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> 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?
Gamers don’t care about FP64 performance, and it seems nVidia is using that for market segmentation. The FP64 performance for RTX 4090 is 1.142 TFlops, for RTX 3090 Ti 0.524 TFlops. AMD doesn’t do that, FP64 performance is consistently better there, and have been this way for quite a few years. For example, the figure for 3090 Ti (a $2000 card from 2022) is similar to Radeon RX Vega 56, a $400 card from 2017 which can do 0.518 TFlops.
And another thing: nVidia forbids usage of GeForce cards in data centers, while AMD allows that. I don’t know how specifically they define datacenter, whether it’s enforceable, or whether it’s tested in courts of various jurisdictions. I just don’t want to find out answers to these questions at the legal expenses of my employer. I believe they would prefer to not cut corners like that.
I think nVidia only beats AMD due to the ecosystem: for GPGPU that’s CUDA (and especially the included first-party libraries like BLAS, FFT, DNN and others), also due to the support in popular libraries like TensorFlow. However, it’s not that hard to ignore the ecosystem, and instead write some compute shaders in HLSL. Here’s a non-trivial open-source project unrelated to CAE, where I managed to do just that with decent results: https://github.com/Const-me/Whisper That software even works on Linux, probably due to Valve’s work on DXVK 2.0 (a compatibility layer which implements D3D11 on top of Vulkan).
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.