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AMD has years of catching up to do with ROCm just to get their devices to work well. They don't support all their own graphics cards that can do AI, and when it

AMD has years of catching up to do with ROCm just to get their devices to work well. They don't support all their own graphics cards that can do AI, and when it is supported, it's buggy. The AMDGPU graphics driver for Linux has had continued instability since 6.6. I don't understand why they can't hire better software engineers.

onlyrealcuzzo 7mo ago
Because they aren't willing to pay for them?
oofbey 7mo ago
Years. They neglected ROCm for soooo long. I have friends who worked there 5+ years ago who tried desperately to convince execs to invest more in ROCm and failed. You had to have your head stuck pretty deep in the sand back then to not see that AI was becoming an important workload. I would love AMD to be competitive. The entire industry would be better off if NVIDIA was less dominant. But AMD did this to themselves. One hundred percent.
- tux1968 7mo ago
  It would be very helpful to deeply understand the truth behind this management failing. The actual players involved, and their thinking. Was it truly a blind spot? Or was it mistaken priorities? I mean, this situation has been so obvious and tragic, that I can't help feeling like there is some unknown story-behind-the-story. We'll probably never really know, but if we could, I wouldn't spend quite as much time wearing a tinfoil hat.
  - throwawayrgb 7mo ago
    if you asked AMD execs they'd probably say they never had the money to build out a software team like NVIDIA's. that might only be part of the answer. the rest would be things like lack of vision, "can't turn a tanker on a dime", etc.
    - KeplerBoy 7mo ago
      I don't buy that story. NVIDIA wasn't that huge of a company when they built CUDA, they weren't huge when the first GPT model was trained with it.
      - Alupis 7mo ago
        CUDA was built during the time AMD was focusing every resource on becoming competitive in the CPU market again. Today they dominate the CPU industry - but CUDA was first to market and therefore there's a ton of inertia behind it. Even if ROCm gets very good, it'll still struggle to overcome the vast amount of support (read "moat") CUDA enjoys.
        KeplerBoy 7mo ago
        True. After all Nvidia hasn't built tensorflow or PyTorch. That stuff was bound to be built on the first somewhat viable platform. Rocm is probably far ahead of where cuda was back then, but the goal moved.
    - pjc50 7mo ago
      Has to be lack of vision. I refuse to believe it's impossible to _do_, but it sounds like it's impossible to _specify_ within AMD. Like they're genuinely incapable of working out what the solution might look like.
    - aurareturn 7mo ago
      They were doing stock buybacks before the AI boom.
    - imtringued 7mo ago
      Nobody is asking AMD to rebuild the entire NVidia ecosystem. Most people just want to run GPGPU code or ML code on AMD GPUs without the entire computer crashing on them.
      - throwawayrgb 7mo ago
  - oofbey 7mo ago
    My guess is it’s just incompetence. Imagine you’re in charge of ROCm and your boss asks you how it’s going. Do you say good things about your team and progress? Do you highlight the successes and say how you can do all the major things CUDA can? I think many people would. Or do you say to your boss “the project I’m in charge of is a total disaster and we are a joke in the industry”? That’s a hard thing to say.
    - throwawayrgb 7mo ago
