I just feel a little impatient, especially since their cards are more than powerful enough to be useful. I suppose my point is that the gap in HPC software between NVIDIA and AMD is much larger than the actual capability gap in their hardware, and that's a shame.
  - Eisenstein 3y ago
    Apple was a few months from bankruptcy during most of the 90s competing with IBM and Microsoft, then turned around to become the most profitable company on the planet. It takes a leader and a plan and a lot of talent and the exact right conditions, but industry behemoths get pulled down from the top spot all the time.
    - tracker1 3y ago
      Apple's success is mostly UX and marketing with a walled garden for an application tax. AMD has to actually achieve on the hardware side, not just marketing. Beyond this, AMD has demonstrated that they are, indeed working on closing and pulling ahead. AMD is well ahead of Intel on the server CPU front, they're neck and neck on desktop, with spans ahead in the past few years. And on the GPU side, they've closed a lot of gaps. While I am a little bit of a fan of AMD, there's still work to do. I think AMD really needs to take advantage of their production margins to gain more market share. They also need to get something a bit closer to the 4090 on a performance gpu + entry workstation api/gpgpu workload card. The 7900 XTX is really close, but if they had something with say 32-48gb vram in the sub-2000 space it would really get a lot of the hobbiest and soho types to consider them.
      - elzbardico 3y ago
        Yeah, sure, changing their platform 3 times in the space of some twenty years is just marketing and UX from Apple. They are just a bunch of MBAs. Sometimes I feel like I am reading slashdot.
        AnthonyMouse 3y ago
        The platform changes had very little to do with their success. They switched from PowerPC to Intel because PowerPC was uncompetitive, but that doesn't explain why they did any better than Dell or anyone else using the exact same chips. Then they developed their own chips because Intel was stagnant, but they barely came out before AMD had something competitive and it's not obvious they'd have been in a meaningfully different position had they just used that. Their hardware is good but if all they were selling was Macbooks and iPhones with Windows and Android on them, they wouldn't have anything near their current margins.
        robbiep 3y ago
        You’re not really making sense. If they hadn’t made platform changes they would have never been able to turn into what they are today. I hardly thing that is ‘little to do’. They would likely barely exist. They have ‘achieved product market fit’ as the saying goes. Which requires more than just a sharp UI, as their history shows
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    NV has a huge advantage over AMD: they only do one thing. And that has helped them to relentlessly focus on optimizing that one thing. AMD is fighting on three different fronts at once.
- freedomben 3y ago
  Yeah, but try running ML projects on your AMD card and you'll quickly see that they're an afterthought nearly everywhere, even projects that use PyTorch (which has backend support for AMD). If consumers can't use it, they're going to learn nvidia and experience has shown that people opt for enterprise tech that they're familiar with, and most people get familiar hacking on it locally
moooo99 3y ago
AMD has made several attempts, their most recent effort apparently is the ROCm [0] software platform. There is an official PyTorch distro for Linux that supports ROCm [1] for acceleration. There's also frameworks like tinygrad [2] that (claim) support for all sorts of accelerators. Thats as far as the claims go, I don't know how it handles the real world. If the occasional George Hotz livestream (creator of TinyGrad) is anything to go by, AMD has to rule out a lot of driver issues to be any actual competition for team green. I really hope AMD manages a comeback like they showed a few years ago with their CPUs. Intel joining the market is certainly helping, but having three big players competing would certainly be desirable for all sorts of applications that require GPUs. AMD cars like the 7900 XTX are already fairly promising on paper with fairly big VRAMs, they'd probably be much more cost effective than NVIDIA cards if software support was anywhere near comparable. [0]: https://www.amd.com/en/graphics/servers-solutions-rocm https://www.amd.com/en/graphics/servers-solutions-rocm [1]: https://pytorch.org/ https://pytorch.org/ [2]: https://github.com/geohot/tinygrad https://github.com/geohot/tinygrad
- kadoban 3y ago
  Does ROCm count as an attempt? They burned so many people by not supporting any of the cards anyone cares about.
  - Tostino 3y ago
    All it would take to remedy that, is actually providing good support going forward and a bit of advertising. Not a huge barrier IMO.
- mmis1000 3y ago
  I think the most weird thing is that. The ROCm works fine on linux. At least some dedicated workstation can use it with specific cards. And it already exists for many years. But somehow they can't make any single card work on windows after so many years passed. (Or they don't want for some reason?). It's really weird, given they already have a working implementation (just not for windows) so they are not lacking of the ability for making it work.
- 3y ago
garbagecoder 3y ago
* and Apple.
MuffinFlavored 3y ago
> Both Intel and AMD have the opportunity to create some actual competition for NVIDIA in the GPGPU space. Apple Silicon being on Metal Performance Shaders (I think they deprecated OpenCL support?) kind of makes this all more confusing. It definitely feels like CUDA is the leader and anything else is backseat/a non starer, which is fine. The community support isn't there. I haven't heard anybody talk about AMD Radeon GPUs in a looong time.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  All the competition fails in tooling and not being polyglot like CUDA. So it is already a non starter if they can't meet those baselines.

easythrees 3y ago

AMD has HIP.

