Comment by 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.
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.
Exactly, it is not a driver.
Appreciate you diving more into my business. Yes, we are one of the few that publishes transparent pricing.
When we started, we got zero sales, for a long time. Nobody knew if these things performed or not. So we donated hardware and people like ChipsAndCheese started to benchmark and write blog posts.
We knew the hardware was good, but the software sucked. 16 or so months later, things have changed and sufficiently improved that now we are at capacity. My deep involvement in this business is exactly how I know what’s going on.
Yes, I have a business to run, but at the same time, I was willing to take the risk, when no-one else would, and deploy this compute. To insinuate that I have some sort of conflict of interest is unfair, especially without knowing the full story.
At this juncture, I don’t know what point you’re trying to make. We agree the software sucked. Tinygrad now runs on mi300x. Whatever George’s motivations were a year ago are no longer true today.
If you feel rocm sucks so badly, go the tinygrad route. Same if you don’t want to be tied to cuda. Choice is a good thing. At the end of the day though, this isn’t a reflection on the hardware at all.
I hope your business works out for you and I am willing to believe that AMD has improved somewhat, but I do not believe AMD has improved enough to be worth people’s time when Nvidia is an option. I have heard too many nightmares and it is going to take many people, including people who reported those nightmares, reporting improvements for me to think otherwise. It is not just George Hotz who reported issues. Eric Hartford has been quiet lately, but one of the last comments he made on his blog was not very inspiring:
> Know that you are in for rough waters. And even when you arrive - There are lots of optimizations tailored for nVidia GPUs so, even though the hardware may be just as strong spec-wise, in my experience so far, it still may take 2-3 times as long to train on equivalient AMD hardware. (though if you are a super hacker maybe you can fix it!)
https://erichartford.com/from-zero-to-fineturning-with-axolo...
There has been no follow-up “it works great now”.
That said, as for saying you have a conflict of interest, let us consider what a conflict of interest is:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_of_interest
> A conflict of interest (COI) is a situation in which a person or organization is involved in multiple interests, financial or otherwise, and serving one interest could involve working against another.
You run a company whose business is dependent entirely on leasing AMD GPUs. Here, you want to say that AMD’s hardware is useful for that purpose and no longer has the deluge of problems others reported last year. If it has not improved, saying such could materially negatively impact your business. This by definition is a conflict of interest.
That is quite a large conflict of interest, given that it involves your livelihood. You are incentivized to make things look better than they are, which affects your credibility when you say that things are fine after there has been ample evidence in the recent past that they have not been. In AMD’s case, poor driver quality is something that they inherited from ATI and the issues goes back decades. While it is believable that AMD has improved their drivers, I find it difficult to believe that they have improved them enough that things are fine now, given history. Viewing your words as being less credible because of these things might be unfair, but there have been plenty of people whose livelihoods depended on things working before you that outright lied about the fitness of products. They even lied when people’s lives were at risk:
https://hackaday.com/2015/10/26/killed-by-a-machine-the-ther...
You could be correct in everything you say, but I have good reason to be skeptical until there has been information from others corroborating it. Blame all of the people who were in similar positions to yours that lied in the past for my skepticism. That said, I will keep my ears open for good news from others who use AMD hardware in this space, but I have low expectations given history.
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