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AMD gatekeeps this functionality behind it's non-consumer cards. They don't realize that having a consumer card and being able to develop on it is a gateway to

AMD gatekeeps this functionality behind it's non-consumer cards. They don't realize that having a consumer card and being able to develop on it is a gateway to using AMD. I can use CUDA on any Nvidia card I buy. I can't believe they are so incredibly dense on this.

LeanderK 3y ago
lol, this is so stupid. Don't they realise that people usually develop locally and train on a server? You don't need a super beefy GPUs to do it, so you buy nvidia. So people are used to nvidia, debug and fix bugs etc. It's not a very smart decision, looks like the decision makers have no idea what's going on.
- paulmd 3y ago
  AMD’s opencl runtime also historically has an incredible number of bugs and paper features that make any sort of portability between nvidia and AMD cards quite difficult - you are running a special build and a different codepath for AMD anyway, there was no gain from using the ostensibly portable approach.
  - latchkey 3y ago
    The gain is that you can't find time on NVIDIA cards right now. Decentralizing away from a single provider lowers the risk on your business significantly. Case in point, OpenAI closed new signups because they couldn't keep up with demand and they literally have all the resources in the world to make things happen.
65a 3y ago
You can run inference and training on consumer AMD cards today. It works fine, including llama.cpp, stable diffusion, hugging face transformers, etc. Way cheaper for a given performance/VRAM target as well.
- thrtythreeforty 3y ago
  Maybe so. But it isn't confidence inspiring when I go to see which cards are supported and I see this issue: https://github.com/ROCm/ROCm/issues/1714 https://github.com/ROCm/ROCm/issues/1714 With Nvidia cards, I know that if I buy any Nvidia card made in the last 10 years, CUDA code will run on it. Period. (Yes, different language levels require newer hardware, but Nvidia docs are quite clear about which CUDA versions require which silicon.) I have an AMD Zen3 APU with a tiny Vega in it; I ought to be able to mess around with HIP with ~zero fuss. The will-they-won't-they and the rapidly dropped support is hurting the otherwise excellent ROCm and HIP projects. There is a huge API surface to implement and it looks like they're making rapid gains.
  - Symmetry 3y ago
    That's from 2022. AMDs move to start generally supporting consumer cards is very recent.
    - echelon 3y ago
      Where's the official show of support? I'll believe it when I see it.
      - Symmetry 3y ago
        They're listed as supported on their website and they work. I'm not sure what there is besides that. https://rocm.docs.amd.com/en/latest/release/gpu_os_support.html https://rocm.docs.amd.com/en/latest/release/gpu_os_support.h... You have to click on the "Radeon" tab for the commercial cards. Yes, it's annoying that they only officially support Ubuntu 22.04 but it is official support and you can get other OSs and cards to work.
  - zamalek 3y ago
    There's a difference between officially supported, and supported. My 6900XT, an unsupported card, works just fine.
riffic 3y ago
*its
- joshstrange 3y ago
  It's a possessive apostrophe: https://www.grammarly.com/blog/possessive-apostrophe/ https://www.grammarly.com/blog/possessive-apostrophe/
  - skyyler 3y ago
    Did you read that article you linked? >The important thing to remember is don’t use possessive apostrophes with any pronouns, either possessive pronouns or possessive adjectives. >If you see an apostrophe with a pronoun, it must be part of a contraction. >its—possessive adjective of it >it’s—contraction for “it is” "its" would be correct in the root comment.
    - joshstrange 3y ago
      No I didn't read it fully, I knew what the concept was called, found an article, skimmed it until I was sure it was talking about the thing I thought it was. I'm almost positive I was taught in school that "it's" is a valid possessive apostrophe case and honestly I think it's stupid that it's not. I find "its" more confusing personally.
      - riffic 3y ago
        just sound it out in your head. If you see an apostrophe with it's, it usually means "it is" Otherwise someone oopsed and you can leave a dumb grammar comment on HN
      - skyyler 3y ago
        >I knew what the concept was called, found an article, skimmed it until I was sure it was talking about the thing I thought it was You just managed to summarise why having conversations with strangers is so difficult on the internet these days. Instead of considering that you were incorrect, even for a moment, you sought an article that you thought would confirm the ideas that you already had. Without even actually reading it, you used it as evidence that you were correct all along. Even though the article very clearly illustrates that you were mistaken. Fascinating.
Symmetry 3y ago
That's something that's started changing over the last few months. Official support for the RX 7900 GPUs for Linux has been added to the most recent versions of ROCm and over on the ROCm subreddit people are reporting success getting other RDNA 3 cards working. On Windows you've got consumer cards from the previous generation getting official support too. This is, obviously, way overdue and it might not be enough to let AMD get back into the race but
latchkey 3y ago
In my eyes, the real problem is that there is no cost effective developer access to high end cards, like the MI300x. This breaks the developer flywheel that you would normally point at consumer cards for. Where can you rent time on one? Traditionally, AMD has only helped build super computers, like Frontier and El Capitan, out of these cards. This time around Azure [0] and other CSP's (cloud service providers) are working to change that. I will have the best of the best of their cards/systems for rent soon. [0] https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/azure-high-performance-computing/azure-announces-new-ai-optimized-vm-series-featuring-amd-s/ba-p/3980770 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/azure-high-performanc...

