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Comment by threatripper | Hacker News Reader

The two compare differently depending on the benchmark that is used.

Do you have any benchmarks which show comparable performance? Two quick searches now but I can only find video game based benchmarks but in every case the 1080TI outperforms the VII, which is kind of surprising and IMO isn't a good sign for ML performance.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=radeon-v...

Here it performs VERY well for machine learning. Look at PlaidML.

That's using OpenCL on the NVidia card ("Once hitting PlaidML for various machine learning benchmarks with OpenCL").

No one does for machine learning that because the CUDA path is much better.

Video games are never a great comparison for raw compute performance. AMD's GCN based architectures have all been very good at compute relative to their graphics performance (recall how it was nearly impossible to find an MSRP AMD GPU during the mining boom). The Radeon VII is pretty ridiculous for compute, aided by the 1TB/s bandwidth due to it's HBM2 stacks.

I just ran LambdaLabs' ResNet50 training benchmark (I could do more models, but this is it for now) on a few machines I have access to:

TensorFlow 1.14.4

    git clone https://github.com/lambdal/lambda-tensorflow-benchmark.git --recursive
    python lambda-tensorflow-benchmark/benchmarks/scripts/tf_cnn_benchmarks/tf_cnn_benchmarks.py --optimizer=sgd --model=resnet50 --num_gpus=1 --batch_size=64 --variable_update=replicated --distortions=false --num_batches=10000 --data_name=imagenet

  FP32
  - NVIDIA GTX 1080 Ti: ~215 images/sec
  - NVIDIA RTX 2080 Ti: ~300 images/sec
  - NVIDIA TITAN RTX: ~320 images/sec
  - NVIDIA Tesla V100: ~383 images/sec
  - AMD Radeon VII: ~275 images/sec

  FP16
  - NVIDIA GTX 1080 Ti: ~277 images/sec
  - NVIDIA RTX 2080 Ti: ~495 images/sec
  - NVIDIA TITAN RTX: ~518 images/sec
  - NVIDIA Tesla V100: ~725 images/sec
  - AMD Radeon VII: ~373 images/sec

So in FP32 for this ResNet50 benchmark the Radeon VII is about 9-10% slower than the 2080 Ti and about 25-30% faster than the 1080 Ti.

In FP16 it is 25% slower than the 2080 Ti and 35% faster than the 1080 Ti.

Sure, it's just one benchmark, but ResNet is quite representative of deep learning architectures in vision.

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