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> This is what having a monopoly looks like ! As someone who has been in the AI/ML space for over a decade, and even had an AMD/Radeon card for more than half
by PheonixPharts 3y ago
> This is what having a monopoly looks like !
As someone who has been in the AI/ML space for over a decade, and even had an AMD/Radeon card for more than half of that, I can't help but feel that this is partially AMD's own fault.
For many, many years it seemed to me that AMD just didn't take AI/ML seriously whereas, for all it's faults, NVIDIA seemed to catch on very early that ML presented a tremendous potential market.
To this day getting things like Stable Diffusion to run on an AMD card requires extra work. At least from my perspective it seems like dedicating a few engineers to getting ROCm working on all major OSes with all major scientific computing/deep learning libraries would have been a pretty good investment.
Is there some context I'm missing for why AMD never caught up in this space?
- edgyquant 3y ago100% this. I, and many others, bought multiple AMD cards due to disliking NVidia and tried to get ROCm set up to no avail. It just never worked except under hard to maintain configurations. I switched to an nvidia card and within the hour import tensorflow just worked
- fleischhauf 3y agoto be fair Nvidia drivers are also a nightmare under linux
- jacooper 3y agoNot anymore
- kristopolous 3y agoUntil they are. When the system breaks it breaks real bad. Nvcc/gcc/cuda/kernel mismatches are a pain to match up right. It gets gnarly super fast. All systems hit snags. In most, you skid the tires a bit, maybe lose balance. With nvidia you're flying over the handlebars on to the asphalt. I got snagged by this just about 2 weeks ago. It gets nasty. Not as bad as CUPS, but probably #2.
- michaelt 3y agoEh, depends what you want out of them. Do you want solid dependability and settings that are right first time, because you've only got one PC and if the graphics get broken you've got no browser to google for a fix? Do you want the absolute most up-to-date drivers, to support the very newest GPUs, while running an LTS version of your OS? Do you want to always run the latest driver version and upgrade without testing or worrying, like we do for web browsers? Do you want to run CUDA and ML stuff, but also want to run Steam which for some reason wants 32-bit support available? Do you want to run on a laptop with hybrid graphics, and have suspend/resume work reliably every time? Do you have a small /boot/ partition, because you expected initrd.img to be 50MB or less? Do you want to support Secure Boot? If you want to achieve all these things at once, it'll take you a few tries to get it right :)
- ken47 3y agoUntil very recently, AMD was struggling for survival. Rather than making the big bet on AI, they went for the sure thing by banking on revolutionary CPU tech. I'm sure if they were in a better financial position 5 years ago, they would have gone bigger on AI.
- xmprt 3y agoAnd arguable their bet on CPU tech worked! AMD is in a much better position today than they were 5+ years ago. They have some catching up to do but that doesn't mean their completely out of the game.
- xcdzvyn 3y ago"much better" is an understatement! "AMD predicted to go bankrupt by 2020"[0] [0] https://www.overclock3d.net/news/cpu_mainboard/amd_predicted_to_go_bankrupt_by_2020/1 https://www.overclock3d.net/news/cpu_mainboard/amd_predicted...
- bornfreddy 3y agoGreat achievement! Of course, they can also thank Intel for waiting for them to catch up.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- izacus 3y agoThey also focused on game consoles, where they won contracts for both major platforms this generation.
- Toutouxc 3y agoPrevious one too. Xbox One and Series and PS4 and PS5 are all AMD, and there’s several revisions of each (e.g. PS4 OG, Slim, Pro).
- 3y ago
- Dalewyn 3y agoWhat really strikes me is Nvidia's been working hard on doing practical work on their GPUs even just 10~15 years ago with PhysX, while both Intel and AMD just existed. Nvidia's dominance today is the product of at least over a decade of work and investments to make better products. Today they are finally reaping their rewards.
- desiarnezjr 3y agoI remember meeting NVIDIA in the late aughts (2007?) first launching their CUDA efforts. Really the product was a re-branded 780GTX or whatever their high end gaming card was at the time more or less, but they already laid out a clear pathway to today (more or less).
- dekhn 3y agoI remember meeting with them in the mid aughts when they were first talking to HPC folks about using their cards for science. I'll never forget what the chief scientist from nVidia said. "What is the color of a NaN? That is, when you render a texture with a nan value, what does it look like? I'll tell: it's nvidia green."
- jjoonathan 3y agoIt's a quality meme but I'm having trouble figuring out the settings that make it work. It looks like RGBA8 would be blue: >>> struct.pack('f',math.nan) b'\x00\x00\xc0\x7f' maybe that becomes green if you composite over white or something? Or maybe there is a common type of NaN that fills some of the unspecified bits? ("Just use the particular NaN that makes it green" is cheating unless you have an excuse)
- dekhn 3y agoIt was an arbitrary decision by the engineers who made the early GPUs, they just mapped NaN to an RGB It was a nice way to debug tensors: render them to the screen, the green sticks out.
- uluyol 3y agoCatching up in this space requires a significant, sustained investment over multiple years and competent software engineers. It's not a simple thing for a hardware company to suddenly become competitive with Nvidia in AI/ML. Instead, they've been going after the CPU market (and winning), HPC/scientific computing (high FP64 performance, in contrast to Nvidia's focus on low-precision ML compute), and integrating Xilinx. However, I agree that it's an unfortunate situation, and I hope AMD becomes competitive in this space soon.
- slashdev 3y agoI think their hardware is comparable with nvidia. The problem is the software is awful by comparison. It’s hard to run any of the AI workloads with AMD, and even when you can the performance is poor. The software investment just hasn’t been made. Until then they are not even in the game.
- tho23iu423o4324 3y agoYes, this is true. However, a lot of this has to do with the fact that AMD was on the brink of bankruptcy before the launch of Zen in 2016 (when their share price was ~$10). They simply did not have the capital to the kind of things Nvidia was doing (since '08 ?). The bet on OpenCL and the 'open-source' community failed. However, ROCM/HIP etc. really seems to be catching up (I even see them packaged on Arch linux).
- slavik81 3y ago> However, ROCM/HIP etc. really seems to be catching up (I even see them packaged on Arch linux). There are now distro-provided packages on Arch, Gentoo, Debian, Ubuntu, and Fedora.
- htrp 3y agoAMD gave up on the market for parallel compute entirely
- xiphias2 3y agoLook at the good thing instead: they are catching up, and open source devs are starting to be serious about AMD because of its price/performance. I believe it's a highly undervalued stock right now.
- FuriouslyAdrift 3y agoAMD has an entire line specifically for AI/ML... https://www.amd.com/en/graphics/instinct-server-accelerators https://www.amd.com/en/graphics/instinct-server-accelerators They just don't have those capabilities in their consumer GPUs. AMD is also nearly 50/50 with nVidia for supercomputers in the Top500 (and dominates at the top) It took a few years after completeing the massive purchase of Xilinx to get going, but they are picking up speed rapidly.
- paulmd 3y agoAMD should do a high-memory-density MCD variant of 7900XT/XTX with a MCD that has 4 PHYs instead of 2. You could get 7900XTX to 48GB with no clamshell and 96GB with clamshell, which is getting into H100 territory.