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At least some of this is "support" meaning different things to different people. AMD means something like "your engineers can raise jira tickets related to the

At least some of this is "support" meaning different things to different people. AMD means something like "your engineers can raise jira tickets related to the supercomputer you bought". The general idea outside of that context seems to be "support" means "can run stuff on the GPU". There's some analogy to games dev - if call of duty doesn't run on an amdgpu, you also don't get to complain to AMD about it, but the games studio certainly will do. The games studio is the entity with the contact details. ROCm is fairly likely to run on unsupported consumer cards if you build the libraries from source or use them from someone who did, which is just about viable from linux distributions now. You don't get to raise official jira tickets about it when it falls over because it's "unsupported". You'll have a moderately bad time if you ignore the docs recommendations about the kernel version for a given release, or if the difficult task of building the libraries from source goes awry. The established packaging idea of only shipping machine code libraries for a subset of the GPUs you sell, and giving very limited information on how to make those libraries exist for other GPUs, is obviously making essentially everyone very pissed off with AMD. Their engineers are aware of that and disagree about what to do about it. I personally think that'll resolve itself once Debian packaging is generally usable. People will install ROCm from their distro instead of from the official builds which don't have machine code for gaming GPUs anyway. That will give rise to new annoyances but at least the applications will try to run on whatever GPU you've got locally.

frognumber 3y ago
"Support," to me, means not dropping support in newer versions of ROCm. See the current compatibility matrix: https://rocm.docs.amd.com/projects/radeon/en/latest/docs/compatibility.html https://rocm.docs.amd.com/projects/radeon/en/latest/docs/com... I bought my (in-production, advertised ROCm-capable) card during the great GPU shortage of 2020, and literally anything new stopped working a few months later when AMD decided to update ROCm to drop support for GFX8 GPUs: https://github.com/ROCm/ROCm/issues/1353 https://github.com/ROCm/ROCm/issues/1353 All the packages I was using (like Spacy) required later ROCm almost immediately. There was literally no way to make them work. Running older packages is a non-starter if you want things like, say, your machines to not be compromised. > if call of duty doesn't run on an amdgpu, you also don't get to complain to AMD about it, but the games studio certainly will do If "Call of Duty" is advertised on the box, and doesn't run, yes, this is false advertising, and "consumers" get to complain to the graphics card maker or AMD. In this case, small claims court would give me a refund if I sued AMD; an advertised ROCm-compatible GPU stopped being ROCm-compatible within the warranty period. It's just not worth complaining or suing over a few hundred bucks. I didn't need much performance, and this was purely for dev -- to make sure I bought this purely so I could have compatibility with AMD. AMD decided to not have compatibility with me, and I said f--k AMD. The result is that if you want to run my data pipeline, it won't work on AMD. A major industry will hopefully standardize on it, and guess who is locked out of selling any GPUs to that industry if that happens?
- JonChesterfield 3y ago
  That seems to be a different thing again. You had at least one rocm version that claimed to work with your GPU and then later versions dropped it. Your options then are to stay with the rocm version that claimed to support it or to build a newer rocm yourself, or get it from distros etc, where at some point in the future it'll probably stop working entirely. I don't know what plays into which GPUs are listed as supported on which versions of ROCm. I'm sure my 6800GT was marked "supported" on some version and isn't on the current one. I think my radeon vii was likewise "supported" on some of them and isn't any more. I used a 5700 XT for a year or so which was never on the blessed list. I obsessively build everything from source instead of using the release binaries though.
  - frognumber 3y ago
    Neither of those would have worked, but that's another post. However, I had a third option, which I took: I bought a working NVidia card, put my AMD card in my attic, swore off AMD GPUs and ROCm forever*, and began warn other people against ever relying on AMD. That's the option I took. Now, my software is tied to CUDA. Others are building more on top if it. If people want to run my software (or by proxy, and software which uses my software as a platform), they have more-or-less the same option if they accidentally bought AMD. So far, I haven't heard from any users who accidentally bought AMD. Right now, I'm just waiting for Arc A770 support to improve, so I can also support Intel. That will be the cheapest way to run my tools, since you get 16GB for $300. I'm not the only one who took this path. I'm just more vocal about it. * Some exclusions apply.
    - sangnoir 3y ago
      Good for you. AMD is focussing on larger customers who write their own software (that runs on supercomputer and in datacenters). Targeting a high-margin, limited scope market before prosumers/consumers is decent strategy for a company that doesn't have Nvidia's deep pockets. It is frustrating as a consumer - dealing with ROCm on an consumer card was a massive pain for the period I bothered to put in the effort. However, I remain bullish on AMD, I think their current GPUs are their Bulldozer-equivalent; I'm waiting patiently for the AMD GPU Zen-1-moment

