I didn't even know who Hotz was, but that YouTube rant on this very issue made me extremely skeptical.
Should someone who will just drop a GPU vendor if they get flustered really be leading a ML framework?
Should someone who will just drop a GPU vendor if they get flustered really be leading a ML framework?
His post is mostly hot air. AMD driver development is very open, excepting only ROCm. Not knowing where things are discussed or how the various driver systems, excluding Nvidia, interact on Linux is not an excuse to rant.
The corporate amd kernel development starts amd-staging-drm-next, with internal AMD pull requests available on the mailing list or here: https://patchwork.freedesktop.org/project/amd-xorg-ddx/serie..., before going through airlied, the maintainer of drm in the main kernel, then to Linus.
Everything user-space regarding OpenGL/Vulkan and some rusty OpenCL, aside from the proprietary amdgpu-pro driver which should almost never be used, is in Mesa.
ROCm is the only thing with huge code dumps, obviously because it's a new effort, and it's said outright that it's unsupported for consumer GPUs. Yes, it's a buggy mess. Did his issue warrant the corporate response he got? No.
But yes, this one sits squarely in “nobody involved looks real good” territory. AMD puts out shit software in general, and ROCm is exceptionally far behind the standard in this field, and often difficult to set up and broken even in “supported” configurations. And the ROCm team have a habit of doing this closed-door development, splitting the actual work into the AMDGPU-PRO driver while neglecting the open one (even in “supported” configurations), and generally just having a process that is not compatible with delivering high-quality open software.
And Hotz is being a manchild who melts down about a driver he knew was bad and berates the people who are trying to get him rush patches while they do their dayjob getting the ROCm release out (which hopefully fixes a lot of the complaints around lack of windows support, lack of consumer gpu support, and general (near-total) lack of polish and stability.
To their credit AMD finally posted a job listing for like 30 engineers for ROCm. It’s just something they should have done like 4 years ago when ROCm first got rolling. And we are well past the “poor lil amd couldn’t afford that” in 2019 or whatever. If you can’t afford it then don’t start the ROCm initiative and make the promises.
Even 2-3 years ago it was clear that the foundation work was done and that if you ever wanted it to go bigger you’d have to do some hiring. And frankly it’s been just as bad with OpenCL before it - support was never good, the runtime constantly had bugs and paper features, etc.
AMD didn’t care about GPGPU compute until AI turned into a billion-dollar industry overnight. And that’s a 15-year story there.
I remember the HSA push too...
Calling that out publicly is probably needed at this point, or they will keep putting AI in their earnings reports without anyone actually being able to train a model on an AMD chip.