      > My guess is it’s just incompetence. maybe on some level but not that level you're describing. pretty much everyone at AMD understands the situation, and has for a while.
    - Shitty-kitty 7mo ago
      a 10 year lead can't be closed overnight but Intel had a even larger lead and look how the mighty have fallen.
      - pjmlp 7mo ago
        Intel was never famous for good GPUs, and they are basically the only ones still trying to make something out of OpenCL, with most of the tooling going beyond what Khronos offers. one API is much more than a plain old SYCL distribution, and still.
        throwaway173738 7mo ago
        Try not to rely on Intel too much. They cut products with promise all the time because they miss quarterly numbers.
        Shitty-kitty 7mo ago
        I meant their CPU supremaciy. ;)
        pjmlp 7mo ago
        That still reigns in PCs and servers. People like to talk about Apple CPUs, but keep forgetting they don't sell chips, and overall desktop market is around 10% world wide. ARM is mostly about phones and tablets, good luck finally getting those Windows ARM or GNU/Linux desktop cases or laptops. Servers, depends pretty much about which hyperscalers we are on. RISC-V is still to be seen, on the desktop, laptops and servers. Where AMD is doing great are game consoles.
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
- jijijijij 7mo ago
  Not even AI. My 5 years old APU is completely neglected by AMD ROCm efforts. So I also can't use it in Blender! I feel quite betrayed to be honest. How is such a basic thing not possible, not to mention years later? Look where Apple Silicon managed going in the same time frame... Because of this, I would never consider another AMD GPU for a long time. Gaming isn't everything I want my GPU doing. How do they keep screwing this up? Why isn't it their top priority?
xethos 7mo ago
> I don't understand why they can't hire better software engineers. Beyond the fact they're competing with the most valuable companies in the world for talent while being less than a decade past "Bet the company"-level financial distress?
- shakow 7mo ago
  I don't think that you need top-of-the-line, $1M/yr TC people to revamp a build system.
  - mathisfun123 7mo ago
    lol the irony is that the person who started revamping the build system is a $1M/yr TC person.
    - klooney 7mo ago
      Sometimes the only way you can get basic engineering practices done like "have tests", "have a build system", "run the tests and the builds automatically", "insist that the above work" without management freaking out is to pay someone a lot of money.
prewett 7mo ago
I figure it must be a cultural problem. ATI was known for buggy graphics drivers back in The Day, if I remember correctly. I certainly remember not buying their cards for that reason. Apparently after AMD bought them, they have been unable to change the culture (or didn't care). The state of ATI drivers has always been about the same.
- philipallstar 7mo ago
  I don't think they invest nearly as large a percentage of their profits in software compared to Nvidia.
  - StillBored 7mo ago
    I don't even think that is the problem. It seems more an engineering cultural one, that has sadly infected most of the software industry at this point. Instead of incremental improvement it seems the old ATI drivers (and seemingly much of the recent history) are just rewrites rather than having a replaceable low level core and a reasonable amount of legacy that just gets forward ported to newer HW architectures. So, they release the hardware and its basically obsolete before the driver stack ever stabilizes sufficiently that any single driver can run a wide range of games well.
jrm4 7mo ago
[flagged]

