ROCm VS ZLUDA

Yep, did exactly that. IMO he threw a fit, even though AMD was working with him squashing bugs. https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/issues/2198#issuec...

Ok, I wonder what's wrong. maybe it's this? https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4959621/error-1001-in-cl...

Nope. Anything about this on the arch wiki? Nope

This bug report[2] from 2021? Maybe I need to update my groups.

[2]: https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/issues/1411

    $ ls -la /dev/kfd

HMM is, I believe, a Linux feature.

AMD added HMM support in ROCm 5.0 according to this: https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/blob/develop/CHANG...

Woot AMD now supports APU? I sold my notebook as i hit a wall when trying rocm [1] Is there a list oft Wirkung apu's ?

[1] https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/issues/1587

Last I heard he's abandoned working with AMD products.

https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/issues/2198#issuec...

They're talking about the meltdown he had on stream [1] (in front of the mentioned pirate flag), that ended with him saying he'd stop using AMD hardware [2]. He recanted this two weeks after talking with AMD [3].

Maybe he'll succeed, but this definitely doesn't scream stability to me. I'd be wary of investing money into his ventures (but then I'm not a VC, so what do I know).

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mr0rWJhv9jU

[2] https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/issues/2198#issuec...

[3] https://twitter.com/realGeorgeHotz/status/166980346408248934...

As for rocm support on consumer devices, AMD wont even clarify what devices are supported. https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/pull/1738

He flamed out, then is back after Lisa Su called him (lmao)

https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2023/05/24/the-t...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mr0rWJhv9jU

https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/issues/2198#issuec...

https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2023/06/07/a-div...

On a personal level that youtube doesn't make him come off looking that good... like people are trying to get patches to him and generally soothe him/damage control and he's just being a bit of a manchild. And it sounds like that's the general course of events around a lot of his "efforts".

On the other hand he's not wrong either, having this private build inside AMD and not even validating official, supported configurations for the officially supported non-private builds they show to the world isn't a good look, and that's just the very start of the problems around ROCm. AMD's OpenCL runtime was never stable or good either and every experience I've heard with it was "we spent so much time fighting AMD-specific runtime bugs and specs jank that what we ended up with was essentially vendor-proprietary anyway".

On the other other hand, it sounds like AMD know this is a mess and has some big stability/maturity improvements in the pipeline. It seems clear from some of the smoke coming out of the building that they're cooking on more general ROCm support for RDNA cards, and generally working to patch the maturity and stability issues he's talking about. I hate the "wait for drivers/new software release bro it's gonna fix everything" that surrounds AMD products but in this case I'm at least hopeful they seem to understand the problem, even if it's completely absurdly late.

Some of what he was viewing as "the process happening in secret" was likely people doing rush patches on the latest build to accommodate him, and he comes off as berating them over it. Again, like, that stream just comes off as "mercurial manchild" not coding genius. And everyone knew the driver situation is bad, that's why there's notionally alpha for him to realize here in the first place. He's bumping into moneymakers, and getting mad about it.

I tried to train another model using InceptionResNetV2 and the same issues happens. Also, this happens even using the model.predict() method if using the GPU. Probably this is an issue related to the AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT or some mine misconfiguration. System Inormation: ArchLinux 6.1.32-1-lts - AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT - gfx1031 Opened issues: - https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/issues/2250 - https://github.com/ROCmSoftwarePlatform/tensorflow-upstream/issues/2125

It now supports AMD GPUs since 3 weeks ago, check the latest commit at the repo:

https://github.com/vosen/ZLUDA

The article also mentions exactly this fact.

Looks like nvidia is trying to keep the lynchpin of their entire business model from crumbling underneath them. ZLUDA lets you run unmodified CUDA applications with near-native performance on AMD GPUs.

https://github.com/vosen/ZLUDA

With Triton looking to eclipse CUDA entirely, im not sure this prohibition does anything more than placate casual shareholders.

>Dark API functions are reverse-engineered and implemented by ZLUDA on a case-by-case basis once we observe an application making use of it.

https://github.com/vosen/ZLUDA/blob/master/ARCHITECTURE.md

> I know AMD have their competition, but their GPU software division keeps tripping over itself.

They are actively stepping on every rake there is. Eg they just stopped supporting the drop-in-cuda project everyone is waiting for, due to there being "no business-case for CUDA on AMD GPUs" [0].

[0] https://github.com/vosen/ZLUDA?tab=readme-ov-file#faq

https://github.com/vosen/ZLUDA

They still funded it and it was created.

From the same repo, I found this excellent, well-written architecture document: https://github.com/vosen/ZLUDA/blob/master/ARCHITECTURE.md

I love the direct, "no bullshit" style of writing.

Some gems:

> Anyone familiar with C++ will instantly understand that compiling it is a complicated affair.

> Additionally CUDA allows, to a large degree, mixing CPU code and GPU code. What does all this complexity mean for ZLUDA? Absolutely nothing

> Since an application can dynamically link to either Driver API or Runtime API, it would seem that ZLUDA needs to provide both. In reality very few applications dynamically link to Runtime API. For the vast majority of applications it's sufficient to provide Driver API for dynamic (runtime) linking.

CUDA is huge and nvidia spent a ton in a lot of "dead end" use cases optimizing it. There have been experiments with CUDA translation layers with decent performance[1]. There are two things that most projects hit:

1. The CUDA API is huge; I'm sure Intel/AMD will focus on what they need to implement pytorch and ignore every other use case ensuring that CUDA always has the leg up in any new frontier

2. Nvidia actually cares about developer experience. The most prominent example is Geohotz with tinygrad - where AMD examples didn't even work or had glaring compiler bugs. You will find nvidia engineer in github issues for CUDA projects. Intel/AMD hasn't made that level of investment and thats important because GPUs tend to be more fickle than CPUs.

[1] https://github.com/vosen/ZLUDA

> I don't think you understand just how insanely difficult it is to break into that market.

You're right, I have no clue nor have I ever tried myself.

> Even with apple money or something like that, it's a losing prospect because in the time it'll take you to get up and off the ground (which is FOREVER) your competition will crush you.

This I find hard to believe, do you have a source or reference for that claim? Companies with that amount of cash are hardly going to be crushed by competition be it direct or indirect. Anyway, I'm talking more about the Intels and AMDs of this world.

We have very lacklustre efforts from players I won't name with their Zluda library (https://github.com/vosen/ZLUDA) which I got REALLY excited about, until I read the README.txt. Four contributors, last commit early 2021.

Why, oh why, is it this bad?