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It would be good if AMD did something, anything. Support this, reimplement that, support upstream efforts, dont really care. Any of those would cost a couple o

It would be good if AMD did something, anything. Support this, reimplement that, support upstream efforts, dont really care. Any of those would cost a couple of million and be worth a trillion dollars to AMD shareholders.

oezi 2y ago
A couple of million doesn't get you anything in corporate land
- spacebanana7 2y ago
  A couple dozen billion for a 10% chance of becoming NVIDIA competitive is worth it, looking at the stock prices.
  - oezi 2y ago
    Billions. Now we are talking.
    - langcss 2y ago
      That or Geohot
slashdave 2y ago
ROCm counts as "something"
- curt15 2y ago
  Pretty much any modern NVIDIA GPU supports CUDA. You don't have to buy a datacenter-class unit to get your feet wet with CUDA programming. ROCm will count as "something" when the same is true for AMD GPUs.
  - muxr 2y ago
    I don't think AMD needs to support 5+ year old GPUs personally. And all the recent generations are already practically supported. AMD only claims support for a select few GPUs, but in my testing I find all the GPUs work fine if the architecture is supported. I've tested rx6600, rx6700xt for example and even though they aren't officially supported, they work fine on ROCm.
    - Dylan16807 2y ago
      > 5+ year old GPUs AMD had a big architecture switchover exactly 5 years ago, and the full launch wasn't over until 4.5 years ago. I think that generation should have full support. Especially because it's not like they're cutting support now. They didn't support it at launch, and they didn't support it after 1, 2, 3, 4 years either. The other way to look at things, I'd say that for a mid to high tier GPU to be obsolete based on performance, the replacement model needs to be over twice as fast. 7700XT is just over 50% faster than 5700XT.
    - imtringued 2y ago
      I'm on a 5+ year old GPU, because I don't trust AMD to offer a compelling GPU that actually works. An RX 7 570 is good enough for the little gaming I do. It mostly acts as an oversized iGPU that has good Linux drivers, but since AMD is not supporting ROCm on this GPU, there is no need to hurry on upgrading to a better GPU or to get my feet wet on running things locally on the GPU like Stable Diffusion, LLMs, etc.
  - CuriousCosmic 2y ago
    ROCm supports current gen consumer gpus officially and a decent chunk of recent gen consumer gpus unofficially. Not all of them of course but a decent chunk. It's not ideal but I'm pretty sure CUDA didn't support everything from day 1. And ROCm is part of AMD's vendor part of the Windows AI stack so from upcoming gen on out basically anything that outputs video should support ROCm.
    - ChoGGi 2y ago
chatmasta 2y ago
Is it weird how the comments here are blaming AMD and not Nvidia? Sure, the obvious argument is that Nvidia has no practical motivation to build an open platform. But there are counterexamples that suggest otherwise (Android). And there is a compelling argument that long term, their proprietary firmware layer will become an insufficient moat to their hardware dominance. Who’s the root cause? The company with the dominant platform that refuses to open it up, or the competitor who can’t catch up because they’re running so far behind? Even if AMD made their own version of CUDA that was better in every way, it still wouldn’t gain adoption because CUDA has become the standard. No matter what they do, they’ll need to have a compatibility layer. And in that case maybe it makes sense for them to invest in the best one that emerges from the community.
- lmm 2y ago
  > Is it weird how the comments here are blaming AMD and not Nvidia? Nvidia has put in the legwork and are reaping the rewards. They've worked closely with the people who are actually using their stuff, funding development and giving loads of support to researchers, teachers and so on, for probably a decade now. Why should they give all that away? > But there are counterexamples that suggest otherwise (Android). How is Android a counterexample? Google makes no money off of it, nor does anyone else. Google keeps Android open so that Apple can't move everyone onto their ad platform, so it's worth it for them as a strategic move, but Nvidia has no such motive. > Even if AMD made their own version of CUDA that was better in every way, it still wouldn’t gain adoption because CUDA has become the standard. Maybe. But again, that's because NVidia has been putting in the work to make something better for a decade or more. The best time for AMD to start actually trying was 10 years ago; the second-best time is today.
  - Zambyte 2y ago
    > Google makes no money off of it, nor does anyone else Google makes no money off of Android? That seems like a really weird claim to make. Do you really think Google would be anywhere near as valuable of a company if iOS had all of the market share that the data vacuum that is Android has? I can't imagine that being the case. Google makes a boatload off of Android, just like AMD would if they supported open GPGPU efforts aggressively.

