For context, the submitter of the issue is Anush Elangovan from AMD who's recently been a lot more active on social after the SemiAnalysis article, and taking the reigns / responsibility of moving AMD's software efforts forward.
However you want to dissect this specific issue, I'd generally consider this a positive step and nice to see it hit the front page.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ROCm/comments/1i5aatx/rocm_feedback...
Also know as the AMD representative who recently argued with Hotz about supporting tinycorp.
Is that a bad thing? Good for him to stand up to extortion.
Hard to say from my perspective.
I think AMDs offer was fair (full remote access to several test machines), then again just giving tinycorp the boxes on their terms with no strings attached as a kind of research grant would have earned them some goodwill with that corner of the community.
Either way both parties will continue making controversial decisions.
It isn't hard. We offered as well. Full BIOS access even.
Another neocloud, that is funded directly by AMD, also offered to buy him boxes. He refused. It had to come from AMD. That's absurd and extortionist.
Long thread here: https://x.com/HotAisle/status/1880467322848137295
To add, AMD only makes _parts_ of an MI300X server.
It's like asking a tire manufacturer to give you a car for free.
Great analogy!
Just uploaded some pictures of how complex these machines really are...
He explained the reasoning:
> Now, why don't they send me the two boxes? I understand when I was asking for firmware to be open sourced that that actually might be difficult for them, but the boxes are on eBay with a simple $$ cost. It was never about the boxes themselves, it was a test to see if software had any budget or power. And they failed super hard
"and they failed" from his PoV... but not from us looking at things from the other side of the table.
> He refused. It had to come from AMD. That's absurd and extortionist.
I'm on the wrong side of the Twitter wall to read the source, but that doesn't sound absurd. Extortionist, maybe. Hotz's major complaint (last time I checked, anyway) is pretty close to one I have - AMD appears to have between little and no strategic interest in consumer grade graphics cards having strong GPGPU support leading to random crashes from the kernel drivers and a certain attitude of "meh, whatever" from AMD corporate when dealing with that.
I doubt any specific boxes or testing regime are his complaint, he'd be much more worried about whether AMD management have any interest in companies like his succeeding. Third parties providing some support doesn't sound like it'd cut it. The process of being burned by AMD leaves one a little leery of any alleged support without some serious guarantees that more major changes are afoot in their management view.
> ...he'd be much more worried about whether AMD management have any interest in companies like his succeeding.
This reads as incredibly entitled. AMD owes him nothing, especially if he's opposed to the leadership's vision[1] and being belligerent about it.
There is maybe 1 or 2 companies with enough cachet to demand management changes at a supplier like AMD - and they have market caps in the trillions.
1. Lisa Su hasn't been shy about AMD being all about partnering with large partners who can move volume. My interpretation of this is AMD prefers dealing with Sony, Microsoft, hyperscalers, and HPC builders, then possibly tier II OEMs. Small startups are probably much further down the line, close to consumers at the tail end of AMD's attention queue. I don't like it as a consumer, but it seems like a sound strategy since the partners will shoulder most of the software effort, which is a weakness AMD has against Nvidia. They can focus on cranking out ok-to-great hardware at more-than-ok prices and build up a warchest for future investments, and who knows when this hype bubble will burst and take VC dollars with it, or someone invents an architecture that's less demanding on compute (if you're more optimistic)
> AMD appears to have between little and no strategic interest in consumer grade graphics cards having strong GPGPU support leading to random crashes from the kernel drivers and a certain attitude of "meh, whatever" from AMD corporate when dealing with that.
AMD has little interest in software support in general.
Their Adrenalin software is riddled with bugs that have been here for years.
Having watched some of his streams on the topic, I think you've captured it well. He's basically saying he's done wasting time on AMD unless/until they get serious. It's not so much that he wants free hardware from them, rather he wants to see them put some skin in the game as they basically blew him off the last time he tried to engage with them.
> He's basically saying he's done wasting time on AMD unless/until they get serious.
They are serious, they just don't respond to his demands.
Or anyone else for that matter, they simply do not care about software.
... they do now thanks to Anush taking the reigns.
Maybe he needs the AMD brand for his fundraising.
AMD's offer was more than fair. Hotz was throwing a trantrum.
