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George is right. But He has a history of being an arrogant prick. That will color people's perceptions of you even if it's not relevant to the immediate inter

George is right. But He has a history of being an arrogant prick. That will color people's perceptions of you even if it's not relevant to the immediate interaction.

brucethemoose2 3y ago
I didn't even know who Hotz was, but that YouTube rant on this very issue made me extremely skeptical. Should someone who will just drop a GPU vendor if they get flustered really be leading a ML framework?
- vbezhenar 3y ago
  You're welcome to fork and find another leader, I guess.
  - brucethemoose2 3y ago
    I don't think some stability or a formal decision making structure is too much to ask. TVM, MLIR based projects, GGML seem to have stable leadership.
- BearOso 3y ago
  Hotz is known for hacking the iPhone and PS3. But you should look deeper into that before giving him any credit. His post is mostly hot air. AMD driver development is very open, excepting only ROCm. Not knowing where things are discussed or how the various driver systems, excluding Nvidia, interact on Linux is not an excuse to rant. The corporate amd kernel development starts amd-staging-drm-next, with internal AMD pull requests available on the mailing list or here: https://patchwork.freedesktop.org/project/amd-xorg-ddx/series/?ordering=-last_updated https://patchwork.freedesktop.org/project/amd-xorg-ddx/serie..., before going through airlied, the maintainer of drm in the main kernel, then to Linus. Everything user-space regarding OpenGL/Vulkan and some rusty OpenCL, aside from the proprietary amdgpu-pro driver which should almost never be used, is in Mesa. ROCm is the only thing with huge code dumps, obviously because it's a new effort, and it's said outright that it's unsupported for consumer GPUs. Yes, it's a buggy mess. Did his issue warrant the corporate response he got? No.
  - paulmd 3y ago
    Hotz followed a guide published by another team’s research and made the exploit into something that could be easily accessed by the public, which the original researchers weren’t too happy about because it brought Sony down on their heads and tightened security up again. But yes, this one sits squarely in “nobody involved looks real good” territory. AMD puts out shit software in general, and ROCm is exceptionally far behind the standard in this field, and often difficult to set up and broken even in “supported” configurations. And the ROCm team have a habit of doing this closed-door development, splitting the actual work into the AMDGPU-PRO driver while neglecting the open one (even in “supported” configurations), and generally just having a process that is not compatible with delivering high-quality open software. And Hotz is being a manchild who melts down about a driver he knew was bad and berates the people who are trying to get him rush patches while they do their dayjob getting the ROCm release out (which hopefully fixes a lot of the complaints around lack of windows support, lack of consumer gpu support, and general (near-total) lack of polish and stability. To their credit AMD finally posted a job listing for like 30 engineers for ROCm. It’s just something they should have done like 4 years ago when ROCm first got rolling. And we are well past the “poor lil amd couldn’t afford that” in 2019 or whatever. If you can’t afford it then don’t start the ROCm initiative and make the promises. Even 2-3 years ago it was clear that the foundation work was done and that if you ever wanted it to go bigger you’d have to do some hiring. And frankly it’s been just as bad with OpenCL before it - support was never good, the runtime constantly had bugs and paper features, etc. AMD didn’t care about GPGPU compute until AI turned into a billion-dollar industry overnight. And that’s a 15-year story there.
    - brucethemoose2 3y ago
      Well said. I remember the HSA push too...
- cavisne 3y ago
  To be fair one of the issues with AMD and ML is they have been pretending it works for years now, when nothing actually works. Calling that out publicly is probably needed at this point, or they will keep putting AI in their earnings reports without anyone actually being able to train a model on an AMD chip.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
ysleepy 3y ago
I found his video pretty dumb. Everybody is assuming the driver is shitty, but he tried is an officially unsupported[1] GPU with ROCm and it failed. Big whoop. He is a serial shit stirrer and this is no exception. Did he try Windows? As much as I hate that AMD is not really supporting consumer GPUs for compute, presenting his problems as some variant of production drivers breaking is a stretch at best. [1]: https://rocm.docs.amd.com/en/latest/release/gpu_os_support.html#linux-supported-gpus https://rocm.docs.amd.com/en/latest/release/gpu_os_support.h...
- jjoonathan 3y ago
  Leaving consumer GPUs unsupported is part of the problem and AMD deserves to have its shit stirred for it. They need to be better than nvidia, not "you'll take what you can get." We can get nvidia. That's the bar. NVidia charges a premium but their shit works (comparatively speaking). AMD has been half-assing their compute offerings for 15 years, it finally became important, and now they need to play catch-up not drag their heels and toss out excuses as to why that's OK. My prediction: AMD won't be second place in this race for long, someone who actually wants the #2 spot will take it from them and AMD will sit around wondering how they blew a 15 year head start.
  - Jasper_ 3y ago
    Remember, geohot was going to write the driver -- he came out of the gate saying "AMD has ROCm but you can't use it on consumer cards, so I'm going to write my own software stack that works with AMD's consumer grade GPUs". He raised $5.1m on that promise. So far, with all that money, he has compiled their driver, ran it in an unsupported configuration, and then had a complete public mental breakdown because it didn't work. Something he already knew going in. Should AMD support ROCm on its consumer grade GPUs? Probably. But that's really not geohot's choice to make, unless he wants to get his hands dirty and actually write the software he promised to write. Having worked on GPU drivers, it's not a couple-lines fix situation, it would be a pretty big investment to add stable ROCm support for consumer GPUs. AMD higher-ups responding with anything other than "lol what it's unsupported what did you expect" is extending a pretty long olive branch here.
wmf 3y ago
Everybody saying "poor AMD is such an underdog" for years = perma-broken drivers George being a prick one time = suddenly working driver appears? My perception is indeed colored but in the opposite direction.

