Re:AMD Radeon RX 6800 and RX 6800 XT Review
by hedgehog on Wednesday November 18, 2020 @04:15PM
(#25142535)
It's got nothing to do with hardware, so far NVIDIA has been the only vendor to take deep learning seriously. AMD GPUs have at times been the best on paper for DL but always lacked real software support. A low cost 16GB card could be very useful but their strategy doesn't appear to have changed so today NVIDIA is still the only option.
MI100 finally brings hardware accelerated matrix-multiplication to the table (bfloat16, FP16, and even FP32 matrix multiplication).
Now that MI100 has matrix-multiplication units, now comes the part where that is distributed to the software. (Hooking up TensorFlow to use them).
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Without Matrix Multiplication units, there was really no point even writing software (aside from maybe preparation of the eventual rise of AMD's matrix-multiplication routines).
But 6800 XT won't have matrix-multiplication units. Only the CDNA architecture has those. So I'm not entirely sure if 6800 XT would even be an adequate competitor to deep learning applications, even if ROCm supported it entirely.