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AMDs APIs have historically been way behind CUDA, both in features and ease of use, making it much harder to reach feature and performance parity with CUDA. Th

by dagw 3y ago

AMDs APIs have historically been way behind CUDA, both in features and ease of use, making it much harder to reach feature and performance parity with CUDA. The second big problem is that AMD has a history of abandoning APIs. While Nvidia has been focusing on CUDA from the start, AMD is on its third or fourth API. A lot of developers got burned early on by putting in a lot of effort into supporting AMD cards, only to have their work become useless as AMD dropped old API. So if you wanted to support AMD today you have to choose between using their latest API which is currently only supported on a handful of their latest top end cards, or using their previous API, which is much worse and may or may not be supported in 2 years time.

slavik81 3y ago
> their latest API [...] is currently only supported on a handful of their latest top end cards While there's very few cards that are officially supported, I've enabled most RDNA 1 and RDNA 2 GPUs in the OS-provided packages on Debian Unstable and Ubuntu 23.10. I haven't tested every architecture, but my experience has been that they generally work quite well. The version of HIP packaged for Debian is still a few versions behind, so we haven't been able to enable RDNA 3 yet, but it shouldn't be too long before that is resolved. As you have described, it has been a very long road to get to this point (with a lot of mistakes along the way), but I think things are getting better. That said, I work on ROCm, so my evaluation may be unintentionally biased.
- dagw 3y ago
  I think things are getting better Hopefully. Although I haven't programmed with it yet, the latest ROCm looks nice (at least from reading the docs). Now all you have to do is actually get to a point where it's actually supported on hardware people actually own and convince people that it's worth investing their time in, and then AMD can start making progress.
  - slavik81 3y ago
    The Debian packages support a much wider range of hardware than the AMD packages do. Just about any discrete AMD GPU hardware released in the past five years should already work or will work soon.

by dagw 3y ago

slavik81 3y ago

> their latest API [...] is currently only supported on a handful of their latest top end cards While there's very few cards that are officially supported, I've enabled most RDNA 1 and RDNA 2 GPUs in the OS-provided packages on Debian Unstable and Ubuntu 23.10. I haven't tested every architecture, but my experience has been that they generally work quite well. The version of HIP packaged for Debian is still a few versions behind, so we haven't been able to enable RDNA 3 yet, but it shouldn't be too long before that is resolved. As you have described, it has been a very long road to get to this point (with a lot of mistakes along the way), but I think things are getting better. That said, I work on ROCm, so my evaluation may be unintentionally biased.

dagw 3y ago
I think things are getting better Hopefully. Although I haven't programmed with it yet, the latest ROCm looks nice (at least from reading the docs). Now all you have to do is actually get to a point where it's actually supported on hardware people actually own and convince people that it's worth investing their time in, and then AMD can start making progress.
- slavik81 3y ago
  The Debian packages support a much wider range of hardware than the AMD packages do. Just about any discrete AMD GPU hardware released in the past five years should already work or will work soon.