HIP-CPU VS rocBLAS

If I'm reading this right, this is Fortran's equivalent of HIP, i.e. a way to (semi-)automatically convert CUDA-based solution to a more backend-independent one so that the same source can be run both on CUDA and ROCm GPUs (and potentially more; e.g. they also have an experimental CPU backend).

So, I know that you asked about cuda, but this might actually be possible in hip, and you can convert your code to hip relatively easily. The path would be to use the CPU implementation (https://github.com/ROCm-Developer-Tools/HIP-CPU) and then run your code coverage on that.

The same is also true for https://github.com/ROCmSoftwarePlatform/rocBLAS and https://github.com/ROCmSoftwarePlatform/hipBLASLt although the build stack, distribution— leaves a lot to be desired, and otherwise quite unstable.

Full circle eh. I wonder how well it compares to just trying to use the actual Whisper models on a variety of existing Gpu capable bigger frameworks.

I don't know much practically about how hard it would be to take the Whisper PyTorch (1 or 2?) trained models & to make good use of them elsewhere. I expect Whisper.cpp probably better caters to users, is more readily consumable.

Fwiw, Whisper.cpp uses Nvidia's cuBLAS. There does appear to be an AMD rocm port. https://github.com/ROCmSoftwarePlatform/rocBLAS

It's not what you asked, but I felt I should point out that rocBLAS is no longer maintained for gfx803 (the architecture of the RX 570) and PyTorch depends on rocBLAS. PyTorch will work at least to some extent, but there are known bugs that may never be fixed. I've been trying to change this, but that's how things are right now.

The last release that officially supported gfx803 was ROCm 3.5. All testing on that hardware ceased shortly after said release, and the code paths for that architecture have been unmaintained for nearly two years. For a specific example of a problem you may encounter, see: https://github.com/ROCmSoftwarePlatform/rocBLAS/issues/1218

Although the code is still there, support for (slightly) older devices are already suffering from lack of maintainence and bugs. For instance there's a bug causing gfx803 devices to produce wrong outputs starting from mid-2020, and I'm pretty sure they're never gonna fix it.