"I estimate having software on par with NVDA would raise their market cap by 100B. Then you estimate what the chance it that @__tinygrad__ can close that gap, say it's 0.1%, probably a very low estimate when you see what we have done so far, but still...
That's worth 100M. And they won't even send us 2 ~100k boxes. In what world does that make sense, except in a world where decisions are made based on pride instead of ROI. Culture issue."
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
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.
>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.
> 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.
TSMC is more responsible for AMD's success vs. Intel than AMD is. Unfortunately for AMD, Nvidia uses TSMC too.
3D-Cache blows Intel out of the water and has absolutely nothing to do with TSMC. Same goes for the clever chiplet design.
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.
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.
> 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!
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.
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.
It's not my job to reformat the entire AI market.
I'm willing to try AMD, and I even built an AMD-based machine to experiment with AI workflows. So far it has been failing miserably. I don't care that MI300X is compelling when I can't make samples work both on my desktop and on a cloud-based MI300X. I don't care about their academic collaborations, I'm not in the business of producing papers.
I'll just pay for H100 in the cloud to be sure that I will be able to run the resulting models on my 3090 locally and/or deploy to 4090 clusters.
If AMD shows some sense, commits to long-term support for their hardware with reasonable feature-parity across multiple generations, I'll reconsider them.
And AMD has a history of doing that! Their CPU division is _excellent_, they are renowned for having long-term support for motherboard socket types. I remember being able to buy a motherboard and then not worrying about upgrading the CPU for the next 3-4 years.
> I'm willing to try AMD, and I even built an AMD-based machine to experiment with AI workflows. So far it has been failing miserably. I don't care that MI300X is compelling when I can't make samples work both on my desktop and on a cloud-based MI300X.
Anush was actively looking for feedback on this on github today...
https://www.reddit.com/r/ROCm/comments/1i5aatx/rocm_feedback...
I would really like to see a concrete, legit way to materialize a "100M raise in market cap" into actual ROI ...
When the market cap rises, price of shares goes up? Do you know what a market cap is?
Yes, but the company doesn't get more money from that. The only, way to get money out of it is by selling shares at the new price.
However it would also raise future revenue, which should be what's reflected by the market.
So it would still be something that's good for the company, but not nearly 100B good.
You dont think AMD being competitive with Nvidia (3,37 trillion USD MC) would be "nearly 100B good"? Believe it or not the only reason thats not the case is good bug-free software. Thats what tinygrad is doing
AMD already has major ongoing projects with OpenXLA/IREE. Lots of established engineers/researchers, and it’s in collaboration with Google/AWS. Hotz is delusional if he thinks that he can do better by ripping off Karpathy’s toy autograd implementation.
> AMD already has major ongoing projects with OpenXLA/IREE.
And how's that been going? The AMD stock price compared to NVidia seems to speak volumes about the efficacy of these projects.
IREE has been around for 5 years, without producing anything overtly practical. They seem to be focused more on academic jobs and citations. It's also focused on the general case of a compiler for "all" AI-type tasks, supporting everything from WASM to CUDA.
OpenXLA seems to be a bit more practical, but I spent the last 2 hours trying to make it work on my AMD card (Radeon Pro W7900) and failing.
I personally don't like Tinygrad's approach of doing their own thing rather than integrating into PyTorch/JAX/..., but it at least is _practical_ with a reasonable end-goal. Is it going to be successful? Who knows. But it's more practical than anything AMD has done within the recent 5 years.
Yeah, AMD is already pouring a lot of support into OpenXLA/IREE, which has a lot of well-respected compiler engineers and researchers working on it, and companies like AWS are also investing into it.
I don’t really think TinyCorp has anything to offer AMD.
Offering software support in exchange for payment is extortion?
It is far more complex than that.
Complex how? He requested payment in the form of MI300X servers, which is unconventional, sure, but the value of the payment is not out of line with the support he proposed to provide IMO.
Which SemiAnalysis article?
Really telling they have to ask us for what cards we want as opposed to supporting all cards by default from day 1 like Nvidia.
All because they went with a boneheaded decision to require per-device code compilation (gfx1030, gfx1031...) instead of compiling to an intermediate representation like CUDA's PTX. Doubly boneheaded considering the graphics API they developed, Vulkan, literally does that via SPIR-V!
