3 ms·

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

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.

AshamedCaptain 3y ago
> "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. Having not followed this, I don't understand what the promise was. ROCm works just fine on at least some consumer cards like the 6xxx, and by fine I mean "as bad as on AMD's pro cards", but at least it works out of the box. Certainly it's not supported, and so therefore they are not shipping precompiled binaries, but it does seem to work...
hedgehog 3y ago
To give him credit I don't think he was saying he was going to write new drivers, just build a ML software stack that worked on whatever they ship for the consumer cards. Certainly a large project by itself with questionable value at this point, but not writing new drivers.
jjoonathan 3y ago
The problem is mismatch between spec sheet and customer needs, not mismatch between spec sheet and card. I don't know whether this is a management problem at AMD or an engineering problem at AMD or both. I don't really care, either -- a "wans't me!" from engineering is completely uninteresting to me. The problem is that AMD's consumer cards don't run ROCm while NVidia's consumer cards all run CUDA. I am amazed that Geohot reached out to AMD to extend an olive branch so far as to force their failure of a product to work despite itself, because frankly I'd just have expected AMD to spin excuses like you did. I am encouraged to see that they took a higher road; hopefully that translates to actual execution. We'll see.
- iforgotpassword 3y ago
  We tried ROCm on the MI50 years ago. Complete shit show, crashes, lackluster support by AMD. I guess it was because we would've just bought a few dozen, so maybe their competent staff was doing support for some startup with huge VC backing buying a few hundred dozen for a new game streaming service.

AshamedCaptain 3y ago

> "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. Having not followed this, I don't understand what the promise was. ROCm works just fine on at least some consumer cards like the 6xxx, and by fine I mean "as bad as on AMD's pro cards", but at least it works out of the box. Certainly it's not supported, and so therefore they are not shipping precompiled binaries, but it does seem to work...

hedgehog 3y ago

To give him credit I don't think he was saying he was going to write new drivers, just build a ML software stack that worked on whatever they ship for the consumer cards. Certainly a large project by itself with questionable value at this point, but not writing new drivers.

jjoonathan 3y ago

The problem is mismatch between spec sheet and customer needs, not mismatch between spec sheet and card. I don't know whether this is a management problem at AMD or an engineering problem at AMD or both. I don't really care, either -- a "wans't me!" from engineering is completely uninteresting to me. The problem is that AMD's consumer cards don't run ROCm while NVidia's consumer cards all run CUDA. I am amazed that Geohot reached out to AMD to extend an olive branch so far as to force their failure of a product to work despite itself, because frankly I'd just have expected AMD to spin excuses like you did. I am encouraged to see that they took a higher road; hopefully that translates to actual execution. We'll see.

iforgotpassword 3y ago
We tried ROCm on the MI50 years ago. Complete shit show, crashes, lackluster support by AMD. I guess it was because we would've just bought a few dozen, so maybe their competent staff was doing support for some startup with huge VC backing buying a few hundred dozen for a new game streaming service.