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I'm very vocal about this to the point where the naive/cursory view is that I'm an "Nvidia fanboy". It's amazing how many times I've had to try to relate this p
by kkielhofner 3y ago
I'm very vocal about this to the point where the naive/cursory view is that I'm an "Nvidia fanboy". It's amazing how many times I've had to try to relate this point and how much hate I get for it - Nvidia is lightyears ahead of AMD and the overall ROCm ecosystem in terms of software support. AMD makes fantastic hardware but at the end of the day it doesn't do anything without software. This is very obvious and very basic.
CUDA will do whatever you want and it more-or-less just works. ROCm (after > six years) is still:
- Won't work on your hardware
- Used to work on your hardware but we removed support within a few years
- Burn 10x more time trying to get something to work
- Be perpetually behind CUDA in terms of what you want/need to do
- Sorry, that just won't work
- Performance is lower than it should be for what is often actually better hardware, to the point where a superior newer generation AMD GPU gets bested by a previous generation Nvidia GPU with inferior (on paper) hardware specs
I've been trying ROCm since it was initially released > six years ago. I want AMD to succeed - I've purchased every new generation of AMD GPU in these six years to evaluate the suitability of AMD/ROCm for my workloads. Once a quarter or so I check back in to evaluate ROCm.
Every. Single. Time. I come away laughing/shaking my head at how abysmal it is. Then I go back to CUDA and sit in wonder at how well it actually works and throw even more money at Nvidia because I just need get things done and my concerns about their monopoly, artificial market segmentation, ridiculously high margins, etc are a distant second to my livelihood.
AMD (and others) need to understand what Jensen Huang has been saying for years - 30% of their development spend is on software. As the announcements this week show, Nvidia is using their greater and greater financial resources and market share to continue to lap AMD in the only thing people actually care about: here's our product and here's what you can actually do with it.
Many people with a fundamental hate/disgust for Nvidia will come back and say "ok bootlicker, it's supported in torch you're spreading FUD". Ok, take a look at the Nvidia platform you linked and show me where the ROCm equivalent is. Take a look at inference serving platforms which are one of the things I care most about. Look at flash attention, alibi, and the countless other software components that you actually need beyond torch in many cases. Watch even basic torch crash all over the place with ROCm.
Sure, you /might/ be able to train or run local one-off inference with AMD. How do I actually run this thing for my users? Crickets -or- maybe vLLM support for ROCm for LLMs (nothing for other models). Then dig just a little bit deeper and realize even vLLM isn't feature complete, requires patches, specific versions all around, and from personal experience a lot of github/blog spelunking and pain. With CUDA it's `docker run` and flies.
With CUDA I can run torchserve, HF TGI, vLLM, Triton, and a number of others to actually serve models up for users so I can make money from my work. ROCm, meanwhile, can barely run local experiments.
AMD needs to get it together.