I appreciate that there are people in academia working on this problem, but it seems like something AMD would have to fix internally if they were serious.
Fully agree. They punted 10 years ago and are now playing catchup. They have the hardware but can’t manage to unlock its full potential due to them not knowing how to write firmware that does.
>I personally prefer the hardware companies making just hardware.
Keeps the incentives pure.
That's self contradictory. Their incentive is to sell more HW and at higher prices using whatever shady practices they can get away with, software or no software. There's nothing pure about that, it's just business. High end chips aren't commodity HW like lawnmowers, they can't function without the right SW.
And this isn't the 90's anymore when Hercules or S3 would only make the silicon, and then system integrators would write the drivers for it which was basically MS-DOS calls to read/write to registers via the PCI bus, by the devs reading a 300 page manual, those days are long gone. Modern silicone is orders of magnitude more complex that nobody else besides the manufacturer could write the drivers for it to extract the most performance out of it.
>I'm even willing to accept a 20% performance hit for this requirement, should someone bring that up.
I'm also willing to accept arbitrary numbers I make up, as a tradeoff, but the market does not work like that.
> nobody else besides the manufacturer could write the drivers for it to extract the most performance out of it
Let's not go too far here. Reverse engineering and independent development of usable drivers are not impossible, they're 'merely' extremely challenging. Alyssa Rosenzweig in particular had great success reverse engineering the Apple M1 GPU and writing drivers for it, and that was just a few years ago.
> ...by the devs reading a 300 page manual, those days are long gone. Modern silicone is orders of magnitude more complex that nobody else besides the manufacturer could write the drivers for it...
The 300 page manual would be 3,000 or 30,000 pages long, if modern ARM ISR manuals are any indication. Independent developers could totally write performant drivers if they had the documents, but those manuals do not exist - or if they do, they're proprietary.
Apple's silicon would be used in DCs if they were more open. But sadly, Apple's offerings are a combination of hardware and software, and therefore not open by necessity.
Except that this same team built a similarly named software package for Nvidia GPUs as well. It’s bright researchers doing what they do best if you ask me.
Except that this other package also only came out last year and has contributed zero to Nvidia's current status. If AMD ever wants to be taken seriously in this market, they will need to start making their own software good instead of relying on "open source" in the mistaken belief that someone else will fix their bad code for free. Nvidia spent more than a decade hiring top talent and getting their proprietary software environment right before they really took off. And some of the older ML researchers here will certainly remember it wasn't pain-free either. But they didn't just turn the ship around, they turned it into a nuclear aircraft carrier that dominates the entire world.
Yeah honestly I’m dumbfounded why all these years AMD still doesn’t have an internal “code red” and get their developer experience up to par with CUDA.
It seems that AMD, like many other companies, doesn’t “get” software. It’s a cost-center, a nuisance, not really hard engineering, the community will take care of that, etc. It’s pretty ironic.
I found their acquisition of Xilinx (the FPGA company) to predict that they were going all in on a uniform FPGA / GPU / AI ecosystem, but… that didn’t seem to have yielded any integration benefits?
I’m genuinely dumbfounded by what’s up at AMD at this point.
From this writeup it does sound like the architecture of the AMD gpu makes it a bit harder to optimize. It also seems like long term, the AMD approach may scale better in the long run. 8 chiplets rather than 2 for the nvidia offering, along with all the associated cache and memory locality woes.
The future will probably see more chiplets rather than less, so I wonder if dealing with complexity here will pay more dividends in the long run
This is a great project, but the bigger question is: why isn't AMD doing this themselves? It continues to boggle my mind how much they don't seem to get the importance of a mature software stack when it is so obviously the key to the success of team red. A stack that can be used for EVERY card they produce, like CUDA, not just a select few. I used to believe that AMD the underdog would catch up some day, but I've more or less given up on them.
I think many people tried making AMD GPU go brrr for the mass of the developers but no one succeeded.
I don't get why AMD doesn't solve their own software issues. Now they have a lot of money so not having money to pay for developers is not an excuse.
And data centers GPUs are not the worst. Using GPU compute for things like running inference at home is a much, much better experience with Nvidia. My 5 years old RTX 3090 is better than any consumer GPU AMD released up to this date, at least for experimenting with ML and AI.
nVidia has been deeply involved in the software side, first with gaming, forever. It’s written into their DNA. Even when ATI/AMD could outperform them in raw hardware, nVidia worked well with every last game and worked with individual developers even writing some of their code for them.
I recently switched from an NVidia card (5090) to a couple of AMD cards (R9700 32GB) for my inference server.
