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by juliangoldsmith 512 days ago
AMD's hardware might be compelling if it had good software support, but it doesn't. CUDA regularly breaks when I try to use Tensorflow on NVIDIA hardware already. Running a poorly-implemented clone of CUDA where even getting Pytorch running is a small miracle is going to be a hard sell.

All AMD had to do was support open standards. They could have added OpenCL/SYCL/Vulkan Compute backends to Tensorflow and Pytorch and covered 80% of ML use cases. Instead of differentiating themselves with actual working software, they decided to become an inferior copy of NVIDIA.

I recently switched from Tensorflow to Tinygrad for personal projects and haven't looked back. The performance is similar to Tensorflow with JIT [0]. The difference is that instead of spending 5 hours fixing things when NVIDIA's proprietary kernel modules update or I need a new box, it actually Just Works when I do "pip install tinygrad".

0: https://cprimozic.net/notes/posts/machine-learning-benchmark...

1 comments

> AMD's hardware might be compelling if it had good software support, but it doesn't. CUDA regularly breaks when I try to use Tensorflow on NVIDIA hardware already.

So it is all shit, but tinygrad saves the day?

It works out of the box without jumping through any hoops, and the fact that it has an OpenCL backend means it can run on a wide variety of hardware.

I don't know of any other autograd libraries with a non-CUDA backend, but I'd be interested to learn about them.