AMD's AI chips could match Nvidia's offerings, software firm says | Hacker News Reader

AMD's AI chips could match Nvidia's offerings, software firm says

reuters.com

43 pointsdbcooper10 comments

Somewhat related: Lisa Su saved AMD – Now she wants Nvidia's AI crown[1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36164055 (236p, 214c, 29d ago)

ROCm is one of the worst GPU software (+drivers) I ever touched, randomly dropping/ not supporting GPUs, random crashes without any proper information etc not integrated with any meaningful framework (It was ~3 years ago).

I have more hope in Apple/Intel joing "AI" chips market over AMD even if they make good enough hardware you cant use it without a lot of software problems (srsly just get your act together AMD, as community support is slowly dying after last AMD dramas and).

Amazingly it hasn’t gotten much better.

I give ROCm a spin roughly once a year and shake my head. I’m hoping Intel can actually get their act together on the software side because Nvidia needs meaningful competition and I think at this point it’s clear AMD either doesn’t care or doesn’t have the ability. There’s just no other explanation for the state of ROCm at this point.

For any application other than hobbyists (per usual) time/people/opportunity cost is the most expensive thing. One of the many reasons Nvidia is so dominant in this space is because you can take any card that says “Nvidia” on it from the last half-decade, install the driver, and run nearly anything with a docker command. In minutes.

As soon as your (very expensive) team starts spending time messing around with ROCm issues at every turn you’ll be happy to throw out AMD and pay the “Nvidia tax” - because it’s actually a dividend given the persistent state of ROCm.

Come on Intel/Apple, save us from the Nvidia monopoly!!!

Well, past few years of Intel troubles, resulting in the success of Zen architecture made people forget that AMD is a company with mediocricity written all over their DNA. Nvidia will run circles around AMD for the decades to come. And the hardware is only smart part of it, the big thing is software.

Devs who do not have these in their workstations will not be experimenting on rented VMs, unless it is company infra. Dunno why Radeon cards aren't the focus instead of these MI variant

AMD is slowly but surely expanding support for Radeon cards. It's not as extensive as Nvidia, but it is improving. ROCm supports RDNA2 now and RDNA3 support is coming this fall.

https://community.amd.com/t5/rocm/new-rocm-5-6-release-bring...

Nvidia making the decision 15 years ago to implement and support CUDA on anything with Nvidia stamped on it was brilliant.

Which is funny because it’s so obvious.

Imagine buying a CPU from a vendor, trying to run an application on it, and then finding out “oh I needed to get the blah blah blah x variant”.

Ridiculous, right? That’s AMD GPU, even before you get to the disaster that is their software.

You said it supports rdna2 but the fine print is only two workstation cards.

I'm not sure about compute, but in graphics NVIDIA is still winning by a lot in terms of performance per watt. That's a huge challenge for AMD even if the card itself is priced competitively, especially as you scale beyond single-card consumer systems.

While performance per watt is definitely a good metric, I don't think that's the main driver of that market On the desktop side casual gamers don't care they just want something affordable they works. Hard core fps pro don't care... they just want the fastest anything. > beyond single car ? Sli/multi gpu consumer solutions are nit really a big market these days.

The challenges for AMD is brand name and software support. Whether things like dlss3 or support in your favorite video/rendering application.

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