[iwontberude]

And this is the investment case for AMD, models fit entirely in a single chassis, and side benefit: less tariffed network equipment to interconnect compute. Map/reduce instead of clustered compute.

Edit: when downvoting, please offer some insight why you disagree

[dragonwriter]

How is the a unique advantage for AMD?

[latchkey]

AMD is consistently stacking more HBM.

  H100 80GB HBM3
  H200 141GB HBM3e
  B200 192GB HBM3e

  MI300x 192GB HBM3
  MI325x 256GB HBM3e
  MI355x 288GB HBM3e

This means that you can fit larger and larger models into a single node, without having to go out over the network. The memory bandwidth on AMD is also quite good.

[ryao]

It really does not matter how much memory AMD has if the drivers and firmware are unstable. To give one example from last year:

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/amds-lisa-su...

They are currently developing their own drivers for AMD hardware because of the headaches that they had with ROCm.

[latchkey]

"driver" is such a generic word. tinygrad works on mi300x. If you want to use it, you can. Negates your point.

Additionally, ROCm is a giant collection of a whole bunch of libraries. Certainly there are issues, as with any large collection of software, but the critical thing is whether or not AMD is responsive towards getting things fixed.

In the past, it was a huge issue, AMD would routinely ignore developers and bugs would never get fixed. But, after that SA article, Lisa lit a fire under Anush's butt and he's taking ownership. It is a major shift in the entire culture at the company. They are extremely responsive and getting things fixed. You can literally tweet your GH issue to him and someone will respond.

What is true a year ago isn't today. If you're paying attention like I am, and experiencing it first hand, things are changing, fast.

[ryao]

I have been hearing this about AMD/ATI drivers for decades. Every year, someone says that it is fixed, only for new evidence to come out that they are not. I have no reason to believe it is fixed given the history.

Here is evidence to the contrary: If ROCm actually was in good shape, tinygrad would use it instead of developing their own driver.

[DiabloD3]

You're conflating two different things.

ROCm isn't part of AMD drivers, its a software library that helps you support legacy compute APIs and stuff in the BLAS/GEMM/LAPACK end of things.

The part of ROCm you're interested in is HIP; HIP is the part that does legacy CUDA emulation. HIP will never be complete because Nvidia keeps adding new things, documents things wrong, and also the "cool" stuff people do on Nvidia cards aren't CUDA and it is out of scope for HIP to emulate PTX (since that is strongly tied to how historical Nvidia architectures worked, and would be entirely inappropriate for AMD architectures).

The whole thing with Tinygrad's "driver" isn't a driver at all, its the infrastructure to handle card to card ccNUMA on PCI-E-based systems, which AMD does not support: if you want that, you buy into the big boy systems that have GPUs that communicate using Infinity Fabric (which it, itself, is the HyperTransport protocol over PCI-E PHY instead of over HyperTransport PHY; PCI over PCI-E has no ability to handle ccNUMA meaningfully).

Extremely few customers, AMD's or not, want to share VRAM directly over PCI-E across GPUs since most PCI-E GPU customers are single GPU. Customers that have massive multi-GPU deployments have bought into the ecosystem of their preferred vendor (ie, Nvidia's Mellanox-powered fabrics, or AMD's wall-to-wall Infinity Fabric).

That said, AMD does want to support it if they can, and Tinygrad isn't interested in waiting for an engineer at AMD to add it, so they're pushing ahead and adding it themselves.

Also, part of Tinygrad's problem is they want it available from ROCm/HIP instead of a standards compliant modern API. ROCm/HIP still has not been ported to the modern shader compiler that the AMD driver uses (ie, the one you use for OpenGL, Vulkan, and Direct family APIs), since it originally came from an unrelated engineering team that isn't part of the driver team.

The big push in AMD currently is to unify efforts so that ROCm/HIP is massively simplified and all the redundant parts are axed, so it is purely a SPIR-V code generator or similar. This would probably help projects like Tinygrad someday, but not today.

[latchkey]

We have all been hearing things for decades. Things are noticeably different now. Live in the present, not in the past.

Tinygrad isn’t a driver. It is a framework. It is being developed by George however he wants. If he wants to build something that gives him more direct control over things. Fine. Others might write PTX instead if using higher level abstractions.

Fact is that tinygrad runs not only on AMD, but also Nvidia and others. You might want to reassess your beliefs because you’re reading into things and coming up with the wrong conclusions.

[faldore]

That was last year Mi300x firmware and software have gotten much better since then

[ryao]

Unfortunately, AMD and ATI before it have had driver quality issues for decades; and both they and their fans have claimed that they have solved the problems every year since.

Even if they have made progress, I doubt that they have reached parity with Nvidia. I have had enough false hope from them that I am convinced that the only way that they will ever improve their drivers if they let another group write the drivers for them.

Coincidentally, Valve has been developing the Vulkan driver used by SteamOS and other Linux distributions, which is how SteamOS is so much better than Windows. If AMD could get someone else to work on improving their GPGPU support, we would likely see it become quite good too. Until then, I have very low expectations.

[latchkey]

Gaming != HPC

[krapht]

So the MI300x has 8 different memory domains, and although you can treat it as one flat memory space, if you want to reach their advertised peak memory bandwidth you have to work with it like an 8-socket board.

[latchkey]

Here is a good article on it:

https://rocm.blogs.amd.com/software-tools-optimization/compu...

[dragonwriter]

MI355X isn't out yet, and the upcoming B300 also has 288GB HBM3e

[latchkey]

June 12th.

B300 is Q4 2025.

Yes, they keep leapfrogging each other. AMD is still ahead in vram.

[rixed]

> when downvoting, please offer some insight why you disagree

And remind that (down)voting is not for (dis)agreement.