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Why did they wait so long? No decent ML support makes their consumer cards so much less attractive, it's crazy
by Aardwolf 3y ago
Why did they wait so long? No decent ML support makes their consumer cards so much less attractive, it's crazy
- Aardwolf 3y agoAlso, once they have decent consumer ML support, they could release a card that has a merely OK-ish GPU, but double the memory of nvidia counterparts (e.g. 32 or 48 GiB, or find some way to allow you to plug in your own memory), and it'd be crazy popular as well I think, because memory is the real limitation to what you can do, for inference at least!
- Scalene2 3y agoWhat makes you think user upgradeable memory is feasible? Aren't the signaling requirements of GPU memory vastly more stringent than CPU memory?
- captainbland 3y agoThat's true although they will be concerned with product segmentation as well. Pro GPUs are where the margins are so they will be careful not to let their consumer gear cannibalise them too much. Nvidia seemingly does this by intentionally limiting VRAM on consumer parts where software support is more or less equivalent for CUDA so you'd imagine AMD could end up following the same path.
- reaperman 3y agoYeah this is why competition is good. It's possible that AMD might just decide "fuck segmentation let's undercut Nvidia and steal marketshare" like they did with the first and second gen Threadripper / Threadripper PRO (later generations priced the Threadripper PRO's at "fuck you, just buy Epyc" prices while gatekeeping some key features from the non PROs).
- TheBigSalad 3y ago99% of their customers are gamers.
- imtringued 3y agoIntel doesn't have this problem with their discrete GPUs. People actually use those for machine learning.
- pjmlp 3y agoMostly because apparently they are doing something good with Data Parallel C++, and related tooling.
- ClumsyPilot 3y agoAnd games could make use of GPGPU, most notably realistic physics simulations, if AMD weren't dragging their heels
- dragontamer 3y agoGames do use GPGPU through DirectX12 compute shaders. Maybe Vulkan compute shaders if cross-platform capability is desired. Video Games already have a huge pipeline of GPU-compute setup for vertex / pixel shaders, geometry shaders and more. Throwing a DirectX Compute Shader / Vulkan Shader on top is no biggie. But this is a lot of cruft to add to a non-video game (gotta initialize DirectX or Vulkan graphics just to start running compute shaders, and ignoring the default vertex/pixel shaders that the APIs are designed for...) > most notably realistic physics simulations Physics simulation is a dead-end. There's no reason to do physics on GPU, because copying the data from CPU->GPU is slow, and GPU -> CPU is slower. By the time all the copying, calculating, and copying back is done, the GPU-physics data is obsolete and the CPU might as well have run it locally in L3 cache instead. I think there's a chance that GPGPU video games could exist, but the graphics would have to be delayed relative to the physics simulation. Time X starts running a step of the physics simulation. Time X+1 the physics simulation copies back to CPU, and gives CPU-time to finalize the results. Time X+2 CPU copies the data into the Vertex/Pixel shaders for rendering to the user. But the game engine, game, and graphics will have to be specifically tailored for GPGPU graphics. Still, real engines like Claybook have done this: https://ubm-twvideo01.s3.amazonaws.com/o1/vault/gdc2018/presentations/Aaltonen_Sebastian_GPU_Based_Clay.pdf https://ubm-twvideo01.s3.amazonaws.com/o1/vault/gdc2018/pres...
- kyriakos 3y agoespecially considering their cards have more memory than nvidia's at the same price ranges