It has been a bit of a nightmare and had to package like 30+ deps and their heavily customized LLVM, but got the runtime to build this morning finally.

Things are looking bright for high security workloads on AMD hardware due to them working fully in the open however much of a mess it may be.

Right now the entire source base is literally throw a bunch of crap into the rocm brand and hope it builds together vs some overarching architecture. Presumably the entire spend it also tied to "whatever big Co's evaluation needs this week" when it comes to developing with it.

Must have been by waiting for each of the 1000 complainers to die of old age, because I do not know what old hardware they have added support for.

I'm not talking gaming CUDA, but CV and data science workloads seem to scale well on Arc and work well on Edge on Core Ultra 2/3.

ROCm Device Support Wishlist (205 points, 107 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42772170

(1) - Supporting only Server grade hardware and ignoring laptop/consumer grade GPU/APU for ROCm was a terrible strategical mistake.

A lot of developers experiments first and foremost on their personal laptop first and scale on expensive, professional grade hardware later. In addition: some developers simply do not have the money to buy server grade hardware.

By locking ROCm only to server grade GPUs, you restrict the potential list of contributors to your OSS ROCm ecosystem to few large AI users and few HPC centers... Meaning virtually nobody.

A much more sensible strategy would be to provide degraded performance for ROCm on top of consummer GPUs, and this is exactly what Nvidia with CUDA is doing.

This is changing but you need to send a clear message there. EVERY new released device should be properly supported by ROCm.

- (2) Supporting only the two last generations of architecture is not what customers want to see.

https://rocm.docs.amd.com/projects/install-on-linux/en/docs-...

People with existing GPU codebase invests significant amount of effort to support ROCm.

Saying them two years later: "Sorry you are out of update now!" when the ecosystem is still unstable is unacceptable.

CUDA excels to backward compatibility. The fact you ignore it entirely plays against you.

(3) - Focusing exclusively on Triton and making HIP a second class citizen is non-sensical.

AI might get all the buzz and the money right now, we go it.

It might look sensible on the surface to focus on Python-base, AI focused, tools like Triton and supporting them is definitively necessary.

But there is a tremendous amount of code that is relying on C++ and C to run over GPU (HPC, simulation, scientific, imaging, ....) and that will remain there for the multiple decades to come.

Ignoring that is loosing, again, custumers to CUDA.

It is currently pretty ironic to see such a move like that considering that AMD GPUs currently tend to be highly competitive over FP64, meaning good for these kind of applications. You are throwing away one of your own competitive advantage...

(4) - Last but not least: Please focus a bit on the packaging of your software solution.

There has been complained on this for the last 5 years and not much changed.

Working with distributions packagers and integrating with them does not cost much... This would currently give you a competitive advantage over Nvidia..

"Anush's success is due to opting out of internal bureaucracy than anything else. most Claude use at AMD goes through internal infrastructure that can take hundreds of seconds per response due to throttling. Anush got us an exemption to use Anthropic directly. he is also exempt from normal policies on open source and so I can directly contribute to projects to add AMD support. He's an effective leader and has turned ROCm into a internal startup based in California. Definitely worth joining the team even if you've heard bad things about AMD as a whole."

This kind of bullshit is why I don't want to join AMD, even if this particular team is temporarily exempt from it.

Is it leadership? Something else?

Meanwhile nvidia just dropped CUDA/driver support for 1xxx series cards from their most recent drivers this year.

For me ROCm's mayfly lifetime is a dealbreaker.

I don't think this is true. ROCm is a huge advantage for Nvidia but as far as I can tell it is more a set of R&D libraries than anything else, so all the Hot New Stuff keeps being Nvidia first and only (to start with) as the library ecosystem for the hotness doesn't exist yet. Then eventually new libraries are created that are CUDA independent and AMD turns out to make pretty good graphics cards.

I wouldn't be surprised of ROCm withered on the vine and AMD still does fine.

AI won't be working in nVidia's advantage this time.

From all the existing examples, it really looks the most interesting.

I.e. what I'm surprised about is lack of backing for it from someone like AMD. It doesn't have to immediately replace ROCm, but AMD would benefit from it advancing and replacing the likes of CUDA.

Of course everybody knows what's really going on here. It's not an open discussion, however.

I really wish AMD and Intel boards get replaced by competent people. They could do it in very short time. Both have integrated GPUs with main memory. AMD and Intel have (or at least used to have) serious know-how in data buses and interconnects, respectively. But I don't see any of that happening.

ROCm? It can't even support decent Attention. It lacks a lot of features and NVIDIA is adding more each year. Soon they will reach escape velocity and nobody will catch them for a decade. smh