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> e.g. Why not... A key part of progress is choosing the direction to progress in. Flashy knee-jerk moves like that sound good but it isn't the fastest way to
by roenxi 3y ago
> e.g. Why not...
A key part of progress is choosing the direction to progress in. Flashy knee-jerk moves like that sound good but it isn't the fastest way to move forward. The first step (which I think they've taken) is for the executives to align on what the market wants. The second is to work out how to achieve it, the third to do it. Handing out freebies would probably help, but it'll take sustained long term strategy for AMD to make money.
AMD's problem isn't low-level developer interest. The George Hotz video rant on AMD was enlightening - the interest is there and the official drivers just don't work. A few years ago I made an effort to get in to reinforcement learning as a hobby and was blocked by AMD crashes. At the time I assumed I'd done something wrong. I still believe that, but I'm less certain now. It is possible that the reason AMD is doing so poorly is just that their code to do BLAS is buggy.
People get very excited about CUDA and maybe everything there is necessary, but on AMD the problem seems to be that the card can't reliably multiply matrices together. I got some early nights using Stable Diffusion because everything worked great for an hour then the kernel paniced. I didn't give AMD any feedback because I run an unsupported card and OS - effectively all cards and OSs are unsupported - but if that is widespread behaviour it would be a grave blocker.
I think they are serious now though. The ROCM documentation dropped a lot of infuriating corporate waffle recently and that is a sign that good people are involved. Still going to wait and see before getting too hopeful that it works out well.
- jacquesm 3y ago> Flashy knee-jerk moves like that sound good but it isn't the fastest way to move forward. NVidia: - Games -> we're on it - Machine learning -> we're on it - Crypto -> we're on it - LLM / AI -> we're on it Compare the growth rate of NVidia vs AMD and you get the picture. Flashy knee-jerk moves are bad, identifying growth segments in your industry and running with them is excellent strategy. People get excited about CUDA because it works, and AMD could have had a very large slice of that pie. > on AMD the problem seems to be that the card can't reliably multiply matrices together. I got some early nights using Stable Diffusion because everything worked great for an hour then the kernel paniced. I didn't give AMD any feedback because I run an unsupported card and OS - effectively all cards and OSs are unsupported - but if that is widespread behaviour[sic] it would be a grave blocker. Exactly. And with NVIDIA you'd be working on your problem instead. And that's what makes the difference. AMD should do exactly what the OP wrote: gain mindshare by getting at least some researchers on board with their product, assuming they haven't burned their brand completely by now.
- seunosewa 3y agoNVIDIA is focused on graphic cards. AMD has the tough CPU market to worry about.
- TheCleric 3y agoNever half ass two things when you can whole ass one thing.
- jacquesm 3y agoThat's AMD's problem to solve, they made that choice. NV doesn't have to worry about resource allocation, branding etc. AMD could copy that by spinning out it's GPU division. Note that 'graphic cards' is no longer a proper identifier either, they just happen to have display connectors on them (and not even all of them). They're more like co-processors that you may also use to generate graphics. But I'm not even sure if that's the bulk of the applications.