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According to the article, AMD seems to have pulled the plug on this as they think it will hinder ROCMv6 adoption, which still btw only supports two consumer car

According to the article, AMD seems to have pulled the plug on this as they think it will hinder ROCMv6 adoption, which still btw only supports two consumer cards out of their entire line up[1] 1. https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-ROCm-6.0-Released https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-ROCm-6.0-Released

bhouston 3y ago
AMD should have the funds to push both of these initiatives at once. If the ROCM team has political reasons to kill the competition, it is because they are scared it will succeed. I've seen this happen in big companies. But management at AMD should be above petty team politics and fund both because at the company level they do not care which solution wins in the end.
- imtringued 3y ago
  Why would they be worried about people using their product? Some CUDA wrapper on top of ROCM isn't going to get them fired. It doesn't get rid of ROCM's function as a GPGPU driver.
- zer00eyz 3y ago
  If your AMD you don't want to be compatible till you have a compelling feature of your own. Good enough CUDA + New feature x gives them leverage in the inevitable court battle(S) and patten sharing agreement that everyone wants to see. AMD' already stuck its toe in the water: new CPU's with their AI cores built in. If you can get a AM5 socket to run with 196 gigs, that's a large (all be it slow) model you can run.
kkielhofner 3y ago
With the most recent card being their one year old flagship ($1k) consumer GPU... Meanwhile CUDA supports anything with Nvidia stamped on it before it's even released. They'll even go as far as doing things like adding support for new GPUs/compute families to older CUDA versions (see Hopper/Ada and CUDA 11.8). You can go out and buy any Nvidia GPU the day of release, take it home, plug it in, and everything just works. This is what people expect. AMD seems to have no clue that this level of usability is what it will take to actually compete with Nvidia and it's a real shame - their hardware is great.
- KingOfCoders 3y ago
  AMD thinks the reason Nvidia is ahead of them is bad marketing on their part, and good marketing (All is AI) by Nvidia. They don't see the difference in software stacks. For years I want to get off the Nvidia train for AI, but I'm forced to buy another Nvidia card b/c AMD stuff just doesn't work, and all examples work with Nvidia cards as they should.
  - fortran77 3y ago
    At the risk of sounding like Jeff Ballmer, the reason I only use NVIDIA for GPGPU work (our company does a lot of it!) is the developer support. They have compilers, tools, documentation, and tech support for developers who want to do any type of GPGPU computing on their hardware that just isn't matched on any other platform.
- roenxi 3y ago
  You've got to remember that AMD are behind at all aspects of this, including documenting their work in an easily digestible way. "Support" means that the card is actively tested and presumably has some sort of SLA-style push to fix bugs for. As their stack matures, a bunch of cards that don't have official support will work well [0]. I have an unsupported card. There are horrible bugs. But the evidence I've seen is that the card will work better with time even though it is never going to be officially supported. I don't think any of my hardware is officially supported by the manufacturer, but the kernel drivers still work fine. > Meanwhile CUDA supports anything with Nvidia stamped on it before it's even released... A lot of older Nvidia cards don't support CUDA v9 [1]. It isn't like everything supports everything, particularly in the early part of building out capability. The impression I'm getting is that in practice the gap in strategy here is not as large as the current state makes it seem. [0] If anyone has bought an AMD card for their machine to multiply matrices they've been gambling on whether the capability is there. This comment is reasonable speculation, but I want to caveat the optimism by asserting that I'm not going to put money into AMD compute until there is some some actual evidence on the table that GPU lockups are rare. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUDA#GPUs_supported https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUDA#GPUs_supported
MrBuddyCasino 3y ago
AMD truly deserves its misfortune in the GPU market.
incrudible 3y ago
That is really out of touch. ROCm is garbage as far as I am concerned. A drop in replacement, especially one that seems to perform quite well, is really interesting however.

bhouston 3y ago

AMD should have the funds to push both of these initiatives at once. If the ROCM team has political reasons to kill the competition, it is because they are scared it will succeed. I've seen this happen in big companies. But management at AMD should be above petty team politics and fund both because at the company level they do not care which solution wins in the end.

imtringued 3y ago
Why would they be worried about people using their product? Some CUDA wrapper on top of ROCM isn't going to get them fired. It doesn't get rid of ROCM's function as a GPGPU driver.
zer00eyz 3y ago
If your AMD you don't want to be compatible till you have a compelling feature of your own. Good enough CUDA + New feature x gives them leverage in the inevitable court battle(S) and patten sharing agreement that everyone wants to see. AMD' already stuck its toe in the water: new CPU's with their AI cores built in. If you can get a AM5 socket to run with 196 gigs, that's a large (all be it slow) model you can run.

kkielhofner 3y ago

With the most recent card being their one year old flagship ($1k) consumer GPU... Meanwhile CUDA supports anything with Nvidia stamped on it before it's even released. They'll even go as far as doing things like adding support for new GPUs/compute families to older CUDA versions (see Hopper/Ada and CUDA 11.8). You can go out and buy any Nvidia GPU the day of release, take it home, plug it in, and everything just works. This is what people expect. AMD seems to have no clue that this level of usability is what it will take to actually compete with Nvidia and it's a real shame - their hardware is great.

KingOfCoders 3y ago
AMD thinks the reason Nvidia is ahead of them is bad marketing on their part, and good marketing (All is AI) by Nvidia. They don't see the difference in software stacks. For years I want to get off the Nvidia train for AI, but I'm forced to buy another Nvidia card b/c AMD stuff just doesn't work, and all examples work with Nvidia cards as they should.
- fortran77 3y ago
  At the risk of sounding like Jeff Ballmer, the reason I only use NVIDIA for GPGPU work (our company does a lot of it!) is the developer support. They have compilers, tools, documentation, and tech support for developers who want to do any type of GPGPU computing on their hardware that just isn't matched on any other platform.
roenxi 3y ago
You've got to remember that AMD are behind at all aspects of this, including documenting their work in an easily digestible way. "Support" means that the card is actively tested and presumably has some sort of SLA-style push to fix bugs for. As their stack matures, a bunch of cards that don't have official support will work well [0]. I have an unsupported card. There are horrible bugs. But the evidence I've seen is that the card will work better with time even though it is never going to be officially supported. I don't think any of my hardware is officially supported by the manufacturer, but the kernel drivers still work fine. > Meanwhile CUDA supports anything with Nvidia stamped on it before it's even released... A lot of older Nvidia cards don't support CUDA v9 [1]. It isn't like everything supports everything, particularly in the early part of building out capability. The impression I'm getting is that in practice the gap in strategy here is not as large as the current state makes it seem. [0] If anyone has bought an AMD card for their machine to multiply matrices they've been gambling on whether the capability is there. This comment is reasonable speculation, but I want to caveat the optimism by asserting that I'm not going to put money into AMD compute until there is some some actual evidence on the table that GPU lockups are rare. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUDA#GPUs_supported https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUDA#GPUs_supported

MrBuddyCasino 3y ago

AMD truly deserves its misfortune in the GPU market.

incrudible 3y ago

That is really out of touch. ROCm is garbage as far as I am concerned. A drop in replacement, especially one that seems to perform quite well, is really interesting however.