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I have read many reports of people giving up on it, claiming that it is terribly buggy and has been for a while. The question is, under what circumstances did A

I have read many reports of people giving up on it, claiming that it is terribly buggy and has been for a while. The question is, under what circumstances did AMD test it and what does AMD consider "working". Probably it works on some specific setups under certain use conditions.

redeeman 3y ago
and thats the problem. Seriously, its not that hard, just make some goddamn software that you can build and use more or less anywhere, why is it that I can relatively easily build mesa with vulkan/opengl driver for AMD cards, but their "rocm" is an atrocious mess? Honestly, it just stinks of incompetence, or if one were otherwise inclined in beliefs, disgust for their customers. If AMD had been hiring japanese to make this, they would have had to close up shop as they would have all had to perform seppuku.
- weebull 3y ago
  Rocm hasn't been the the problem in my experience. It's things like pytorch on rocm. It uses hippify to convert cuda code to hip rather than having native support. It "works", but it's an obvious second class citizen, and the developers don't seem to take bug reports / PRs seriously.
roenxi 3y ago
More than likely they are testing it on specific server setups with a dedicated GPU handling compute workloads. Think supercomputers and maybe cloud provider setups. That'd make sense if someone in AMD ranked the opportunities by $ value and started working down the list fixing bugs. My anecdotal evidence with an AMD GPU is there are serious problems trying to use a graphics card to run graphics and throwing a few compute tasks at it - because X11 will reliably crash and the kernel graphics driver enters some sort of corrupt state. I think that is a use case that was beyond their design considerations to start with. There is a hint that servers are targeted because they supported linux first with ROCm, and had a very tight support matrix of what OS they expected people to use. Unfortunately, this strategy generates a lot of bad publicity and I'd guess has trouble gaining traction because people can't experiment cheaply with AMD hardware. They're progressing though and even with a dose of cynicism about their wherewithal there is a lot in the pipe that has the potential to take on CUDA. Even APUs are promising.

redeeman 3y ago

and thats the problem. Seriously, its not that hard, just make some goddamn software that you can build and use more or less anywhere, why is it that I can relatively easily build mesa with vulkan/opengl driver for AMD cards, but their "rocm" is an atrocious mess? Honestly, it just stinks of incompetence, or if one were otherwise inclined in beliefs, disgust for their customers. If AMD had been hiring japanese to make this, they would have had to close up shop as they would have all had to perform seppuku.

weebull 3y ago
Rocm hasn't been the the problem in my experience. It's things like pytorch on rocm. It uses hippify to convert cuda code to hip rather than having native support. It "works", but it's an obvious second class citizen, and the developers don't seem to take bug reports / PRs seriously.

roenxi 3y ago

More than likely they are testing it on specific server setups with a dedicated GPU handling compute workloads. Think supercomputers and maybe cloud provider setups. That'd make sense if someone in AMD ranked the opportunities by $ value and started working down the list fixing bugs. My anecdotal evidence with an AMD GPU is there are serious problems trying to use a graphics card to run graphics and throwing a few compute tasks at it - because X11 will reliably crash and the kernel graphics driver enters some sort of corrupt state. I think that is a use case that was beyond their design considerations to start with. There is a hint that servers are targeted because they supported linux first with ROCm, and had a very tight support matrix of what OS they expected people to use. Unfortunately, this strategy generates a lot of bad publicity and I'd guess has trouble gaining traction because people can't experiment cheaply with AMD hardware. They're progressing though and even with a dose of cynicism about their wherewithal there is a lot in the pipe that has the potential to take on CUDA. Even APUs are promising.