LeanderK 3y ago

lol, this is so stupid. Don't they realise that people usually develop locally and train on a server? You don't need a super beefy GPUs to do it, so you buy nvidia. So people are used to nvidia, debug and fix bugs etc. It's not a very smart decision, looks like the decision makers have no idea what's going on.

paulmd 3y ago
AMD’s opencl runtime also historically has an incredible number of bugs and paper features that make any sort of portability between nvidia and AMD cards quite difficult - you are running a special build and a different codepath for AMD anyway, there was no gain from using the ostensibly portable approach.
- latchkey 3y ago
  The gain is that you can't find time on NVIDIA cards right now. Decentralizing away from a single provider lowers the risk on your business significantly. Case in point, OpenAI closed new signups because they couldn't keep up with demand and they literally have all the resources in the world to make things happen.

65a 3y ago

You can run inference and training on consumer AMD cards today. It works fine, including llama.cpp, stable diffusion, hugging face transformers, etc. Way cheaper for a given performance/VRAM target as well.

thrtythreeforty 3y ago
Maybe so. But it isn't confidence inspiring when I go to see which cards are supported and I see this issue: https://github.com/ROCm/ROCm/issues/1714 https://github.com/ROCm/ROCm/issues/1714 With Nvidia cards, I know that if I buy any Nvidia card made in the last 10 years, CUDA code will run on it. Period. (Yes, different language levels require newer hardware, but Nvidia docs are quite clear about which CUDA versions require which silicon.) I have an AMD Zen3 APU with a tiny Vega in it; I ought to be able to mess around with HIP with ~zero fuss. The will-they-won't-they and the rapidly dropped support is hurting the otherwise excellent ROCm and HIP projects. There is a huge API surface to implement and it looks like they're making rapid gains.
- Symmetry 3y ago
  That's from 2022. AMDs move to start generally supporting consumer cards is very recent.
  - echelon 3y ago
    Where's the official show of support? I'll believe it when I see it.
    - Symmetry 3y ago
      They're listed as supported on their website and they work. I'm not sure what there is besides that. https://rocm.docs.amd.com/en/latest/release/gpu_os_support.html https://rocm.docs.amd.com/en/latest/release/gpu_os_support.h... You have to click on the "Radeon" tab for the commercial cards. Yes, it's annoying that they only officially support Ubuntu 22.04 but it is official support and you can get other OSs and cards to work.
- zamalek 3y ago
  There's a difference between officially supported, and supported. My 6900XT, an unsupported card, works just fine.

riffic 3y ago

*its

joshstrange 3y ago
It's a possessive apostrophe: https://www.grammarly.com/blog/possessive-apostrophe/ https://www.grammarly.com/blog/possessive-apostrophe/
- skyyler 3y ago
  Did you read that article you linked? >The important thing to remember is don’t use possessive apostrophes with any pronouns, either possessive pronouns or possessive adjectives. >If you see an apostrophe with a pronoun, it must be part of a contraction. >its—possessive adjective of it >it’s—contraction for “it is” "its" would be correct in the root comment.
  - joshstrange 3y ago
    No I didn't read it fully, I knew what the concept was called, found an article, skimmed it until I was sure it was talking about the thing I thought it was. I'm almost positive I was taught in school that "it's" is a valid possessive apostrophe case and honestly I think it's stupid that it's not. I find "its" more confusing personally.
    - riffic 3y ago
      just sound it out in your head. If you see an apostrophe with it's, it usually means "it is" Otherwise someone oopsed and you can leave a dumb grammar comment on HN
    - skyyler 3y ago
      >I knew what the concept was called, found an article, skimmed it until I was sure it was talking about the thing I thought it was You just managed to summarise why having conversations with strangers is so difficult on the internet these days. Instead of considering that you were incorrect, even for a moment, you sought an article that you thought would confirm the ideas that you already had. Without even actually reading it, you used it as evidence that you were correct all along. Even though the article very clearly illustrates that you were mistaken. Fascinating.

Symmetry 3y ago

That's something that's started changing over the last few months. Official support for the RX 7900 GPUs for Linux has been added to the most recent versions of ROCm and over on the ROCm subreddit people are reporting success getting other RDNA 3 cards working. On Windows you've got consumer cards from the previous generation getting official support too. This is, obviously, way overdue and it might not be enough to let AMD get back into the race but

latchkey 3y ago

In my eyes, the real problem is that there is no cost effective developer access to high end cards, like the MI300x. This breaks the developer flywheel that you would normally point at consumer cards for. Where can you rent time on one? Traditionally, AMD has only helped build super computers, like Frontier and El Capitan, out of these cards. This time around Azure [0] and other CSP's (cloud service providers) are working to change that. I will have the best of the best of their cards/systems for rent soon. [0] https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/azure-high-performance-computing/azure-announces-new-ai-optimized-vm-series-featuring-amd-s/ba-p/3980770 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/azure-high-performanc...