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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 support

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.
jacooper 3y ago
The issue with ROCm is that its completely unaccessible for most users. It only support high end GPUs. While cuda works on a 1050ti.
- vkaku 3y ago
  Agreed. What they've also been doing is stalling/removing support on gfx803 and that literally could have allowed people to still use the GPU for doing many decent small nets.
- kkielhofner 3y ago
  Supported on CUDA 12 no less! To get an idea, the 1050ti is a card with an MSRP of $140 - almost seven years ago when it was released. Between the driver and CUDA support matrix it will likely end up with a 10 year support life. While it's not going to impress with an LLM or such it's the lowest minimum supported card for speech to text with Willow Inference Server (I'm the creator) and it still puts up impressive numbers. Same for the GTX 1060/1070, which you can get with up to 8GB VRAM today for ~$100 used. Again, not impressive for the hotter LLMs, etc but it will do ASR, TTS, video encoding/decoding, Frigate, Plex transcoding, and any number of other things with remarkable performance (considering cost). People also run LLMs on them and from a price/performance/power standpoint it's not even close compared to CPU. The 15 year investment and commitment to universal support for any Nvidia GPU across platforms (with very long support lifecycles) is extremely hard to compete with (as we see again and again with AMD attempts in the space).
  - jacooper 3y ago
    To be fair, AMD does offer good long term support for cards, just not with ROCm.
    - kkielhofner 3y ago
      The 390.x driver series (updated 11/22) supports cards that are at least 13 years old[0]. From a quick glance of available drivers for AMD cards of that vintage the drivers haven't been updated since 2014/2015. When comparing the last driver release from Nvidia in the 2014-205 range it supports cards going back to at least 2004[1]. [0] - https://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/390.157/README/supportedchips.html https://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/390.157/REA... [1] - https://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/96.43.23/README/appendix-a.html https://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/96.43.23/RE...
joe_the_user 3y ago
"AMD has made several attempts..." And failed to make any of them work, which to my mind means they've burned their possibilities more than if they flat-out did nothing.

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.

jacooper 3y ago

The issue with ROCm is that its completely unaccessible for most users. It only support high end GPUs. While cuda works on a 1050ti.

vkaku 3y ago
Agreed. What they've also been doing is stalling/removing support on gfx803 and that literally could have allowed people to still use the GPU for doing many decent small nets.
kkielhofner 3y ago
Supported on CUDA 12 no less! To get an idea, the 1050ti is a card with an MSRP of $140 - almost seven years ago when it was released. Between the driver and CUDA support matrix it will likely end up with a 10 year support life. While it's not going to impress with an LLM or such it's the lowest minimum supported card for speech to text with Willow Inference Server (I'm the creator) and it still puts up impressive numbers. Same for the GTX 1060/1070, which you can get with up to 8GB VRAM today for ~$100 used. Again, not impressive for the hotter LLMs, etc but it will do ASR, TTS, video encoding/decoding, Frigate, Plex transcoding, and any number of other things with remarkable performance (considering cost). People also run LLMs on them and from a price/performance/power standpoint it's not even close compared to CPU. The 15 year investment and commitment to universal support for any Nvidia GPU across platforms (with very long support lifecycles) is extremely hard to compete with (as we see again and again with AMD attempts in the space).
- jacooper 3y ago
  To be fair, AMD does offer good long term support for cards, just not with ROCm.
  - kkielhofner 3y ago
    The 390.x driver series (updated 11/22) supports cards that are at least 13 years old[0]. From a quick glance of available drivers for AMD cards of that vintage the drivers haven't been updated since 2014/2015. When comparing the last driver release from Nvidia in the 2014-205 range it supports cards going back to at least 2004[1]. [0] - https://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/390.157/README/supportedchips.html https://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/390.157/REA... [1] - https://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/96.43.23/README/appendix-a.html https://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/96.43.23/RE...

joe_the_user 3y ago

"AMD has made several attempts..." And failed to make any of them work, which to my mind means they've burned their possibilities more than if they flat-out did nothing.