George is right. But He has a history of being an arrogant prick. That will color people's perceptions of you even if it's not relevant to the immediate interaction.

brucethemoose2 3y ago

I didn't even know who Hotz was, but that YouTube rant on this very issue made me extremely skeptical. Should someone who will just drop a GPU vendor if they get flustered really be leading a ML framework?

vbezhenar 3y ago
You're welcome to fork and find another leader, I guess.
- brucethemoose2 3y ago
  I don't think some stability or a formal decision making structure is too much to ask. TVM, MLIR based projects, GGML seem to have stable leadership.
BearOso 3y ago
Hotz is known for hacking the iPhone and PS3. But you should look deeper into that before giving him any credit. His post is mostly hot air. AMD driver development is very open, excepting only ROCm. Not knowing where things are discussed or how the various driver systems, excluding Nvidia, interact on Linux is not an excuse to rant. The corporate amd kernel development starts amd-staging-drm-next, with internal AMD pull requests available on the mailing list or here: https://patchwork.freedesktop.org/project/amd-xorg-ddx/series/?ordering=-last_updated https://patchwork.freedesktop.org/project/amd-xorg-ddx/serie..., before going through airlied, the maintainer of drm in the main kernel, then to Linus. Everything user-space regarding OpenGL/Vulkan and some rusty OpenCL, aside from the proprietary amdgpu-pro driver which should almost never be used, is in Mesa. ROCm is the only thing with huge code dumps, obviously because it's a new effort, and it's said outright that it's unsupported for consumer GPUs. Yes, it's a buggy mess. Did his issue warrant the corporate response he got? No.
- paulmd 3y ago
  Hotz followed a guide published by another team’s research and made the exploit into something that could be easily accessed by the public, which the original researchers weren’t too happy about because it brought Sony down on their heads and tightened security up again. But yes, this one sits squarely in “nobody involved looks real good” territory. AMD puts out shit software in general, and ROCm is exceptionally far behind the standard in this field, and often difficult to set up and broken even in “supported” configurations. And the ROCm team have a habit of doing this closed-door development, splitting the actual work into the AMDGPU-PRO driver while neglecting the open one (even in “supported” configurations), and generally just having a process that is not compatible with delivering high-quality open software. And Hotz is being a manchild who melts down about a driver he knew was bad and berates the people who are trying to get him rush patches while they do their dayjob getting the ROCm release out (which hopefully fixes a lot of the complaints around lack of windows support, lack of consumer gpu support, and general (near-total) lack of polish and stability. To their credit AMD finally posted a job listing for like 30 engineers for ROCm. It’s just something they should have done like 4 years ago when ROCm first got rolling. And we are well past the “poor lil amd couldn’t afford that” in 2019 or whatever. If you can’t afford it then don’t start the ROCm initiative and make the promises. Even 2-3 years ago it was clear that the foundation work was done and that if you ever wanted it to go bigger you’d have to do some hiring. And frankly it’s been just as bad with OpenCL before it - support was never good, the runtime constantly had bugs and paper features, etc. AMD didn’t care about GPGPU compute until AI turned into a billion-dollar industry overnight. And that’s a 15-year story there.
  - brucethemoose2 3y ago
    Well said. I remember the HSA push too...
cavisne 3y ago
To be fair one of the issues with AMD and ML is they have been pretending it works for years now, when nothing actually works. Calling that out publicly is probably needed at this point, or they will keep putting AI in their earnings reports without anyone actually being able to train a model on an AMD chip.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

ysleepy 3y ago

I found his video pretty dumb. Everybody is assuming the driver is shitty, but he tried is an officially unsupported[1] GPU with ROCm and it failed. Big whoop. He is a serial shit stirrer and this is no exception. Did he try Windows? As much as I hate that AMD is not really supporting consumer GPUs for compute, presenting his problems as some variant of production drivers breaking is a stretch at best. [1]: https://rocm.docs.amd.com/en/latest/release/gpu_os_support.html#linux-supported-gpus https://rocm.docs.amd.com/en/latest/release/gpu_os_support.h...

jjoonathan 3y ago
Leaving consumer GPUs unsupported is part of the problem and AMD deserves to have its shit stirred for it. They need to be better than nvidia, not "you'll take what you can get." We can get nvidia. That's the bar. NVidia charges a premium but their shit works (comparatively speaking). AMD has been half-assing their compute offerings for 15 years, it finally became important, and now they need to play catch-up not drag their heels and toss out excuses as to why that's OK. My prediction: AMD won't be second place in this race for long, someone who actually wants the #2 spot will take it from them and AMD will sit around wondering how they blew a 15 year head start.
- Jasper_ 3y ago
  Remember, geohot was going to write the driver -- he came out of the gate saying "AMD has ROCm but you can't use it on consumer cards, so I'm going to write my own software stack that works with AMD's consumer grade GPUs". He raised $5.1m on that promise. So far, with all that money, he has compiled their driver, ran it in an unsupported configuration, and then had a complete public mental breakdown because it didn't work. Something he already knew going in. Should AMD support ROCm on its consumer grade GPUs? Probably. But that's really not geohot's choice to make, unless he wants to get his hands dirty and actually write the software he promised to write. Having worked on GPU drivers, it's not a couple-lines fix situation, it would be a pretty big investment to add stable ROCm support for consumer GPUs. AMD higher-ups responding with anything other than "lol what it's unsupported what did you expect" is extending a pretty long olive branch here.

wmf 3y ago

Everybody saying "poor AMD is such an underdog" for years = perma-broken drivers George being a prick one time = suddenly working driver appears? My perception is indeed colored but in the opposite direction.