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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
by 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 agoGood 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 agoWhat you described would have been a fine strategy. That's not AMD's strategy. To implement your strategy, you either don't ship mass market GPGPU cards, or you stick a big "beta / prototype" label on ROCm and make sure people use it only caveat emptor. I've bought plenty of half-baked things because I wanted to tinker with them or help a company along. AMD cards are very competitive for gaming too, which really brings volume much more so than GPGPU, so there's no reason to oversell. AMD's problem is that they're claiming these things work, and they don't. I was fortunate to learn that lesson spending a few hundred bucks. I know people who learned that lesson spending thousands. I wouldn't want to figure out on a data center or a supercomputer whether or not the same lesson applies. If a company is willing to cheaply torch relationships as it figures out a strategy, ship half-baked ill-thought-out software, and make bold, unsubstantiated claims, I'll pick another vendor if at all competitive. AMD is losing mind share, credibility, and branding. That will hurt if they ever have a product ready for the broader market, and it will also hurt (although not as much) with the strategy you described.
- flamedoge 3y agoAMD hardware is amazing. AMD software needs catching up to do. It's pretty amazing how Nvidia's strategy of making compute tools available on most consumer grade cards is paying off latent dividends -- consumers learn on their own hw and become developers/researchers using same stack, something AMD needs to realize. The result is Nvidia is a trillion dollar company and AMD only 1/5 of that.
- imtringued 3y agoDid you read his post? Software isn't catching up. For most AMD GPU owners, the software quality is getting worse over time.
- YetAnotherNick 3y ago> AMD hardware is amazing How did you reach the conclusion? In almost all the metric, AMD is just 20-30% ahead or wildly behind. e.g. AMD is so much behind in tensor cores in consumer grade GPU or raytracing.
- flamedoge 3y agoI'm just saying AMD hardware is (namely their compute line of cards). Nvidia has great scientists in light transport research and it shows in their Real-time ray tracers.