I can understand wanting to prioritize support for the cards people want to use most, but they should still plan to write software support for all the cards that have hardware support.
I've long since given up on my 5700xt getting supported. AMD is just not a good pick if you care about non graphics compute.
this is a-posteriori development.. we have no idea of how hard it is to implement with older GPUs
Imagine Nvidia not supporting CUDA on any of their cards. Unthinkable.
Nvidia takes a software first approach and AMD takes a hardware first approach.
It is clear that AMD's approach isn't working and they need to change their balance.
Hardware first, but then their hardware isn't any better than NVidia's, so I don't see how that's a valid excuse here.
(Okay, maybe their super high end unobtanium-level GPUs are better hardware-wise. Don't know, don't care about enterprise-only hardware that is unbuyable by mere mortals.)
It's just not, people like to try and defend AMD out of hatred for Nvidia but the thousands of fumbles over the past 15 years that have led AMD to their current position and Nvidia to their current dominance are not deserving of coddling and excuses.
The fact support still isn't there, they've had 2 years since Stable Diffusion to get a serious team up and shipping and they still don't even have enough resources pointed at this to not have to be asking what should be prioritized.
The only way to fix their culture/priorities is to stop buying their cards.
Some of it isn't unbuyable... it is just expensive. https://www.ebay.com/itm/305850340813
But that's why my business exists... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42759191
AMD supports only a single Radeon GPU in Linux (RX 7900 in three variants)?
Windows support is also bad, but supports significantly more than one GPU.
Imagine nvidia supported only the 4090, 4080 and 4070 for cuda at the consumer level. With the 3090 not being supported since the 40xx series came out. This is what amd is defending here.
I honestly can't figure out which Radeon GPUs are supposed to be supported.
The GitHub discussion page in the title lists RX 6800 (and a bunch of RX 7xxx GPUs) as supported, and some lower-end RX 6xxx ones as supported for runtime. The same comment also links to a page on the AMD website for a "compatibility matrix" [1].
That page only shows RX 7900 variants as supported on the consumer Radeon tab. On the workstation side, Radeon Pro W6800 and some W7xxx cards are listed as supported. It also suggests to see the "Use ROCm on Radeon GPU documentation" page [2] if using ROCm on Radeon or Radeon Pro cards.
That link leads to a page for "compatibility matrices" -- again. If you click the link for Linux compatibility, you get a page on "Linux support matrices by ROCm version" [3].
That "by ROCm version" page literally only has a subsection for ROCm 6.2.3. It only lists RX 7900 and Pro W7xxx cards as supported. No mention of W6800.
(The page does have an unintuitively placed "Version List" link through which you can find docs for ROCm 5.7 [4]. Those older docs are no more useful than the 6.2.3 ones.)
Is RX 6800 supported? Or W6800? Even the amd.com pages seem to contradict each other on the latter.
Maybe the pages on the AMD site only list official production support or something. In any case it's confusing as hell.
Nothing against the GitHub page author who at least seems to try and be clear but the official documentation leaves a lot to be desired.
[1] https://rocm.docs.amd.com/projects/install-on-linux/en/lates...
[2] https://rocm.docs.amd.com/projects/radeon/en/latest/docs/com...
[3] https://rocm.docs.amd.com/projects/radeon/en/latest/docs/com...
[4] https://rocm.docs.amd.com/projects/radeon/en/docs-5.7.0/docs...
> I honestly can't figure out which Radeon GPUs are supposed to be supported.
Exactly.
I have a 6700 XT with 12 gig ram and a 5700 with 8 gig ram.
If i ctrl+f for either of those numbers on the GH issue, I get one hit. For the 6700, it's a single row that has a green check for "runtime" and a red x for "HIP SDK". For the 5700 card, it's somebody in the peanut gallery saying "don't forget about us!".
HIP is the c++ "flavor" that can compile down to work on amd _and_ nvidia gpus. If the 6700 has support for the "runtime" but not HIP ... what does that even mean for me?
And as you pointed out, the 6800 series card has green checks for both so that means it's fully supported? But ... it's not listed on AMD's site?!
Bad docs are how you cement a reputation of "just buy nvidia and install their latest drivers and it'll be fine".