I must say it's been a completely positive experience. The mainline Fedora kernel just worked without any need to mess with the DKMS. I just forwarded /dev/dri/* devices to my containers, and everything worked fine with ROCm.
I needed to grab a different image (-rocm instead of -cuda) for Ollama, change the type of whisper build for Storyteller. And that was it! On the host, nvtop works fine to visualize the GPU state, and VAAPI provides accelerated encoding for ffmpeg.
Honestly, it's been an absolutely pleasant experience compared to getting NVidia CUDA to work.
> Now they have a lot of money so not having money to pay for developers is not an excuse.
NVidia is the exception to the rule when it comes to hardware companies paying competitive salaries for software engineers. I imagine AMD is still permeated by the attitude that software "isn't real work" and doesn't deserve more compensation, and that kind of inertia is very hard to overcome.
Lisa Su gave a disastrous interview last year where she said exactly that. The CEOs attitude explains everything about this fight. Jensen is just a much better CEO than Su but I bet it's impossible to get rid of her without the board being viciously attacked by every woke feminist on the planet. Maybe even sued. So AMD is stuck with bad leadership for the foreseeable future unless she retires.
That "bad leadership" dug AMD out of hole and transformed the company into a behemoth. From under $2 a share to around $250 in eight years. I'll invest in that kind of bad leadership all day everyday.
It's insane to me that AMD is not spending billions and billions trying to fix their software. Nvidia is the most valuable company in the world and AMD is the only one poised to compete.
They are, but the problem is that shifting an organization whose lifeblood is yearly hardware refreshes and chip innovation towards a ship-daily software culture is challenging. And software doesn’t “make money” the way hardware does so it can get deprioritized by executives. And vendors are lining up to write and even open source lots of software for your platform in exchange for pricing, preference, priority (great on paper but bad for long term quality). And your competitors will get ahead of you if you miss even a single hardware trend/innovation.
There was a podcast episode linked here a while ago about how the software industry in Japan never took off as it did in America and it was a similar conclusion. According to the host, the product being sold was hardware, and software was a means to fulfill and then conclude the contract. After that you want the customer to buy the new model, primarily for the hardware and software comes along for the ride.
It should be obvious by now though that there's symbiosis between software and hardware, and that support timescales are longer. Another angle is that it's more than just AMD's own software developers, also the developers making products for their customers who in turn buy AMD's if everyone works together to make them run well and it's those second developers they need to engage with in a way their efforts will be welcomed.
I worked at at a number of GPU vendors, and it felt like Nvidia was the only one that took software as an asset worth investing in, rather than as a cost center. Massively different culture.
The writing is laughably bad. I can’t tell if it’s someone that over relied on AI or if they just mimic the structure and mannerisms of AI produced writing because that’s what they see.
A few choice examples:
> Checkout part one of this series for an intro to HipKittens and checkout this post for a technical deep dive.
> Unsurprisingly, making AMD GPUs go brr boils down to keeping the “matrix cores” (tensor cores on NVIDIA) fed.
> These two patterns tradeoff programmability and performance, where 8-wave and its large tile primitives lead to compact code and 4-wave fine-grained interleaving expands code size. Surprisingly, the 8-wave schedule is sufficient to achieve SoTA-level performance on GEMMs and attention forwards. For GQA non-causal attention backwards, 8-wave also outperforms all AMD baselines by
1.8
×
1.8×, and our HK 4-wave further outperforms by
2.3
×
2.3×.
And I could go on. And on.
But overall besides the overuse of cliche/memespeak places it doesn’t make sense, the entire section that deals with the hot loop describes something that should be explained in a graph and instead explained in 100 lines of source code.
How those AMD crashes though. All my friends in AMD CPUs have had a hell of the last two years with constant crashes in unreal engine games. Meanwhile, I made fun of myself for buying an ancient 11 series which is a decade old arch at this point but is rock solid.
Their linux driver support isn't so great, though. I really considered an AMD GPU for my most recent build, and based on the driver support for just the integrated graphics on my new AMD CPU (7900X), I opted for an NVidia card instead.
How so? Switching from an Nvidia card to an AMD one I am now able to upgrade my kernel whenever without getting a blinking cursor after reboot. How are in-tree drivers worse than whatever Nvidia does?
I'm running a 6900XT on Arch and have no problems so far. Steam, Heroic launcher and every game i tried so far worked like a charm. You can even OC with LACT [1] if you want to.
I appreciate that there are people in academia working on this problem, but it seems like something AMD would have to fix internally if they were serious.
Fully agree. They punted 10 years ago and are now playing catchup. They have the hardware but can’t manage to unlock its full potential due to them not knowing how to write firmware that does.