onlyrealcuzzo 7mo ago

Because they aren't willing to pay for them?

oofbey 7mo ago

Years. They neglected ROCm for soooo long. I have friends who worked there 5+ years ago who tried desperately to convince execs to invest more in ROCm and failed. You had to have your head stuck pretty deep in the sand back then to not see that AI was becoming an important workload. I would love AMD to be competitive. The entire industry would be better off if NVIDIA was less dominant. But AMD did this to themselves. One hundred percent.

tux1968 7mo ago
It would be very helpful to deeply understand the truth behind this management failing. The actual players involved, and their thinking. Was it truly a blind spot? Or was it mistaken priorities? I mean, this situation has been so obvious and tragic, that I can't help feeling like there is some unknown story-behind-the-story. We'll probably never really know, but if we could, I wouldn't spend quite as much time wearing a tinfoil hat.
- throwawayrgb 7mo ago
  if you asked AMD execs they'd probably say they never had the money to build out a software team like NVIDIA's. that might only be part of the answer. the rest would be things like lack of vision, "can't turn a tanker on a dime", etc.
  - KeplerBoy 7mo ago
    I don't buy that story. NVIDIA wasn't that huge of a company when they built CUDA, they weren't huge when the first GPT model was trained with it.
    - Alupis 7mo ago
      CUDA was built during the time AMD was focusing every resource on becoming competitive in the CPU market again. Today they dominate the CPU industry - but CUDA was first to market and therefore there's a ton of inertia behind it. Even if ROCm gets very good, it'll still struggle to overcome the vast amount of support (read "moat") CUDA enjoys.
      - KeplerBoy 7mo ago
        True. After all Nvidia hasn't built tensorflow or PyTorch. That stuff was bound to be built on the first somewhat viable platform. Rocm is probably far ahead of where cuda was back then, but the goal moved.
  - pjc50 7mo ago
    Has to be lack of vision. I refuse to believe it's impossible to _do_, but it sounds like it's impossible to _specify_ within AMD. Like they're genuinely incapable of working out what the solution might look like.
  - aurareturn 7mo ago
    They were doing stock buybacks before the AI boom.
  - imtringued 7mo ago
    Nobody is asking AMD to rebuild the entire NVidia ecosystem. Most people just want to run GPGPU code or ML code on AMD GPUs without the entire computer crashing on them.
    - throwawayrgb 7mo ago
- oofbey 7mo ago
  My guess is it’s just incompetence. Imagine you’re in charge of ROCm and your boss asks you how it’s going. Do you say good things about your team and progress? Do you highlight the successes and say how you can do all the major things CUDA can? I think many people would. Or do you say to your boss “the project I’m in charge of is a total disaster and we are a joke in the industry”? That’s a hard thing to say.
  - throwawayrgb 7mo ago
    > My guess is it’s just incompetence. maybe on some level but not that level you're describing. pretty much everyone at AMD understands the situation, and has for a while.
  - Shitty-kitty 7mo ago
    a 10 year lead can't be closed overnight but Intel had a even larger lead and look how the mighty have fallen.
    - pjmlp 7mo ago
      Intel was never famous for good GPUs, and they are basically the only ones still trying to make something out of OpenCL, with most of the tooling going beyond what Khronos offers. one API is much more than a plain old SYCL distribution, and still.
      - throwaway173738 7mo ago
        Try not to rely on Intel too much. They cut products with promise all the time because they miss quarterly numbers.
      - Shitty-kitty 7mo ago
        I meant their CPU supremaciy. ;)
        pjmlp 7mo ago
        That still reigns in PCs and servers. People like to talk about Apple CPUs, but keep forgetting they don't sell chips, and overall desktop market is around 10% world wide. ARM is mostly about phones and tablets, good luck finally getting those Windows ARM or GNU/Linux desktop cases or laptops. Servers, depends pretty much about which hyperscalers we are on. RISC-V is still to be seen, on the desktop, laptops and servers. Where AMD is doing great are game consoles.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
jijijijij 7mo ago
Not even AI. My 5 years old APU is completely neglected by AMD ROCm efforts. So I also can't use it in Blender! I feel quite betrayed to be honest. How is such a basic thing not possible, not to mention years later? Look where Apple Silicon managed going in the same time frame... Because of this, I would never consider another AMD GPU for a long time. Gaming isn't everything I want my GPU doing. How do they keep screwing this up? Why isn't it their top priority?

xethos 7mo ago

> I don't understand why they can't hire better software engineers. Beyond the fact they're competing with the most valuable companies in the world for talent while being less than a decade past "Bet the company"-level financial distress?

shakow 7mo ago
I don't think that you need top-of-the-line, $1M/yr TC people to revamp a build system.
- mathisfun123 7mo ago
  lol the irony is that the person who started revamping the build system is a $1M/yr TC person.
  - klooney 7mo ago
    Sometimes the only way you can get basic engineering practices done like "have tests", "have a build system", "run the tests and the builds automatically", "insist that the above work" without management freaking out is to pay someone a lot of money.

prewett 7mo ago

I figure it must be a cultural problem. ATI was known for buggy graphics drivers back in The Day, if I remember correctly. I certainly remember not buying their cards for that reason. Apparently after AMD bought them, they have been unable to change the culture (or didn't care). The state of ATI drivers has always been about the same.

philipallstar 7mo ago
I don't think they invest nearly as large a percentage of their profits in software compared to Nvidia.
- StillBored 7mo ago
  I don't even think that is the problem. It seems more an engineering cultural one, that has sadly infected most of the software industry at this point. Instead of incremental improvement it seems the old ATI drivers (and seemingly much of the recent history) are just rewrites rather than having a replaceable low level core and a reasonable amount of legacy that just gets forward ported to newer HW architectures. So, they release the hardware and its basically obsolete before the driver stack ever stabilizes sufficiently that any single driver can run a wide range of games well.

jrm4 7mo ago

[flagged]