Why are people in AMD assuming other people don't want more software support for their GPUs by default? This is not nice.
Add support for every APU. They can have much more RAM than discrete graphics.
rocm is kind of a joke. Recently I wanted to write some golang code which talks to rocm devices using amd smi. You have to build and install the go amd smi from source, the go amd smi repo has dead links and there is basically no documentation anywhere on how to get this working.
Compare this to nvidia where I just imported the go nvml library and it built the cgo code and automatically links to nvidia-ml.so at runtime.
I figure that list is only what’s officially supported, meaning things not on that list may or may not work?. For example, my 6800 XT runs stable diffusion just fine on Linux with PyTorch ROCm.
Really hoping for support for an AMD Radeon Pro W5700 I have kicking around.
I’m constantly baffled and amused on why AMD keeps majorly failing at this.
Either the management at AMD is not smart enough to understand that without the computing software side they will always be a distant number 2 to NVIDIA, or the management at AMD considers it hopeless to ever be able to create something as good as CUDA because they don’t have and can’t hire smart enough people to write the software.
Really, it’s just baffling why they continue on this path to irrelevance. Give it a few years and even Intel will get ahead of them on the GPU side.
If I were Jensen, I would snap up all the GPU software experts I possibly could, and put them to work improving the CUDA ecosystem. I'd also spin up a big research group to further fuel the CUDA pipeline for hardware, software, and application areas.
Which is exactly what NVIDIA seems to be doing.
AMD's ROCm software group seems far behind, is probably understaffed, and probably is paid a fraction of what NVIDIA pays its CUDA software groups.
AMD also has to catch up with NVlink and Spectrum-X (and/or InfiniBand.)
AMD's main leverage point is its CPUs, and its raw GPU hardware isn't bad, but there is a long way to go in terms of GPU software ecosystem and interconnect.
> I’m constantly baffled and amused on why AMD keeps majorly failing at this.
i wonder if you've considered the possibility that there's some component/dimension of this that you're simply unaware of? that it's not as straightforward as whatever reductive mental model you have? is that even like within the universe of possibilities?
I mean, they did say they were baffled. I'd say that probably includes "I don't know"
My wishlist for ROCm support is actually supporting the cards they already released. But that's not going to happen.
By the time an (consumer) AMD device is supported by ROCm it'll only have a few years of ROCm support left before support is removed. Lifespan of support for AMD cards with ROCm is very short. You end up having to use Vulkan which is not optimized, of course, and a bit slower. I once bought an AMD GPU 2 years after release and 1 year after I bought it ROCm support was dropped.
FWIW, every ROCm library currently in the Debian 13 'main' and Ubuntu 24.04 'universe' repository has been built for and tested on every discrete consumer GPU architecture since Vega. Not every package is available that way, but the ones that are have been tested on and work on Vega 10, Vega 20, RDNA 1, 2 and 3.
Note that these are not the packages distributed by AMD. They are the packages in the OS repositories. Not all the ROCm packages are there, but most of them are. The biggest downside is that some of them are a little old and don't have all the latest performance optimizations for RDNA 3.
Those operating systems will be around for the next decade, so that should at least provide one option for users of older hardware.
Packages existing and the software actually working are very different things. You can run rocm on unsupported GPUs like a 780m, but as soon as you hit an issue you are out of luck. And you’ll hit an issue.
For example, my 780m gets 1-2 inferences from llama.cpp before dropping off the bus due to a segfault in the driver. It’s a bad enough lockup that linux can’t cleanly shutdown and will hang under hard rebooted.
The 780m is an integrated GPU. I specified discrete GPUs because that's what I have tested and can confirm will work.
I have dozens of different AMD GPUs and I personally host most of the Debian ROCm Team's continuous integration servers. Over the past year, I have worked together with other members of the Debian project to ensure that every potentially affected ROCm library is tested on every discrete consumer AMD GPU architecture since Vega whenever a new version of a package is uploaded to Debian.
FWIW, Framework Computers donated a few laptops to Debian last year, which I plan to use to enable the 780m too. I just haven't had the time yet. Fedora has some patches that add support for that architecture.
I can confirm this, Debian's ROCm distribution worked great for me on some "unsupported" cards.