I personally prefer the hardware companies making just hardware.
Keeps the incentives pure.
I'm even willing to accept a 20% performance hit for this requirement, should someone bring that up.
>I personally prefer the hardware companies making just hardware. Keeps the incentives pure.
That's self contradictory. Their incentive is to sell more HW and at higher prices using whatever shady practices they can get away with, software or no software. There's nothing pure about that, it's just business. High end chips aren't commodity HW like lawnmowers, they can't function without the right SW.
And this isn't the 90's anymore when Hercules or S3 would only make the silicon, and then system integrators would write the drivers for it which was basically MS-DOS calls to read/write to registers via the PCI bus, by the devs reading a 300 page manual, those days are long gone. Modern silicone is orders of magnitude more complex that nobody else besides the manufacturer could write the drivers for it to extract the most performance out of it.
>I'm even willing to accept a 20% performance hit for this requirement, should someone bring that up.
I'm also willing to accept arbitrary numbers I make up, as a tradeoff, but the market does not work like that.
> nobody else besides the manufacturer could write the drivers for it to extract the most performance out of it
Let's not go too far here. Reverse engineering and independent development of usable drivers are not impossible, they're 'merely' extremely challenging. Alyssa Rosenzweig in particular had great success reverse engineering the Apple M1 GPU and writing drivers for it, and that was just a few years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alyssa_Rosenzweig#Career
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45034537
> ...by the devs reading a 300 page manual, those days are long gone. Modern silicone is orders of magnitude more complex that nobody else besides the manufacturer could write the drivers for it...
The 300 page manual would be 3,000 or 30,000 pages long, if modern ARM ISR manuals are any indication. Independent developers could totally write performant drivers if they had the documents, but those manuals do not exist - or if they do, they're proprietary.
> Their incentive is to sell more HW and at higher prices using whatever shady practices they can get away with, software or no software.
And you don't think these shady practices will leak into the software?
> Modern silicone is orders of magnitude more complex that nobody else besides the manufacturer could write the drivers for it...
The hardware people at the manufacturer are not the software people. So there __must__ be documentation.
> the market does not work like that.
That depends on whether OP is buying/renting AMD gpu machines.
That means 25% more datacentre/grid capacity. Genuinely I think most companies are not happy to fund that, in order to save marginally in other areas.
Unfortunately hardware can’t exist anymore without software. Everything non-trivial needs firmware or microcode.
And depending on others to write firmware for your hardware, I don’t think that’s a recipe for success.
Software team at AMD to hardware team at AMD: "Give us the hardware with the docs then we will write software for it"
Hardware team at AMD: "Sorry, hardware can't exist without software; we'll first have to write the software"
Software team: "But we're the software team ..."
Hardware team: "Uhm yeah ... seems we have a nasty chicken and egg problem here"
In certain contexts 20% is a lot bucks, leaving that on the plate would be very wasteful ;-)
Yes, it would be 20% wasteful. But giving up freedom can be more costly.
Also, the 20% would be open to further optimization by the community, so it wouldn't be that bad in practice, probably.
20% performance on a 10GW DC? Suuuuuuure....
What do absolute numbers have to do with it?
You alone is... pretty small market niche, I'd say.
This is a silly thing to say. Right now there are probably thousands of hackers dying to get their hands on the M-series CPU documentation from Apple.
This thread is about DC level HW, not consumer electronics.
Apple's silicon would be used in DCs if they were more open. But sadly, Apple's offerings are a combination of hardware and software, and therefore not open by necessity.
Is apple a hw or sw … or is that a wrong question. Why is a company has to be a hw or sw one ?
If nvidia dominate because of CUDA and why it can do it but amd should not?
Except that this same team built a similarly named software package for Nvidia GPUs as well. It’s bright researchers doing what they do best if you ask me.
Except that this other package also only came out last year and has contributed zero to Nvidia's current status. If AMD ever wants to be taken seriously in this market, they will need to start making their own software good instead of relying on "open source" in the mistaken belief that someone else will fix their bad code for free. Nvidia spent more than a decade hiring top talent and getting their proprietary software environment right before they really took off. And some of the older ML researchers here will certainly remember it wasn't pain-free either. But they didn't just turn the ship around, they turned it into a nuclear aircraft carrier that dominates the entire world.
Yeah honestly I’m dumbfounded why all these years AMD still doesn’t have an internal “code red” and get their developer experience up to par with CUDA.
Check out several interesting comments here from AMDAnon for insider insights on this question:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45923188
It seems that AMD, like many other companies, doesn’t “get” software. It’s a cost-center, a nuisance, not really hard engineering, the community will take care of that, etc. It’s pretty ironic.
