ROCm Device Support Wishlist
35 comments
·January 20, 2025latchkey
KeplerBoy
Also know as the AMD representative who recently argued with Hotz about supporting tinycorp.
latchkey
Is that a bad thing? Good for him to stand up to extortion.
rikafurude21
"I estimate having software on par with NVDA would raise their market cap by 100B. Then you estimate what the chance it that @__tinygrad__ can close that gap, say it's 0.1%, probably a very low estimate when you see what we have done so far, but still...
That's worth 100M. And they won't even send us 2 ~100k boxes. In what world does that make sense, except in a world where decisions are made based on pride instead of ROI. Culture issue."
KeplerBoy
Hard to say from my perspective.
I think AMDs offer was fair (full remote access to several test machines), then again just giving tinycorp the boxes on their terms with no strings attached as a kind of research grant would have earned them some goodwill with that corner of the community.
Either way both parties will continue making controversial decisions.
modeless
Offering software support in exchange for payment is extortion?
daguava
[dead]
clhodapp
Which SemiAnalysis article?
ghostpepper
I can understand wanting to prioritize support for the cards people want to use most, but they should still plan to write software support for all the cards that have hardware support.
KeplerBoy
Imagine Nvidia not supporting CUDA on any of their cards. Unthinkable.
latchkey
Nvidia takes a software first approach and AMD takes a hardware first approach.
It is clear that AMD's approach isn't working and they need to change their balance.
kouteiheika
Hardware first, but then their hardware isn't any better than NVidia's, so I don't see how that's a valid excuse here.
(Okay, maybe their super high end unobtanium-level GPUs are better hardware-wise. Don't know, don't care about enterprise-only hardware that is unbuyable by mere mortals.)
ac29
AMD supports only a single Radeon GPU in Linux (RX 7900 in three variants)?
Windows support is also bad, but supports significantly more than one GPU.
llm_trw
Imagine nvidia supported only the 4090, 4080 and 4070 for cuda. With the 3090 not being supported since the 40xx series came out. This is what amd is defending here.
wtcactus
I’m constantly baffled and amused on why AMD keeps majorly failing at this.
Either the management at AMD is not smart enough to understand that without the computing software side they will always be a distant number 2 to NVIDIA, or the management at AMD considers it hopeless to ever be able to create something as good as CUDA because they don’t have and can’t hire smart enough people to write the software.
Really, it’s just baffling why they continue on this path to irrelevance. Give it a few years and even Intel will get ahead of them on the GPU side.
superkuh
My wishlist for ROCm support is actually supporting the cards they already released. But that's not going to happen.
By the time an (consumer) AMD device is supported by ROCm it'll only have a few years of ROCm support left before support is removed. Lifespan of support for AMD cards with ROCm is very short. You end up having to use Vulkan which is not optimized, of course, and a bit slower. I once bought an AMD GPU 2 years after release and 1 year after I bought it ROCm support was dropped.
slavik81
FWIW, every ROCm library currently in the Debian 13 'main' and Ubuntu 24.04 'universe' repository has been built for and tested on every discrete consumer GPU architecture since Vega. Not every package is available that way, but the ones that are have been tested on and work on Vega 10, Vega 20, RDNA 1, 2 and 3.
Note that these are not the packages distributed by AMD. They are the packages in the OS repositories. Not all the ROCm packages are there, but most of them are. The biggest downside is that some of them are a little old and don't have all the latest performance optimizations for RDNA 3.
Those operating systems will be around for the next decade, so that should at least provide one option for users of older hardware.
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mikepurvis
As the underdog AMD can't afford to have their efforts perceived as half-assed or a hobby or whatever. They should be moving heaven and earth to maximize their value proposition, promising and delivering on longer support horizons to demonstrate the long term value of their ecosystem.
seanhunter
Honestly at this point half-assed support would be a significant step up from their historical position. The one thing they have pioneered is new tiers of fractional assedness asymptotically approaching zero.
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XorNot
I mean at this point my next card is going to be an nvidia. It has been a total waste of time trying to use rocm for anything machine-learning based. No one uses it. No one can use it. The card I have is somehow always not quite supported.
llm_trw
We go from:
Support is coming in three months!
To
This card is ancient and will be no longer developed for. Buy our brand new card released in three months!
Every damned time.
FuriouslyAdrift
AMD has separate architectures for GPU compute (Instinct https://www.amd.com/en/products/accelerators/instinct/mi300....) and consumer video (Radeon).
AMD are merging the architectures (UDNA) like nVidia but it's not going to be before 2026. (https://wccftech.com/amd-ryzen-zen-6-cpus-radeon-udna-gpus-u...)
7speter
You can use ROCM on consumer radeon as long as you pay more than 400 dollars for one of their gpus. Meanwhile, you can run stable diffusion with the -lowvram flag on a 3050 6gb that goes for 180 dollars
7speter
I have a mi50 with 16gb of hbm thats collecting dust (its Vega bases, so it can play games, I guess) because I don’t want to bother setting up a system with Ubuntu 20.04, the last version of Ubuntu the last version of ROCM that supported the MI50 works on.
With situations like this, its not hard to see why Nvidia totally dominates in the compute/ai market.
FuriouslyAdrift
AMD did over $5 billion in GPU compute (Instinct line) last year. Not nVidia numbers but also not bad. Customers love that they can actually get Instinct system rather than trying to compete with the hyperscalers for limited supplies of nVidia systems. Meta and Microsoft are the two biggest buyers of AMD Instincts, though...
AMD Instinct is also more power efficient and has comparable (if not better) performance for the same (or less) price.
7speter
Meta and Microsoft buys hundreds of thousands of Nvidia accelerators a year, and are a big reason why everyone else has to compete for nvidia units.
slavik81
The MI50 may be considered deprecated in newer releases, but it seems to work fine in my experience. I have a Radeon VII in my workstation (which shares the same architecture) and I host the MI60 test machine for Debian AI Team. I haven't had any trouble with them.
For context, the submitter of the issue is Anush Elangovan from AMD who's recently been a lot more active on social after the SemiAnalysis article, and taking the reigns / responsibility of moving AMD's software efforts forward.
However you want to dissect this specific issue, I'd generally consider this a positive step and nice to see it hit the front page.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ROCm/comments/1i5aatx/rocm_feedback...
https://www.reddit.com/user/powderluv/