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You know what happens to companies that panic and throw all their resources into knee-jerk software projects? I don't, but I'd predict it is ugly. Adding more p
by roenxi 3y ago
You know what happens to companies that panic and throw all their resources into knee-jerk software projects? I don't, but I'd predict it is ugly. Adding more people to a bad project generally makes it worse.
The issue that AMD has is they had a long period where they clearly had no idea what they were doing. You could tell just from looking at websites, CUDA pretty much immediately gets to "here is a library for FFT", "here is a library for sparse matricies". AMD would explain that ROCM is an abbreviation of the ROCm Software platform or something unspeakably stupid. And that your graphics card wasn't supported.
That changed a few months ago; so it looks like they have put some competent PMs in the chair now or something. But it'll take months for the flow on effects to reach the market. They have to figure out what the problems are which takes months to do properly; then fix the software (1-3 months more minimum); then get it into the open and the foundational libraries like PyTorch pick it up (might take another year). You can speed that up, but more cooks in the kitchen is not the way. Bandwidth use needs to be optimised.
It isn't like ROCm seems lacks key features; it can technically do inference and training. My card crashes regularly though (might be a VRAM issue) so it is useless in practice. AMD can check boxes but the software doesn't really work and grappling with that organisationally is hard. Unless you have the right people in the right places, which AMD didn't have up to at least mid 2023.
- elcomet 3y agoPytorch has been supporting rocm for all last 2 years
- Certhas 3y agoLook at AMDs vs Intel. They have now surpassed Intel in terms of CPUs sold and market cap. That was unthinkable even six, seven years ago. It makes perfect sense that, organisationally, they were focused on that battle. If you remember the Athlon days, AMD beat Intel before, but briefly. It didn't last. This time it looks like they beat Intel and have had the focus to stay. Intel will come back and beat them some cycles, but there is no collapse on the horizon. So it makes sense that they started looking at nVidia in the last year or so. Of course nVidia has amassed an obscene war chest in the meantime...
- nicoburns 3y agoAMDs graphics was an acquisition though (ATI), and I understand that the company culture of that division might still be quite different.
- makomk 3y ago> AMD would explain that ROCM is an abbreviation of the ROCm Software platform or something unspeakably stupid. And that your graphics card wasn't supported. If even that. A few years ago they managed to break basic machine learning code on the few commonly-used consumer GPUs that were officially supported at the time, and it was only after several months of more or less radio silence on the bug report and several releases that they declared those GPUs were no longer officially supported and they'd be closing the bug report: https://github.com/ROCm/ROCm/issues/1265 https://github.com/ROCm/ROCm/issues/1265