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That limitation is totally artificial. There is nothing stopping AMD from allowing the sale of an affordable 48GB 7900 (or 32GB 7800) right now... In fact they

That limitation is totally artificial. There is nothing stopping AMD from allowing the sale of an affordable 48GB 7900 (or 32GB 7800) right now... In fact they already do in the form of the W7900, for $4500. They just don't sell those at competitive consumer prices, as they are playing the anticompetitive artificial segmentation game right alongside Nvidia, because they somehow think their tiny workstation market is more valuable than seeding AI development on their cards. Technically speaking, AMD could sell "cheap" 96GB+ GPUs by simply swapping the 7000 series memory controller die. This would take some time and money, but not an eternity + fortune like Nvidia would need to tape out a whole new GPU die. Intel has no workstation market to lose. I suspect the Arc A770 was kinda late and skimpy for a 32GB "AI" SKU, but the next generation could be very interesting.

gruez 3y ago
>as they are playing the anticompetitive artificial segmentation game right alongside Nvidia Product segmentation might be anti-consumer (in the sense that they can charge higher prices overall), but it's hardly "anticompetitive". >than seeding AI development on their cards *ceding
- badsectoracula 3y ago
  I understood "seeding AI development on their cards" as in "making sure AI development in the future will happen on their cards". "ceding" sounds like the opposite of that (i.e. giving up).
- brucethemoose2 3y ago
  The anti competitiveness is from the pricing in the face of competition. W7900 margins are enormous. In a competitive market, AMD would massively undercut the 48GB RTX A6000 and the 24GB 4090, which Nvidia is price gouging even more. They absolutely can... But they don't. Separately, its also (IMO) a bone headed business decision.
Der_Einzige 3y ago
You have no idea how deep the Nvidia lock-in goes. AMD only supports small fractions of the deep custom eco-systems built around models such as Stable Diffusion. Good luck getting half of the shit built for ComfyUI or Automatic1111 to run at all, and frequently those features are the killer ones which motivate folks to want to do AI in the first place. There's a reason why Nvidia is a first class citizen among all of the AI clouds. AMD is even behind Intel in this regard, because at least Intel had an existing robust ecosystem of accelerators (i.e. intel optimized sklearn/pytorch, OpenVino, etc) AMD can be 4x better in every way compared to Nvidia hardware wise but if they can't get developer communities to build around their equivalent to CUDA and its ecosystem than it's not looking rosy for AMDs future.
- ClumsyPilot 3y ago
  Which makes it even more stupid that AMD does not at least try to compensate for their shortcoming by selling large memory GPUs, there would be a reason to develop for team red
  - brucethemoose2 3y ago
    Yeah. If there was a 40GB-48GB 7900 SKU, I would have bought it over a 3090 in a heartbeat, even at a big premium over the 24GB card. And I'd be debugging ROCm support in ML projects left and right. But I am not. The 24GB SKU is just not worth the trouble over a 3090, which is more RAM efficient out of the box. I can't pay $5K for a W7900.
- latchkey 3y ago
  > but if they can't get developer communities to build around their equivalent to CUDA and its ecosystem than it's not looking rosy for AMDs future. Dec 6th was an announcement from Lisa Su about the MI300x. It also included a full on commitment to ROCm as well as other projects like pyTorch. They are clearly aware of what you're talking about, and working on it. It isn't something that can magically be fixed over night, but it is something that people can complain about on HN over and over and over again...
MegaDeKay 3y ago
AMD plays that artificial segmentation game with SR-IOV as well, unfortunately. Intel is supporting SR-IOV in Linux with the latest Xe GPU driver they are developing, but it isn't clear to me that they'll allow it in the consumer cards. If they do, and if I can run a Linux host and Windows guest simultaneously on one card, I'll be on it like stink on a monkey.
- jadbox 3y ago
  I didn't know about SR IOV! I took would love to see that adopted on consumer cards.

gruez 3y ago

>as they are playing the anticompetitive artificial segmentation game right alongside Nvidia Product segmentation might be anti-consumer (in the sense that they can charge higher prices overall), but it's hardly "anticompetitive". >than seeding AI development on their cards *ceding

badsectoracula 3y ago
I understood "seeding AI development on their cards" as in "making sure AI development in the future will happen on their cards". "ceding" sounds like the opposite of that (i.e. giving up).
brucethemoose2 3y ago
The anti competitiveness is from the pricing in the face of competition. W7900 margins are enormous. In a competitive market, AMD would massively undercut the 48GB RTX A6000 and the 24GB 4090, which Nvidia is price gouging even more. They absolutely can... But they don't. Separately, its also (IMO) a bone headed business decision.

Der_Einzige 3y ago

You have no idea how deep the Nvidia lock-in goes. AMD only supports small fractions of the deep custom eco-systems built around models such as Stable Diffusion. Good luck getting half of the shit built for ComfyUI or Automatic1111 to run at all, and frequently those features are the killer ones which motivate folks to want to do AI in the first place. There's a reason why Nvidia is a first class citizen among all of the AI clouds. AMD is even behind Intel in this regard, because at least Intel had an existing robust ecosystem of accelerators (i.e. intel optimized sklearn/pytorch, OpenVino, etc) AMD can be 4x better in every way compared to Nvidia hardware wise but if they can't get developer communities to build around their equivalent to CUDA and its ecosystem than it's not looking rosy for AMDs future.

ClumsyPilot 3y ago
Which makes it even more stupid that AMD does not at least try to compensate for their shortcoming by selling large memory GPUs, there would be a reason to develop for team red
- brucethemoose2 3y ago
  Yeah. If there was a 40GB-48GB 7900 SKU, I would have bought it over a 3090 in a heartbeat, even at a big premium over the 24GB card. And I'd be debugging ROCm support in ML projects left and right. But I am not. The 24GB SKU is just not worth the trouble over a 3090, which is more RAM efficient out of the box. I can't pay $5K for a W7900.
latchkey 3y ago
> but if they can't get developer communities to build around their equivalent to CUDA and its ecosystem than it's not looking rosy for AMDs future. Dec 6th was an announcement from Lisa Su about the MI300x. It also included a full on commitment to ROCm as well as other projects like pyTorch. They are clearly aware of what you're talking about, and working on it. It isn't something that can magically be fixed over night, but it is something that people can complain about on HN over and over and over again...

MegaDeKay 3y ago

AMD plays that artificial segmentation game with SR-IOV as well, unfortunately. Intel is supporting SR-IOV in Linux with the latest Xe GPU driver they are developing, but it isn't clear to me that they'll allow it in the consumer cards. If they do, and if I can run a Linux host and Windows guest simultaneously on one card, I'll be on it like stink on a monkey.

jadbox 3y ago
I didn't know about SR IOV! I took would love to see that adopted on consumer cards.