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Comment by latchkey

2 months ago

"driver" is such a generic word. tinygrad works on mi300x. If you want to use it, you can. Negates your point.

Additionally, ROCm is a giant collection of a whole bunch of libraries. Certainly there are issues, as with any large collection of software, but the critical thing is whether or not AMD is responsive towards getting things fixed.

In the past, it was a huge issue, AMD would routinely ignore developers and bugs would never get fixed. But, after that SA article, Lisa lit a fire under Anush's butt and he's taking ownership. It is a major shift in the entire culture at the company. They are extremely responsive and getting things fixed. You can literally tweet your GH issue to him and someone will respond.

What is true a year ago isn't today. If you're paying attention like I am, and experiencing it first hand, things are changing, fast.

17 comments

latchkey

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ryao  2 months ago

I have been hearing this about AMD/ATI drivers for decades. Every year, someone says that it is fixed, only for new evidence to come out that they are not. I have no reason to believe it is fixed given the history.

Here is evidence to the contrary: If ROCm actually was in good shape, tinygrad would use it instead of developing their own driver.

  • DiabloD3  2 months ago

    You're conflating two different things.

    ROCm isn't part of AMD drivers, its a software library that helps you support legacy compute APIs and stuff in the BLAS/GEMM/LAPACK end of things.

    The part of ROCm you're interested in is HIP; HIP is the part that does legacy CUDA emulation. HIP will never be complete because Nvidia keeps adding new things, documents things wrong, and also the "cool" stuff people do on Nvidia cards aren't CUDA and it is out of scope for HIP to emulate PTX (since that is strongly tied to how historical Nvidia architectures worked, and would be entirely inappropriate for AMD architectures).

    The whole thing with Tinygrad's "driver" isn't a driver at all, its the infrastructure to handle card to card ccNUMA on PCI-E-based systems, which AMD does not support: if you want that, you buy into the big boy systems that have GPUs that communicate using Infinity Fabric (which it, itself, is the HyperTransport protocol over PCI-E PHY instead of over HyperTransport PHY; PCI over PCI-E has no ability to handle ccNUMA meaningfully).

    Extremely few customers, AMD's or not, want to share VRAM directly over PCI-E across GPUs since most PCI-E GPU customers are single GPU. Customers that have massive multi-GPU deployments have bought into the ecosystem of their preferred vendor (ie, Nvidia's Mellanox-powered fabrics, or AMD's wall-to-wall Infinity Fabric).

    That said, AMD does want to support it if they can, and Tinygrad isn't interested in waiting for an engineer at AMD to add it, so they're pushing ahead and adding it themselves.

    Also, part of Tinygrad's problem is they want it available from ROCm/HIP instead of a standards compliant modern API. ROCm/HIP still has not been ported to the modern shader compiler that the AMD driver uses (ie, the one you use for OpenGL, Vulkan, and Direct family APIs), since it originally came from an unrelated engineering team that isn't part of the driver team.

    The big push in AMD currently is to unify efforts so that ROCm/HIP is massively simplified and all the redundant parts are axed, so it is purely a SPIR-V code generator or similar. This would probably help projects like Tinygrad someday, but not today.

  • latchkey  2 months ago

    We have all been hearing things for decades. Things are noticeably different now. Live in the present, not in the past.

    Tinygrad isn’t a driver. It is a framework. It is being developed by George however he wants. If he wants to build something that gives him more direct control over things. Fine. Others might write PTX instead if using higher level abstractions.

    Fact is that tinygrad runs not only on AMD, but also Nvidia and others. You might want to reassess your beliefs because you’re reading into things and coming up with the wrong conclusions.

    • ryao  2 months ago

      I read tinygrad’s website:

      https://tinygrad.org/#tinygrad

      Under driver quality for AMD, they say “developing” and point to their git repository. If AMD had fixed the issues, they would instead say the driver quality is great and get more sales.

      They can still get sales even if they are honest about the state of AMD hardware, since they sell Nvidia hardware too, while your company would risk 0 sales if you say anything other than “everything is fine”, since your business is based on leasing AMD GPUs:

      https://hotaisle.xyz/pricing/

      Given your enormous conflict of interest, I will listen to what George Hotz and others are saying over what you say on this matter.

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