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This is his opinion, nothing more, nothing less. He currently has a partially implemented piece of software that hasn't seen a release since November and isn't

This is his opinion, nothing more, nothing less. He currently has a partially implemented piece of software that hasn't seen a release since November and isn't performant at all. Take the free offer, prove everyone wrong and then start to tell us how great you are. https://x.com/HotAisle/status/1880507210217750550 https://x.com/HotAisle/status/1880507210217750550

FeepingCreature 2y ago
To be fair, having seen his software evolve, and having seen ROCm evolve, I'm more optimistic for his software in a year than yours. He picked his problem better. The whole reason that tinygrad is, well, tiny, is that it limits the amount of overhead to onboard people and perform maintenance and rewrites. My strong impression is that the ROCm codebase is simply much too large for AMD's dev resources. You're trying to race NVidia on their turf with less resources. It's brave, but foolish. I can see how Tinygrad could succeed. The story makes sense. AMD's doesn't, neither logically nor empirically. NVidia would have to seriously fumble.
- llm_trw 2y ago
  >NVidia would have to seriously fumble. Worked for AMD in the CPU market. That said I'm deeply worried about anyone whose based their company on amd gpus. The only reason why they do well in hpc is because there's an army of dreadfully underpaid and over performing grand students to pick up the slack from AMD. Trying to do that in a corporate environment is company suicide.
  - modeless 2y ago
    TSMC is more responsible for AMD's success vs. Intel than AMD is. Unfortunately for AMD, Nvidia uses TSMC too.
    - jorvi 2y ago
      3D-Cache blows Intel out of the water and has absolutely nothing to do with TSMC. Same goes for the clever chiplet design.
      - modeless 2y ago
        This is false. 3D VCache is enabled by TSMC's 3DFabric packaging. It also didn't really play a role in AMD passing Intel. Chiplets are also enabled by TSMC technology, CoWoS.
        jorvi 2y ago
        > 3D VCache is enabled by TSMC's 3DFabric packaging > Chiplets are also enabled by TSMC technology, CoWoS. Interesting, my mistake. Thank you for pointing that out!
        wmf 2y ago
        But AMD decided to use those technologies and Intel decided not to. AMD on TSMC N4 is beating Intel on TSMC N3 because AMD has better designs.
        modeless 2y ago
        When AMD passed Intel, they hadn't even decided to use TSMC at all yet. Of course now Intel is behind in leveraging TSMC technology. They started late.
  - sangnoir 2y ago
    > That said I'm deeply worried about anyone whose based their company on amd gpus Sony Interactive and Microsoft XBox seem to be doing great without an army of underpaid students. AMD does great at the top and bottom: the corporates in the middle that are unwilling or unable to pay people to author/tweak their software for AMD GPUs will do better going with Nvidia, which has great OOTB software, and a premium to go with it. I suppose if AMD had infinite resources, it'd fix this post-haste.
    - aurareturn 2y ago
      That's for gaming though, which AMD/ATi has decades of experience in.
    - Eval-Apply 2y ago
      Sony and Microsoft don't need to interact with AMD's software, they just use the hardware. Just see that Sony made its own upscaling software via ML and even created hardware with several pieces of RDNA architectures, so much so that they called it RDNA 2X (RDNA 2 (compute) + WMMA from RDNA 3 and RT from RDNA 4).
      - sangnoir 2y ago
        > Sony and Microsoft don't need to interact with AMD's software, they just use the hardware That's the entire point of AMD partnering with larger companies, rather than going all-in with consumers and small startups at this point in time.
cyberax 2y ago
AMD is so behind NVidia that it's not even funny. If AMD board had any sense, they'd be carpet-bombing every researcher, AI startup, and random Joes with the latest engineering samples of unreleased top-of-the line products. And giving them a direct line to the engineering team. This would end up costing maybe tens of millions at most, but the potential return is indeed measured in billions. And yep, lots of people like geohot are (to put it mildly) eccentric. So deal with it. They are not merely your customers, they are your freaking sales people. As it is, I work in a startup that does a bit of AI vision-related stuff. I'm not going to even touch AMD because I don't want to deal with divas on the AMD board in future. NVidia is more expensive right now, but they're far more predictable.
- latchkey 2y ago
  > AMD is so behind NVidia that it's not even funny. Do you really want all AI hardware and software dominated by a monopoly? We're not looking to "beat" Nvidia, we are looking to offer a compelling alternative. MI300x is compelling. MI355x is even more compelling. If there is another company out there making a compelling product, send them my way!
  - doctorpangloss 2y ago
    Time will tell, no? Transmeta shipped a lot of Crusoes. It was run by brilliant people. It was a “compelling alternative.” Maybe Cerebras is the Transmeta of this race, I don’t know. But. It’s not about making an alternative. It most definitely is about “beating” NVIDIA. Otherwise, you are just shoveling dollars - shareholders’, undercompensated employees at AMD and TSMC, etc. - to Meta, like everyone else.
    - latchkey 2y ago
      The current ASIC's all fail in the memory game, they are not compelling. Cerebras is even more unavailable than AMD! > It most definitely is about “beating” NVIDIA. Hard disagree, but we are just going to have to agree to disagree on that.
  - 2y ago