As the underdog AMD can't afford to have their efforts perceived as half-assed or a hobby or whatever. They should be moving heaven and earth to maximize their value proposition, promising and delivering on longer support horizons to demonstrate the long term value of their ecosystem.
Honestly at this point half-assed support would be a significant step up from their historical position. The one thing they have pioneered is new tiers of fractional assedness asymptotically approaching zero.
I mean at this point my next card is going to be an nvidia. It has been a total waste of time trying to use rocm for anything machine-learning based. No one uses it. No one can use it. The card I have is somehow always not quite supported.
We go from:
Support is coming in three months!
To
This card is ancient and will be no longer developed for. Buy our brand new card released in three months!
Every damned time.
Seeing Radeon VII on the deprecation list is a little saddening, unless they start putting out more 16gb+ GPUs that aren't overly expensive...
They should have at a minimum 5 year support release cycle.
It kinda seems like they do - 5 years would only include the RX 6xxx and 7xxx.
5 years is not very long tbh.
True but business hardware (and home for that matter) often goes on 3-5 year cycles though. At 5 years it's kinda expected hardware will get replaced.
AMD has separate architectures for GPU compute (Instinct https://www.amd.com/en/products/accelerators/instinct/mi300....) and consumer video (Radeon).
AMD are merging the architectures (UDNA) like nVidia but it's not going to be before 2026. (https://wccftech.com/amd-ryzen-zen-6-cpus-radeon-udna-gpus-u...)
You can use ROCM on consumer radeon as long as you pay more than 400 dollars for one of their gpus. Meanwhile, you can run stable diffusion with the -lowvram flag on a 3050 6gb that goes for 180 dollars
I have a mi50 with 16gb of hbm thats collecting dust (its Vega bases, so it can play games, I guess) because I don’t want to bother setting up a system with Ubuntu 20.04, the last version of Ubuntu the last version of ROCM that supported the MI50 works on.
With situations like this, its not hard to see why Nvidia totally dominates in the compute/ai market.
AMD did over $5 billion in GPU compute (Instinct line) last year. Not nVidia numbers but also not bad. Customers love that they can actually get Instinct system rather than trying to compete with the hyperscalers for limited supplies of nVidia systems. Meta and Microsoft are the two biggest buyers of AMD Instincts, though...
AMD Instinct is also more power efficient and has comparable (if not better) performance for the same (or less) price.
Meta and Microsoft buys hundreds of thousands of Nvidia accelerators a year, and are a big reason why everyone else has to compete for nvidia units.
The MI50 may be considered deprecated in newer releases, but it seems to work fine in my experience. I have a Radeon VII in my workstation (which shares the same architecture) and I host the MI60 test machine for Debian AI Team. I haven't had any trouble with them.
I had the impression Debian applied patches that widen arch support from what upstream officially supports, including for the MI50/MI60.
https://salsa.debian.org/rocm-team/rocm-hipamd/-/raw/d6d2014... (one patch of many)
I wrote that patch. It's not actually used for MI50/MI60 in any of the Debian system packages, since Debian builds for gfx906 rather than using the gfx900 fallback path that patch provides. Debian is not relying on any special patches to enhance gfx906 support. That architecture is the same as upstream.
Now, for some other GPU architectures, you're absolutely right. There are indeed important patches in Debian that enable its extra-wide hardware compatibility.
Thanks for all your work on this.
I don’t think the mi60 has reached deprecated status yet (the last time I look at prices for the mi50 and mi60, the mi60 was something like 3x expensive, and I think thats because its still officially supported), but I’ll check this all out. Thanks.
The MI60 is basically just a faster MI50 with more memory. They were deprecated together. It's plausible there could be small firmware or driver differences that cause issues in one but not the other, but I think that's unlikely.
As someone from the rendering side of GPU stuff, what exactly is the point of ROCm/CUDA? We already have Vulkan and SPIR-V with vendor extensions as a mostly-portable GPU API, what do these APIs do differently?
Furthermore, don't people use PyTorch (and other libraries? I'm not really clear on what ML tooling is like, it feels like there's hundreds of frameworks and I haven't seen any simplified list explaining the differences. I would love a TLDR for this) and not ROCm/CUDA directly anyways? So the main draw can't be ergonomics, at least.