Hacker News Reader

Comment by JonChesterfield | Hacker News Reader

That seems to be a different thing again. You had at least one rocm version that claimed to work with your GPU and then later versions dropped it. Your options then are to stay with the rocm version that claimed to support it or to build a newer rocm yourself, or get it from distros etc, where at some point in the future it'll probably stop working entirely.

I don't know what plays into which GPUs are listed as supported on which versions of ROCm. I'm sure my 6800GT was marked "supported" on some version and isn't on the current one. I think my radeon vii was likewise "supported" on some of them and isn't any more. I used a 5700 XT for a year or so which was never on the blessed list. I obsessively build everything from source instead of using the release binaries though.

View on HN

Neither of those would have worked, but that's another post. However, I had a third option, which I took: I bought a working NVidia card, put my AMD card in my attic, swore off AMD GPUs and ROCm forever*, and began warn other people against ever relying on AMD.

That's the option I took.

Now, my software is tied to CUDA. Others are building more on top if it. If people want to run my software (or by proxy, and software which uses my software as a platform), they have more-or-less the same option if they accidentally bought AMD.

So far, I haven't heard from any users who accidentally bought AMD.

Right now, I'm just waiting for Arc A770 support to improve, so I can also support Intel. That will be the cheapest way to run my tools, since you get 16GB for $300.

I'm not the only one who took this path. I'm just more vocal about it.

* Some exclusions apply.

Good for you. AMD is focussing on larger customers who write their own software (that runs on supercomputer and in datacenters). Targeting a high-margin, limited scope market before prosumers/consumers is decent strategy for a company that doesn't have Nvidia's deep pockets.

It is frustrating as a consumer - dealing with ROCm on an consumer card was a massive pain for the period I bothered to put in the effort. However, I remain bullish on AMD, I think their current GPUs are their Bulldozer-equivalent; I'm waiting patiently for the AMD GPU Zen-1-moment

What you described would have been a fine strategy. That's not AMD's strategy.

To implement your strategy, you either don't ship mass market GPGPU cards, or you stick a big "beta / prototype" label on ROCm and make sure people use it only caveat emptor. I've bought plenty of half-baked things because I wanted to tinker with them or help a company along. AMD cards are very competitive for gaming too, which really brings volume much more so than GPGPU, so there's no reason to oversell.

AMD's problem is that they're claiming these things work, and they don't. I was fortunate to learn that lesson spending a few hundred bucks. I know people who learned that lesson spending thousands. I wouldn't want to figure out on a data center or a supercomputer whether or not the same lesson applies. If a company is willing to cheaply torch relationships as it figures out a strategy, ship half-baked ill-thought-out software, and make bold, unsubstantiated claims, I'll pick another vendor if at all competitive.

AMD is losing mind share, credibility, and branding. That will hurt if they ever have a product ready for the broader market, and it will also hurt (although not as much) with the strategy you described.

AMD hardware is amazing. AMD software needs catching up to do. It's pretty amazing how Nvidia's strategy of making compute tools available on most consumer grade cards is paying off latent dividends -- consumers learn on their own hw and become developers/researchers using same stack, something AMD needs to realize. The result is Nvidia is a trillion dollar company and AMD only 1/5 of that.

Did you read his post?

Software isn't catching up. For most AMD GPU owners, the software quality is getting worse over time.

> AMD hardware is amazing

How did you reach the conclusion? In almost all the metric, AMD is just 20-30% ahead or wildly behind. e.g. AMD is so much behind in tensor cores in consumer grade GPU or raytracing.

I'm just saying AMD hardware is (namely their compute line of cards). Nvidia has great scientists in light transport research and it shows in their Real-time ray tracers.

But nvidia isn’t pulling this crap. You don’t get one old version immediately dropped. So another choice is to use nvidia. And cuda support covers a large number of their cards. And event recent releases cover a good chunk

Reply on news.ycombinator.com