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Frontier will run for more than 2 years before being replaced, but there are many more national lab type organizations than FAANG companies. If you decide to cl

Frontier will run for more than 2 years before being replaced, but there are many more national lab type organizations than FAANG companies. If you decide to classify anything below FAANG scale as "not large", well... And anyway, my point was merely that there are large customers going AMD. As for the supposed contradiction: Cuda is much more than PyTorch support. There is a real breadth of proprietary C++ libraries. When I (and many others here I guess) say cuda, we mean that breadth of effort. Not just the cuda backend of pytorch. You don't have to match that breadth of effort to be competitive for very many AI applications being built higher up the stack, you only have to have a good enough ROCm backend for pytorch, and from everything I am hearing, it's getting there (if you are on Instinct, and not consumer hardware). But I don't have first hand experience. What I have first-hand experience with is what NVIDIA tried to pitch us. They want to be the AI "platform", rather than just a hardware vendor. It all sounded like they know that their software advantage is brittle in places, hence the "platform" strategy. But they couldn't really articulate what that should mean. I think the moat metaphor is ill-suited. This is not a situation where, if the moat is breached in some places, the castle falls. NV will have a software advantage in some domains for a long time to come. But at the same time, we are seeing that AMDs hardware can be competitive and better in domains where the software advantage matters comparatively less.

almostgotcaught 2y ago
> but there are many more national lab type organizations than FAANG companies Is your claim really that national labs outspend FAANG for compute? Like do you understand what you're saying? You're off by probably an order of magnitude if not two. > You don't have to match that breadth of effort to be competitive for very many AI applications being built higher up the stack, you only have to have a good enough ROCm backend for pytorch, and from everything I am hearing, it's getting there (if you are on Instinct, and not consumer hardware). But I don't have first hand experience. I don't want to say too much more because I work somewhere that is very close to this story/melodrama but everything you're hearing is aspirational hype and what I wish for everyone talking about this is much less gossip and much more first-hand reality.
- Certhas 2y ago
  I have said nothing of the sort anywhere in this thread. All I said is that AMD is viable for some large customers. You chose to continue to misinterpret that after several clarifications. Then you throw out vague statements, and claim that you "don't want to say much more", to complain in the next sentence that it's all gossip. You have literally offered no argument, other than saying "trust me, I know, I am an insider"...
  - almostgotcaught 2y ago
    > You have literally offered no argument I absolutely did but seemingly no one understands the force of it (because no one actually cares about details). My argument was very very simple: go look at the hip backend in pytorch and the cuda backend. To anyone that understands what's what, that alone speaks volumes. Not my fault if you don't understand though.
    - Certhas 2y ago
      Again, your argument is ad hominem ("you don't understand") and not naming an actual problem but declaring that it's obvious to anyone who wants to look. The AMD and the CUDA backend in pytorch are actually derived from the same code base. AMD compiles the CUDA code to its HIP interface (which is essentially a reimplementation of CUDA), and that's that. It's all upstreamed and so changes to the CUDA backend are tested against the AMD build. If there is a problem with that strategy, then it's up to you to demonstrate it because the prima facie evidence is that it works: I can go to Azure and buy an AMD Instinct VM and run a Hugging Face model on that right now, with marginally more effort than it takes to run it on an nVidia VM.
      - almostgotcaught 2y ago
        > Again, your argument is ad hominem ("you don't understand") It's not ad hominem - it was my argument in literally my first response without a single word of shade. you then go and say "you have no argument" and I respond with "well if you can't understand the argument then sure I have no argument". pretty simple. I read this on reddit at some point: you're not the victim here, you're just starting a fight and then losing that fight. > If there is a problem with that strategy, then it's up to you to demonstrate it because the prima facie evidence is that it works you think that yolking yourself to your direct competitor's runtime API is a sound product strategy? really? i'm sure you'll come back with "intel x86_64 blah blah blah". the fact is it's not a sound strategy and maybe it would be wise for AMD to build out a real HIP backend (and maybe they already are).

almostgotcaught 2y ago

> but there are many more national lab type organizations than FAANG companies Is your claim really that national labs outspend FAANG for compute? Like do you understand what you're saying? You're off by probably an order of magnitude if not two. > You don't have to match that breadth of effort to be competitive for very many AI applications being built higher up the stack, you only have to have a good enough ROCm backend for pytorch, and from everything I am hearing, it's getting there (if you are on Instinct, and not consumer hardware). But I don't have first hand experience. I don't want to say too much more because I work somewhere that is very close to this story/melodrama but everything you're hearing is aspirational hype and what I wish for everyone talking about this is much less gossip and much more first-hand reality.

Certhas 2y ago
I have said nothing of the sort anywhere in this thread. All I said is that AMD is viable for some large customers. You chose to continue to misinterpret that after several clarifications. Then you throw out vague statements, and claim that you "don't want to say much more", to complain in the next sentence that it's all gossip. You have literally offered no argument, other than saying "trust me, I know, I am an insider"...
- almostgotcaught 2y ago
  > You have literally offered no argument I absolutely did but seemingly no one understands the force of it (because no one actually cares about details). My argument was very very simple: go look at the hip backend in pytorch and the cuda backend. To anyone that understands what's what, that alone speaks volumes. Not my fault if you don't understand though.
  - Certhas 2y ago
    Again, your argument is ad hominem ("you don't understand") and not naming an actual problem but declaring that it's obvious to anyone who wants to look. The AMD and the CUDA backend in pytorch are actually derived from the same code base. AMD compiles the CUDA code to its HIP interface (which is essentially a reimplementation of CUDA), and that's that. It's all upstreamed and so changes to the CUDA backend are tested against the AMD build. If there is a problem with that strategy, then it's up to you to demonstrate it because the prima facie evidence is that it works: I can go to Azure and buy an AMD Instinct VM and run a Hugging Face model on that right now, with marginally more effort than it takes to run it on an nVidia VM.
    - almostgotcaught 2y ago
      > Again, your argument is ad hominem ("you don't understand") It's not ad hominem - it was my argument in literally my first response without a single word of shade. you then go and say "you have no argument" and I respond with "well if you can't understand the argument then sure I have no argument". pretty simple. I read this on reddit at some point: you're not the victim here, you're just starting a fight and then losing that fight. > If there is a problem with that strategy, then it's up to you to demonstrate it because the prima facie evidence is that it works you think that yolking yourself to your direct competitor's runtime API is a sound product strategy? really? i'm sure you'll come back with "intel x86_64 blah blah blah". the fact is it's not a sound strategy and maybe it would be wise for AMD to build out a real HIP backend (and maybe they already are).