trostaft 3y ago
Yes, but I don't think its debatable to say that the entire ecosystem is firmly behind NVIDIA's. Usually it comes as a surprise when something does support their framework, whether directly ROCm or even HIP which should be easier.... I shouldn't be surprised that AMD's ecosystem is lagging behind, since their GPU division spent a good decade suffering to be even relevant. Not to mention that NVIDIA has spent a lot of effort on their HPC tools. I don't want this to be too negative towards AMD, they have been steadily growing in this space. Some things do work well, e.g. stable diffusion is totally fine on AMD GPUs. So they seem to be catching up. I just feel a little impatient, especially since their cards are more than powerful enough to be useful. I suppose my point is that the gap in HPC software between NVIDIA and AMD is much larger than the actual capability gap in their hardware, and that's a shame.
- Eisenstein 3y ago
  Apple was a few months from bankruptcy during most of the 90s competing with IBM and Microsoft, then turned around to become the most profitable company on the planet. It takes a leader and a plan and a lot of talent and the exact right conditions, but industry behemoths get pulled down from the top spot all the time.
  - tracker1 3y ago
    Apple's success is mostly UX and marketing with a walled garden for an application tax. AMD has to actually achieve on the hardware side, not just marketing. Beyond this, AMD has demonstrated that they are, indeed working on closing and pulling ahead. AMD is well ahead of Intel on the server CPU front, they're neck and neck on desktop, with spans ahead in the past few years. And on the GPU side, they've closed a lot of gaps. While I am a little bit of a fan of AMD, there's still work to do. I think AMD really needs to take advantage of their production margins to gain more market share. They also need to get something a bit closer to the 4090 on a performance gpu + entry workstation api/gpgpu workload card. The 7900 XTX is really close, but if they had something with say 32-48gb vram in the sub-2000 space it would really get a lot of the hobbiest and soho types to consider them.
    - elzbardico 3y ago
      Yeah, sure, changing their platform 3 times in the space of some twenty years is just marketing and UX from Apple. They are just a bunch of MBAs. Sometimes I feel like I am reading slashdot.
      - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
        The platform changes had very little to do with their success. They switched from PowerPC to Intel because PowerPC was uncompetitive, but that doesn't explain why they did any better than Dell or anyone else using the exact same chips. Then they developed their own chips because Intel was stagnant, but they barely came out before AMD had something competitive and it's not obvious they'd have been in a meaningfully different position had they just used that. Their hardware is good but if all they were selling was Macbooks and iPhones with Windows and Android on them, they wouldn't have anything near their current margins.
        robbiep 3y ago
        You’re not really making sense. If they hadn’t made platform changes they would have never been able to turn into what they are today. I hardly thing that is ‘little to do’. They would likely barely exist. They have ‘achieved product market fit’ as the saying goes. Which requires more than just a sharp UI, as their history shows
- jacquesm 3y ago
  NV has a huge advantage over AMD: they only do one thing. And that has helped them to relentlessly focus on optimizing that one thing. AMD is fighting on three different fronts at once.
freedomben 3y ago
Yeah, but try running ML projects on your AMD card and you'll quickly see that they're an afterthought nearly everywhere, even projects that use PyTorch (which has backend support for AMD). If consumers can't use it, they're going to learn nvidia and experience has shown that people opt for enterprise tech that they're familiar with, and most people get familiar hacking on it locally

moooo99 3y ago

AMD has made several attempts, their most recent effort apparently is the ROCm [0] software platform. There is an official PyTorch distro for Linux that supports ROCm [1] for acceleration. There's also frameworks like tinygrad [2] that (claim) support for all sorts of accelerators. Thats as far as the claims go, I don't know how it handles the real world. If the occasional George Hotz livestream (creator of TinyGrad) is anything to go by, AMD has to rule out a lot of driver issues to be any actual competition for team green. I really hope AMD manages a comeback like they showed a few years ago with their CPUs. Intel joining the market is certainly helping, but having three big players competing would certainly be desirable for all sorts of applications that require GPUs. AMD cars like the 7900 XTX are already fairly promising on paper with fairly big VRAMs, they'd probably be much more cost effective than NVIDIA cards if software support was anywhere near comparable. [0]: https://www.amd.com/en/graphics/servers-solutions-rocm https://www.amd.com/en/graphics/servers-solutions-rocm [1]: https://pytorch.org/ https://pytorch.org/ [2]: https://github.com/geohot/tinygrad https://github.com/geohot/tinygrad

kadoban 3y ago
Does ROCm count as an attempt? They burned so many people by not supporting any of the cards anyone cares about.
- Tostino 3y ago
  All it would take to remedy that, is actually providing good support going forward and a bit of advertising. Not a huge barrier IMO.
mmis1000 3y ago
I think the most weird thing is that. The ROCm works fine on linux. At least some dedicated workstation can use it with specific cards. And it already exists for many years. But somehow they can't make any single card work on windows after so many years passed. (Or they don't want for some reason?). It's really weird, given they already have a working implementation (just not for windows) so they are not lacking of the ability for making it work.
3y ago

garbagecoder 3y ago

* and Apple.

MuffinFlavored 3y ago

> Both Intel and AMD have the opportunity to create some actual competition for NVIDIA in the GPGPU space. Apple Silicon being on Metal Performance Shaders (I think they deprecated OpenCL support?) kind of makes this all more confusing. It definitely feels like CUDA is the leader and anything else is backseat/a non starer, which is fine. The community support isn't there. I haven't heard anybody talk about AMD Radeon GPUs in a looong time.

pjmlp 3y ago
All the competition fails in tooling and not being polyglot like CUDA. So it is already a non starter if they can't meet those baselines.