What's the cost benefit vs. Nvidia? Is it cheaper?
* Drives down price
* Enhances product features (I see them competing on VRAM first)
* Helps to insulates buyers from supply issues
Nvidia has kneecapped their consumer grade hardware to ensure the gaming market still has scraps to buy in spite of crypto mining and the AI gold rush. All AMD would have to do to eat into Nvidia marketshare is remove the hardware locks in low-end cards and ship one with 64GB+ of VRAM.
This of course would only work if they have comparable/usable software support. Any improvements to ROCm will be a boon for any company that doesn't already have or can't afford huge farms of high-end Nvidia chips.
More than 10x cheaper than allocating machines on a tier 1 cloud - AWS, Azure, GCP, Oracle, etc
More memory - 128GB HBM per GPU - means bigger models fit for training/inference without the nightmare of model parallelism over MPI/infiniband/etc
Longer term - finetuning optimizations
Does AMD provide something similar to nvlink, and even libraries like cudnn?
Also, last I checked none of the public clouds offered any of the latest gens MI GPUs, so I wasn't aware that it had good availability! Azure had a preview but I'll look more into it now.
Thank you for your answer btw!
On the plus side, it was drastically cheaper and now we can just slot in machines.
I would prefer that a tier 1 cloud made MI GPUs available though. It would make it so much more accessible.
We will open source pieces of it over time. Our strategy is open source functional core. Eventually we will have an open source dev environment that runs on a personal scale computer. We already have this for some configurations, but we don't do enough testing to ensure perf/functionality on many different systems.
We are mainly bottlenecked by resources as a 12-person startup.
We have released some open source SDKs here:
https://github.com/orgs/lamini-ai
This class has some training recipe code:
https://www.deeplearning.ai/short-courses/finetuning-large-l...
One thing I'd like to push back to open source is the scale out AMD SLURM support.