Re:AMD's CDNA 3 Compute Architecture
by segfaultbuserr on Sunday December 17, 2023 @08:14PM
(#38678169)
> I'd really not call the Radeon VII a "fantastic card" by any stretch of the imagination
Whether or not the Radeon VII was a "fantastic card" is relatively unimportant, it would have been another GPU. OP's main point was that AMD had a years-long policy of not officially supporting any of their consumer-grade GPUs for computing applications, as a result AMD had lost critical opportunities during this time period - even a small market share is better than none. OP mentioned Radeon VII because it was the only exception, and it only happened because there was strong support from some groups within AMD - which didn't last long. After RDNA was released, computing support on consumer GPUs was put on pause again until several months ago. There's a big difference between "not optimally designed for computing" and "no official support of computing at all".
The outcome is that it created a great barrier of entry for developers and power users with desktop GPUs. You have to figure out everything by yourself, which is not supposed to be particularly difficult as it's the norm in the FOSS world. The problem is that, in a community-driven project, you would have received help or at least a hint from your peers or project maintainers who's familiar with the system. Not so for AMD. if something doesn't work, no AMD developers will provide any help or even hints - and by not providing support, the "community" is never really established. The ROCm GitHub Issues page was (is?) basically post-apocalypse world abandoned by AMD, full of user self-help threads with no input from developers. Almost nothing works and nobody known why.
> Sure, if those things are relevant to you, it was a killer card
Disclosure: I use the Radeon VII for bandwidth-heavy simulations so I have a pro-Radeon VII bias. But I don't think my bias affected my judgement here.
Re:AMD's CDNA 3 Compute Architecture
by namibj on Sunday December 17, 2023 @11:46PM
(#38679335)
Also it's basically an Mi50 in a trench coat.
You could buy a 32 GiB version labeled Mi60, initially with a single mini DP port making it IMO classify as "graphics card" not "compute accelerator".
Whether or not the Radeon VII was a "fantastic card" is relatively unimportant, it would have been another GPU. OP's main point was that AMD had a years-long policy of not officially supporting any of their consumer-grade GPUs for computing applications, as a result AMD had lost critical opportunities during this time period - even a small market share is better than none. OP mentioned Radeon VII because it was the only exception, and it only happened because there was strong support from some groups within AMD - which didn't last long. After RDNA was released, computing support on consumer GPUs was put on pause again until several months ago. There's a big difference between "not optimally designed for computing" and "no official support of computing at all".
The outcome is that it created a great barrier of entry for developers and power users with desktop GPUs. You have to figure out everything by yourself, which is not supposed to be particularly difficult as it's the norm in the FOSS world. The problem is that, in a community-driven project, you would have received help or at least a hint from your peers or project maintainers who's familiar with the system. Not so for AMD. if something doesn't work, no AMD developers will provide any help or even hints - and by not providing support, the "community" is never really established. The ROCm GitHub Issues page was (is?) basically post-apocalypse world abandoned by AMD, full of user self-help threads with no input from developers. Almost nothing works and nobody known why.
> Sure, if those things are relevant to you, it was a killer card
Disclosure: I use the Radeon VII for bandwidth-heavy simulations so I have a pro-Radeon VII bias. But I don't think my bias affected my judgement here.