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Comment by bayindirh | Hacker News Reader

I have my hopes high because of two reasons.

1. World's most powerful supercomputers run on AMD Radeon Instinct cards, which means more funding for better ML stack from AMD.

2. A ton of ROCm libraries developed by AMD has landed recently in Debian, which means there's actual and fast paced development work being done on this stack.

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But this is all for the enterprise grade hardware. There seems to be very little interest from AMD to extend their stack to consumer GPUs. From an outside perspective I really cannot understand their reasoning here.

If you manage to build the stack from source (or your distro did) it's likely to run fine on consumer hardware. A lot of it is developed on them. I don't do ML or try to build 'real' applications though, so ymmv. And outside of the blessed rocm binaries the company line is unsupported. Kind of has to be, they weren't tested by amd.

Source: I work on the llvm part of the stack and don't have enterprise hardware. I don't know what the library developers use but expect some of them have similar setups.

There's been this big promise of rocm for ages, since it hasn't taken up ever since, I see no reason for it to do so shortly (it will eventually). Yes rdna3 has ml optimizations, sure there is even some non public windows rocm build, but even if everything works out, taking into account the time the leading frameworks need to either fully use rocm at all or even update a to newer version, now is not the time to get an amd gpu when you want to do ml. Given AMDs trackrecord of not delivering workable ml solutions, it only makes sense to do so when the ecosystem is there and stable for a year or so.

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