Yes. Why is that? Somebody here must have an informed opinion. It seems ludicrous, but also too obvious. What's up?
I found their acquisition of Xilinx (the FPGA company) to predict that they were going all in on a uniform FPGA / GPU / AI ecosystem, but… that didn’t seem to have yielded any integration benefits?
I’m genuinely dumbfounded by what’s up at AMD at this point.
Honestly they should be hired by NVIDIA or AMD.
AFAIK, they are already doing it at various levels including working with tinycorp
From this writeup it does sound like the architecture of the AMD gpu makes it a bit harder to optimize. It also seems like long term, the AMD approach may scale better in the long run. 8 chiplets rather than 2 for the nvidia offering, along with all the associated cache and memory locality woes.
The future will probably see more chiplets rather than less, so I wonder if dealing with complexity here will pay more dividends in the long run
AMD doesn't need warp specialisation for high performance while nvidia does, which simplifies programming AMD
see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45923188 for HipKittens discussion
side question : how is mojo doing in that regard ? i thought their ideas was to improve devX on amds gpu ?
This is a great project, but the bigger question is: why isn't AMD doing this themselves? It continues to boggle my mind how much they don't seem to get the importance of a mature software stack when it is so obviously the key to the success of team red. A stack that can be used for EVERY card they produce, like CUDA, not just a select few. I used to believe that AMD the underdog would catch up some day, but I've more or less given up on them.
I think many people tried making AMD GPU go brrr for the mass of the developers but no one succeeded.
I don't get why AMD doesn't solve their own software issues. Now they have a lot of money so not having money to pay for developers is not an excuse.
And data centers GPUs are not the worst. Using GPU compute for things like running inference at home is a much, much better experience with Nvidia. My 5 years old RTX 3090 is better than any consumer GPU AMD released up to this date, at least for experimenting with ML and AI.
And the developer experience is horrible when working with AMD. They don’t even accept driver crash bug reports.
People say that as if the Nvidia experience is better. Nvidia also has a horrible developer experience.
Huh? I've been developing against the Nvidia ecosystem for years. Just build a container and you're done. They even provide base containers.
Anything specific related to DC level computing?
YMMV but I reported a crash in Nvidia's vulkan driver and they responded promptly and fixed it.
I just saw that Nvidia even maintains their own fork of Unreal Engine. AMD isn't even competing.
nVidia has been deeply involved in the software side, first with gaming, forever. It’s written into their DNA. Even when ATI/AMD could outperform them in raw hardware, nVidia worked well with every last game and worked with individual developers even writing some of their code for them.
I recently switched from an NVidia card (5090) to a couple of AMD cards (R9700 32GB) for my inference server.
I must say it's been a completely positive experience. The mainline Fedora kernel just worked without any need to mess with the DKMS. I just forwarded /dev/dri/* devices to my containers, and everything worked fine with ROCm.
I needed to grab a different image (-rocm instead of -cuda) for Ollama, change the type of whisper build for Storyteller. And that was it! On the host, nvtop works fine to visualize the GPU state, and VAAPI provides accelerated encoding for ffmpeg.
Honestly, it's been an absolutely pleasant experience compared to getting NVidia CUDA to work.
> Now they have a lot of money so not having money to pay for developers is not an excuse.
NVidia is the exception to the rule when it comes to hardware companies paying competitive salaries for software engineers. I imagine AMD is still permeated by the attitude that software "isn't real work" and doesn't deserve more compensation, and that kind of inertia is very hard to overcome.
Lisa Su gave a disastrous interview last year where she said exactly that. The CEOs attitude explains everything about this fight. Jensen is just a much better CEO than Su but I bet it's impossible to get rid of her without the board being viciously attacked by every woke feminist on the planet. Maybe even sued. So AMD is stuck with bad leadership for the foreseeable future unless she retires.
https://stratechery.com/2024/an-interview-with-amd-ceo-lisa-...
That "bad leadership" dug AMD out of hole and transformed the company into a behemoth. From under $2 a share to around $250 in eight years. I'll invest in that kind of bad leadership all day everyday.
Yup... the first Ryzen/EPYC chips were literally a saving throw.
AMD's driver/software woes compared to nVidia make more sense when you realize they barely made it here at all.
the two statements can be true at the same time: they can still view software developers as second class while having a great hardware vision.
what OP is saying is that after a point it doesn't matter how good your HW is if your SW stack is bad.
It's insane to me that AMD is not spending billions and billions trying to fix their software. Nvidia is the most valuable company in the world and AMD is the only one poised to compete.
