People go a bit crazy about CUDA, ROCm and PyTorch, but I've been watching for a few years and have seen no evidence whatsoever that they are serious blockers. PyTorch does work on AMD cards and whatever ROCm can't do doesn't seem to be important because no-one has articulated why they need it in my line of sight. By far AMD's biggest problem is that their linux kernel drivers historically don't seem to be able to handle GEMM workloads without kernel panics.
Having some senior engineers taking a public interest in putting up this sort of article is rather exciting. I'm not going to give AMD the benefit of the doubt after their horrific performance in the 2010s and early 2020s but observing from a safe distance - they do look like they're on the right track and possibly even a fair way down the path to getting into the game.
You seem to be saying AMD GPUs can run PyTorch but can't run GEMM? Can you explain? I thought PyTorch used GEMM extensively.
I also don't understand the comment on "whatever ROCm can't do doesn't seem to be important because no-one has articulated why they need it in my line of sight". Isn't the problem with ROCm the lack of support? It's only officially supported on a tiny proportion of AMD's product line?
RDNA4 is officially supported on ROCm (release for that came out shortly after the drivers shipped), and PyTorch officially supports ROCm and AMD officially supports PyTorch's ROCm target.
Wow they support the whole RDNA4 product line now! Pleased to see AMD seem to finally getting somewhere with ROCm on consumer cards. It's been a long time coming. Looks like the Ryzen AI Max 395 has (Linux only) ROCm support too now.
I'd missed all of this when it arrived but I'm happy to see it. Articles like this one should be appearing a lot more often now and that's a good thing.
roenxi|7 months ago
Having some senior engineers taking a public interest in putting up this sort of article is rather exciting. I'm not going to give AMD the benefit of the doubt after their horrific performance in the 2010s and early 2020s but observing from a safe distance - they do look like they're on the right track and possibly even a fair way down the path to getting into the game.
fancyfredbot|7 months ago
I also don't understand the comment on "whatever ROCm can't do doesn't seem to be important because no-one has articulated why they need it in my line of sight". Isn't the problem with ROCm the lack of support? It's only officially supported on a tiny proportion of AMD's product line?
DiabloD3|7 months ago
RDNA4 is officially supported on ROCm (release for that came out shortly after the drivers shipped), and PyTorch officially supports ROCm and AMD officially supports PyTorch's ROCm target.
fancyfredbot|7 months ago
I'd missed all of this when it arrived but I'm happy to see it. Articles like this one should be appearing a lot more often now and that's a good thing.