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Comment by tikkun | Hacker News Reader

A possible prescription for AMD regarding AI and CUDA:

1) Open-source driver development as mentioned in this post

2) Set up 24/7 free software tech support on discord. Maybe for all use cases, maybe only AI use cases. Do the tech support via screen sharing, and have a writer join for all calls, so that every issue once solved gets a blog post

3) Have employees run all popular AI tools and get them working on AMD hardware, publish written guides and videos showing how to do it.

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The problem is not that people within the company don't have good ideas of how to improve deep learning research end user experience, it's just not a priority for AMD. It's annoying as a potential customer but arguably whatever their overall strategy is it's working.

4) Release a consumer GPU with 32-80 GB of VRAM.

What are you planning to play on that thing?

Llama 2.

I think Hogwart's Legacy could benefit from it. It crashes on my 16GB system due to being out of video memory regularly. It might be lying about the cause but that's what it claims.

It sounds silly, but people would endure a lot of pain to fit significantly larger models into ram.

It could even be 2-3 generations behind and that thing would still sell.

Or at least make it so that you could rent the larger gpus by the hour.

As far as I know, there isn't a single service that offers bare metal access to MI210/MI250's.

AMD has CPUs with built-in GPU with hundreds of ALUs and unified memory (GPU uses system memory). Cannot such CPU be used for ML tasks without purchasing expensive graphic cards? 64 Gb of ordinary RAM will be cheaper than 64 Gb of VRAM.

Currently such built-in GPUs seem to be optimized for games only.

VRAM speed is a major factor. Even ddr5 with 4 channels would be slow compared to current GDDRs.

That's correct, but if you are, for example, multiplying two 1024x1024 matrices (typical for ML loads) then you need to perform roughly 1B operations on 1M numbers. There is no need for loading lot of data. So we can do without fast memory in this case, can't we? Hopefully the cache and registers of GPU can handle this.

Yes, let's build an open source community on top of a closed platform. It's not like twitter, reddit, Facebook etc have taught us anything.

Open a mailing list like every project that survives more than 5 years. Hell the barrier to entry will ensure you get people who can use a text editor and save you half the question of 'how do I install this on on an Intel a2 Mac???'

Yes, absolutely do not use Discord for this, Matrix would be better

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