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I expect everyone has been saying it for a while, the calls are just getting more strident and public as it becomes clear that AMD's failures are strategic rath
by roenxi 2y ago
I expect everyone has been saying it for a while, the calls are just getting more strident and public as it becomes clear that AMD's failures are strategic rather than tactical. And as people try to build business on their half-hearted attempts.
I still think it is a mistake to say that CUDA is a moat. IMO the problem here is that AMD still doesn't seem to think that GPGPU compute is a thing. They don't seem to understand the idea that someone might want to use their graphics cards to multiply matricies independently of a graphics pipeline. All the features CUDA supports are irrelevant compared to the fact that AMD can't handle GEMM performantly out of the box. In my experience it just can't do it, back in the day my attempts to multiply matrices would crash drivers. That isn't a moat, but it certainly is something spectacular.
If they could manage an engineering process that delivered good GEMM performance then the other stuff can probably get handled. But without it there really is a question of what these cards are for.
- ryao 2y agoI wonder to what extent vulkan compute could be used for this. Of course, it is only an option on their RDNA GPUs since CDNA is not for graphics, even though that is the G in GPU.
- Fronzie 2y agoThere has been some testing within llama.cpp, which supports both Vulkan and ROCM-Blas. When it works, the latter is about 2x faster than the Vulkan version.
- pjmlp 2y agoUnless it provides the polyglot capabilities of CUDA, and related IDE and graphical debugging capabilities, not really.
- schmidtleonard 2y agoYeah, 80% margins on matrix multiplication should be a puddle not a moat but AMD is more scared of water than the witch that melts in Wizard of Oz so I guess the puddle is a moat after all.