oezi 2y ago

A couple of million doesn't get you anything in corporate land

spacebanana7 2y ago
A couple dozen billion for a 10% chance of becoming NVIDIA competitive is worth it, looking at the stock prices.
- oezi 2y ago
  Billions. Now we are talking.
  - langcss 2y ago
    That or Geohot

slashdave 2y ago

ROCm counts as "something"

curt15 2y ago
Pretty much any modern NVIDIA GPU supports CUDA. You don't have to buy a datacenter-class unit to get your feet wet with CUDA programming. ROCm will count as "something" when the same is true for AMD GPUs.
- muxr 2y ago
  I don't think AMD needs to support 5+ year old GPUs personally. And all the recent generations are already practically supported. AMD only claims support for a select few GPUs, but in my testing I find all the GPUs work fine if the architecture is supported. I've tested rx6600, rx6700xt for example and even though they aren't officially supported, they work fine on ROCm.
  - Dylan16807 2y ago
    > 5+ year old GPUs AMD had a big architecture switchover exactly 5 years ago, and the full launch wasn't over until 4.5 years ago. I think that generation should have full support. Especially because it's not like they're cutting support now. They didn't support it at launch, and they didn't support it after 1, 2, 3, 4 years either. The other way to look at things, I'd say that for a mid to high tier GPU to be obsolete based on performance, the replacement model needs to be over twice as fast. 7700XT is just over 50% faster than 5700XT.
  - imtringued 2y ago
    I'm on a 5+ year old GPU, because I don't trust AMD to offer a compelling GPU that actually works. An RX 7 570 is good enough for the little gaming I do. It mostly acts as an oversized iGPU that has good Linux drivers, but since AMD is not supporting ROCm on this GPU, there is no need to hurry on upgrading to a better GPU or to get my feet wet on running things locally on the GPU like Stable Diffusion, LLMs, etc.
- CuriousCosmic 2y ago
  ROCm supports current gen consumer gpus officially and a decent chunk of recent gen consumer gpus unofficially. Not all of them of course but a decent chunk. It's not ideal but I'm pretty sure CUDA didn't support everything from day 1. And ROCm is part of AMD's vendor part of the Windows AI stack so from upcoming gen on out basically anything that outputs video should support ROCm.
  - ChoGGi 2y ago

chatmasta 2y ago

Is it weird how the comments here are blaming AMD and not Nvidia? Sure, the obvious argument is that Nvidia has no practical motivation to build an open platform. But there are counterexamples that suggest otherwise (Android). And there is a compelling argument that long term, their proprietary firmware layer will become an insufficient moat to their hardware dominance. Who’s the root cause? The company with the dominant platform that refuses to open it up, or the competitor who can’t catch up because they’re running so far behind? Even if AMD made their own version of CUDA that was better in every way, it still wouldn’t gain adoption because CUDA has become the standard. No matter what they do, they’ll need to have a compatibility layer. And in that case maybe it makes sense for them to invest in the best one that emerges from the community.

lmm 2y ago
> Is it weird how the comments here are blaming AMD and not Nvidia? Nvidia has put in the legwork and are reaping the rewards. They've worked closely with the people who are actually using their stuff, funding development and giving loads of support to researchers, teachers and so on, for probably a decade now. Why should they give all that away? > But there are counterexamples that suggest otherwise (Android). How is Android a counterexample? Google makes no money off of it, nor does anyone else. Google keeps Android open so that Apple can't move everyone onto their ad platform, so it's worth it for them as a strategic move, but Nvidia has no such motive. > Even if AMD made their own version of CUDA that was better in every way, it still wouldn’t gain adoption because CUDA has become the standard. Maybe. But again, that's because NVidia has been putting in the work to make something better for a decade or more. The best time for AMD to start actually trying was 10 years ago; the second-best time is today.
- Zambyte 2y ago
  > Google makes no money off of it, nor does anyone else Google makes no money off of Android? That seems like a really weird claim to make. Do you really think Google would be anywhere near as valuable of a company if iOS had all of the market share that the data vacuum that is Android has? I can't imagine that being the case. Google makes a boatload off of Android, just like AMD would if they supported open GPGPU efforts aggressively.