HIP VS stable-diffusion

>ROCm or HIP?

I'm not sure that's even the right question to ask. Afaik ROCm is the name of that entire tech stack and HIP is AMD's equivalent to CUDA C++ (they basically replicated the API and replaced every "CUDA" by "hip", they have functions called "hipmalloc" and "hipmemcpy").

The repository is located at https://github.com/ROCm/HIP.

Is it perhaps because they want people to use HIP?

> HIP is very thin and has little or no performance impact over coding directly in CUDA mode.

> The HIPIFY tools automatically convert source from CUDA to HIP.

1. https://github.com/ROCm/HIP

AMD has released HIP and a tool called HIPIFY which kind of behaves like this but at the source level¹. Rather than try and just translate CUDA to work on AMD compute they are more focused on higher level tooling.

Currently they seem to have a particular focus on AI frameworks and tools like PyTorch/Tensorflow/ONNX. They have sponsored and helped with a lot of PyTorch development for example, so PyTorch support for AMD is much better than it was this time last year².

¹(https://github.com/ROCm/HIP)

²(https://pytorch.org/blog/experience-power-pytorch-2.0/)

> what would be the point for someone to add ROCm support to various pieces of software which currently require CUDA

It isn't just old cards though, CUDA is a point of centralization on a single provider during a time when access to that providers higher end cards isn't even available and that is causing people to look elsewhere.

ROCm supports CUDA through the included HIP projects...

https://github.com/ROCm/HIP

https://github.com/ROCm/HIPCC

https://github.com/ROCm/HIPIFY

The later will regex replace your CUDA methods with HIP methods. If it is as easy as running hipify on your codebase (or just coding to HIP apis), it certainly makes sense to do so.

AMD's equivalent is HIP [1], for sufficiently flexible definitions of "equivalent". I can't speak to how complete/correct/performant it is (I'm just a guy running tutorial/toy-level ML stuff on an RDNA1 card), but part of AMD's problem is that it might not practically matter how well they do this because the broader ecosystem support specifically for the CUDA stack is so entrenched.

[1] https://github.com/ROCm-Developer-Tools/HIP

From what I know, modern GPUs are still programmed with C++ exclusively. See CUDA [0] for Nvidia and ROCm [1] for AMD.

Why is this? Why Rust is not loved there?

[0] https://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/

[1] https://github.com/ROCm-Developer-Tools/HIP

Go ahead and try to ship ROCm code that works on multiple consumer graphics cards on Linux, MacOS, and Windows. As an example of how much AMD cares about it, the installation notes linked to in the readme returns a 404.

Yes, you can install it with Python! https://github.com/lstein/stable-diffusion works with macOS, and you can control all the common parameter via their WebUI or CLI :)

I'm using lstein fork ("dream") and when I create an image from the terminal, it also writes back to the terminal like this:

> Whenever I ask for something like ‘seamless tiling xxxxxx’ it kinda sorta gets the idea, but the resulting texture doesn’t quite tile right.

Getting seamless tiling requires more than just have "seamless tiling" in the prompt. It also depends on if the fork you're using has that feature at all.

https://github.com/lstein/stable-diffusion has the feature, but you need to pass it outside the prompt. So if you use the `dream.py` prompt cli, you can pass it `"Hats on the ground" --seamless` and it should be perfectly tilable.

From https://github.com/lstein/stable-diffusion

Stable Diffusion Dream Script: This is the original site/script for supporting macOS. I found this soon after Stable Diffusion was publicly released and it was the site which inspired me to try out using Stable Diffusion on a mac. They have a web-based UI (as well as command-line scripts) and a lot of documentation on how to get things working.

I’m pretty sure it works for M2 as well - basically the newer ARM-based Macs. The instructions to get it working are detailed! https://github.com/lstein/stable-diffusion