frognumber 3y ago

"Support," to me, means not dropping support in newer versions of ROCm. See the current compatibility matrix: https://rocm.docs.amd.com/projects/radeon/en/latest/docs/compatibility.html https://rocm.docs.amd.com/projects/radeon/en/latest/docs/com... I bought my (in-production, advertised ROCm-capable) card during the great GPU shortage of 2020, and literally anything new stopped working a few months later when AMD decided to update ROCm to drop support for GFX8 GPUs: https://github.com/ROCm/ROCm/issues/1353 https://github.com/ROCm/ROCm/issues/1353 All the packages I was using (like Spacy) required later ROCm almost immediately. There was literally no way to make them work. Running older packages is a non-starter if you want things like, say, your machines to not be compromised. > if call of duty doesn't run on an amdgpu, you also don't get to complain to AMD about it, but the games studio certainly will do If "Call of Duty" is advertised on the box, and doesn't run, yes, this is false advertising, and "consumers" get to complain to the graphics card maker or AMD. In this case, small claims court would give me a refund if I sued AMD; an advertised ROCm-compatible GPU stopped being ROCm-compatible within the warranty period. It's just not worth complaining or suing over a few hundred bucks. I didn't need much performance, and this was purely for dev -- to make sure I bought this purely so I could have compatibility with AMD. AMD decided to not have compatibility with me, and I said f--k AMD. The result is that if you want to run my data pipeline, it won't work on AMD. A major industry will hopefully standardize on it, and guess who is locked out of selling any GPUs to that industry if that happens?

JonChesterfield 3y ago
That seems to be a different thing again. You had at least one rocm version that claimed to work with your GPU and then later versions dropped it. Your options then are to stay with the rocm version that claimed to support it or to build a newer rocm yourself, or get it from distros etc, where at some point in the future it'll probably stop working entirely. I don't know what plays into which GPUs are listed as supported on which versions of ROCm. I'm sure my 6800GT was marked "supported" on some version and isn't on the current one. I think my radeon vii was likewise "supported" on some of them and isn't any more. I used a 5700 XT for a year or so which was never on the blessed list. I obsessively build everything from source instead of using the release binaries though.
- frognumber 3y ago
  Neither of those would have worked, but that's another post. However, I had a third option, which I took: I bought a working NVidia card, put my AMD card in my attic, swore off AMD GPUs and ROCm forever*, and began warn other people against ever relying on AMD. That's the option I took. Now, my software is tied to CUDA. Others are building more on top if it. If people want to run my software (or by proxy, and software which uses my software as a platform), they have more-or-less the same option if they accidentally bought AMD. So far, I haven't heard from any users who accidentally bought AMD. Right now, I'm just waiting for Arc A770 support to improve, so I can also support Intel. That will be the cheapest way to run my tools, since you get 16GB for $300. I'm not the only one who took this path. I'm just more vocal about it. * Some exclusions apply.
  - sangnoir 3y ago
    Good for you. AMD is focussing on larger customers who write their own software (that runs on supercomputer and in datacenters). Targeting a high-margin, limited scope market before prosumers/consumers is decent strategy for a company that doesn't have Nvidia's deep pockets. It is frustrating as a consumer - dealing with ROCm on an consumer card was a massive pain for the period I bothered to put in the effort. However, I remain bullish on AMD, I think their current GPUs are their Bulldozer-equivalent; I'm waiting patiently for the AMD GPU Zen-1-moment