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Comment by zehaeva | Hacker News Reader

If AMD cards were half the price of Nvidia ones then sure, this would happen. The 4090 can be had for ~$1600USD and the RX 7900 for about ~$1000USD. A significant discount, however the RX 7900 is about 3/4ths as powerful as the 4090, which puts it more in the class as a 4080, which costs about as much.

As a small budget research/grad student, if the price difference isn't that big, why waste the time porting torch to it?

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Nah, price isn't going to be a motivating factor. If AMD came up with a card that had 3x the VRAM of the latest NVIDIA offering there would be research groups who would be interested because loads of models are hardware bottlenecked.

MI250's (which are really 2 gpus on one board) are 128gb and can be chained together with other cards.

Of course cost is a motivating factor.

The very nature of GPUs implies that they are optimized for parallelizable workloads.

If I can split my training across 3x the chips at 1/10th the cost for each chip, why wouldn’t I do that?

You're thinking consumer.

MI250 cards are less than half the price of H100, and more importantly, you can buy them today.

Now I'm imaging a small budget grad student/researcher with a budget of several hundred grand.

Maybe I'm not as familiar with the word small as I thought I as. :)

Can buy 4 MI250’s (8 gpus) in a high end chassis for less than $100k. Today.

Try that with H100’s.

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