FeepingCreature 2y ago

To be fair, having seen his software evolve, and having seen ROCm evolve, I'm more optimistic for his software in a year than yours. He picked his problem better. The whole reason that tinygrad is, well, tiny, is that it limits the amount of overhead to onboard people and perform maintenance and rewrites. My strong impression is that the ROCm codebase is simply much too large for AMD's dev resources. You're trying to race NVidia on their turf with less resources. It's brave, but foolish. I can see how Tinygrad could succeed. The story makes sense. AMD's doesn't, neither logically nor empirically. NVidia would have to seriously fumble.

llm_trw 2y ago
>NVidia would have to seriously fumble. Worked for AMD in the CPU market. That said I'm deeply worried about anyone whose based their company on amd gpus. The only reason why they do well in hpc is because there's an army of dreadfully underpaid and over performing grand students to pick up the slack from AMD. Trying to do that in a corporate environment is company suicide.
- modeless 2y ago
  TSMC is more responsible for AMD's success vs. Intel than AMD is. Unfortunately for AMD, Nvidia uses TSMC too.
  - jorvi 2y ago
    3D-Cache blows Intel out of the water and has absolutely nothing to do with TSMC. Same goes for the clever chiplet design.
    - modeless 2y ago
      This is false. 3D VCache is enabled by TSMC's 3DFabric packaging. It also didn't really play a role in AMD passing Intel. Chiplets are also enabled by TSMC technology, CoWoS.
      - jorvi 2y ago
        > 3D VCache is enabled by TSMC's 3DFabric packaging > Chiplets are also enabled by TSMC technology, CoWoS. Interesting, my mistake. Thank you for pointing that out!
      - wmf 2y ago
        But AMD decided to use those technologies and Intel decided not to. AMD on TSMC N4 is beating Intel on TSMC N3 because AMD has better designs.
        modeless 2y ago
        When AMD passed Intel, they hadn't even decided to use TSMC at all yet. Of course now Intel is behind in leveraging TSMC technology. They started late.
- sangnoir 2y ago
  > That said I'm deeply worried about anyone whose based their company on amd gpus Sony Interactive and Microsoft XBox seem to be doing great without an army of underpaid students. AMD does great at the top and bottom: the corporates in the middle that are unwilling or unable to pay people to author/tweak their software for AMD GPUs will do better going with Nvidia, which has great OOTB software, and a premium to go with it. I suppose if AMD had infinite resources, it'd fix this post-haste.
  - aurareturn 2y ago
    That's for gaming though, which AMD/ATi has decades of experience in.
  - Eval-Apply 2y ago
    Sony and Microsoft don't need to interact with AMD's software, they just use the hardware. Just see that Sony made its own upscaling software via ML and even created hardware with several pieces of RDNA architectures, so much so that they called it RDNA 2X (RDNA 2 (compute) + WMMA from RDNA 3 and RT from RDNA 4).
    - sangnoir 2y ago
      > Sony and Microsoft don't need to interact with AMD's software, they just use the hardware That's the entire point of AMD partnering with larger companies, rather than going all-in with consumers and small startups at this point in time.

cyberax 2y ago

AMD is so behind NVidia that it's not even funny. If AMD board had any sense, they'd be carpet-bombing every researcher, AI startup, and random Joes with the latest engineering samples of unreleased top-of-the line products. And giving them a direct line to the engineering team. This would end up costing maybe tens of millions at most, but the potential return is indeed measured in billions. And yep, lots of people like geohot are (to put it mildly) eccentric. So deal with it. They are not merely your customers, they are your freaking sales people. As it is, I work in a startup that does a bit of AI vision-related stuff. I'm not going to even touch AMD because I don't want to deal with divas on the AMD board in future. NVidia is more expensive right now, but they're far more predictable.

latchkey 2y ago
> AMD is so behind NVidia that it's not even funny. Do you really want all AI hardware and software dominated by a monopoly? We're not looking to "beat" Nvidia, we are looking to offer a compelling alternative. MI300x is compelling. MI355x is even more compelling. If there is another company out there making a compelling product, send them my way!
- doctorpangloss 2y ago
  Time will tell, no? Transmeta shipped a lot of Crusoes. It was run by brilliant people. It was a “compelling alternative.” Maybe Cerebras is the Transmeta of this race, I don’t know. But. It’s not about making an alternative. It most definitely is about “beating” NVIDIA. Otherwise, you are just shoveling dollars - shareholders’, undercompensated employees at AMD and TSMC, etc. - to Meta, like everyone else.
  - latchkey 2y ago
    The current ASIC's all fail in the memory game, they are not compelling. Cerebras is even more unavailable than AMD! > It most definitely is about “beating” NVIDIA. Hard disagree, but we are just going to have to agree to disagree on that.
- 2y ago