They are, but the problem is that shifting an organization whose lifeblood is yearly hardware refreshes and chip innovation towards a ship-daily software culture is challenging. And software doesn’t “make money” the way hardware does so it can get deprioritized by executives. And vendors are lining up to write and even open source lots of software for your platform in exchange for pricing, preference, priority (great on paper but bad for long term quality). And your competitors will get ahead of you if you miss even a single hardware trend/innovation.
There was a podcast episode linked here a while ago about how the software industry in Japan never took off as it did in America and it was a similar conclusion. According to the host, the product being sold was hardware, and software was a means to fulfill and then conclude the contract. After that you want the customer to buy the new model, primarily for the hardware and software comes along for the ride.
It should be obvious by now though that there's symbiosis between software and hardware, and that support timescales are longer. Another angle is that it's more than just AMD's own software developers, also the developers making products for their customers who in turn buy AMD's if everyone works together to make them run well and it's those second developers they need to engage with in a way their efforts will be welcomed.
Hardware is a profit center, software is a cost center, and they get treated accordingly
I worked at at a number of GPU vendors, and it felt like Nvidia was the only one that took software as an asset worth investing in, rather than as a cost center. Massively different culture.
See also this post about the same work: HipKittens: Fast and furious AMD kernels [0], with comments from George Hotz and AMD employees.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45923188
This is great, but why does the write-up read like it was written by someone with brain damage?
The writing is laughably bad. I can’t tell if it’s someone that over relied on AI or if they just mimic the structure and mannerisms of AI produced writing because that’s what they see.
A few choice examples:
> Checkout part one of this series for an intro to HipKittens and checkout this post for a technical deep dive.
> Unsurprisingly, making AMD GPUs go brr boils down to keeping the “matrix cores” (tensor cores on NVIDIA) fed.
> These two patterns tradeoff programmability and performance, where 8-wave and its large tile primitives lead to compact code and 4-wave fine-grained interleaving expands code size. Surprisingly, the 8-wave schedule is sufficient to achieve SoTA-level performance on GEMMs and attention forwards. For GQA non-causal attention backwards, 8-wave also outperforms all AMD baselines by 1.8 × 1.8×, and our HK 4-wave further outperforms by 2.3 × 2.3×.
And I could go on. And on.
But overall besides the overuse of cliche/memespeak places it doesn’t make sense, the entire section that deals with the hot loop describes something that should be explained in a graph and instead explained in 100 lines of source code.
Am I crazy what is wrong with any of those quotes.
It's not my favorite internet meme but I'm tickled to see "go brr" on a website/university like Stanford
They already "went brr" when they announced ThunderKittens a year ago: https://hazyresearch.stanford.edu/blog/2024-05-12-tk
This meme is tired. Let it rest boss.
Usually a sign that it is not cool anymore and the kids need to make something new up.
I quite like that the AMD aren’t so popular with the AI bubble. It means I can play games without getting a mortgage.
How those AMD crashes though. All my friends in AMD CPUs have had a hell of the last two years with constant crashes in unreal engine games. Meanwhile, I made fun of myself for buying an ancient 11 series which is a decade old arch at this point but is rock solid.
AMD CPU, AMD GPU, zero crashes here. No crashes on the Steam Deck either, which is also 100% AMD.
The common denominator to the crashes you mention might possibly not be AMD? Do you friends perchance play on Windows?
Just to point out that those crashes are specific to Windows: current generation of consoles run the same UE games with no crashes.
it took me around half a year to get an AMD integrated GPU working on linux
the solution was adding amdgpu.ppfeaturemask=0xffff7fff to the command line. Before that I could reliably crash the driver with firefox.My AMD cpu died after 9 months. I've received money return, but still it leaves a bad taste.
Their linux driver support isn't so great, though. I really considered an AMD GPU for my most recent build, and based on the driver support for just the integrated graphics on my new AMD CPU (7900X), I opted for an NVidia card instead.
Quite the opposite these days. AMD just works and Nvidia is a crapshoot
How so? Switching from an Nvidia card to an AMD one I am now able to upgrade my kernel whenever without getting a blinking cursor after reboot. How are in-tree drivers worse than whatever Nvidia does?
I'm running a 6900XT on Arch and have no problems so far. Steam, Heroic launcher and every game i tried so far worked like a charm. You can even OC with LACT [1] if you want to.
[1] https://github.com/ilya-zlobintsev/LACT
I have a 9060 in one PC and a 9070 in another, on Fedora 43.
It runs great. Run all my steam stuff through them. Those days to mention have been long gone for quite awhile.