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Re:Google's First Tensor Processing Unit: Architecture by rurban on Tuesday March 26, 2024 @04:02AM (#39825217)
They have Vulcan, which is cross-compatible.

And AMD has ROCm. pytorch is standard and pytorch has ROCm support. And the Google TPU v5 also has pytorch support.

We do have a couple of H100's, but I'd love to replace them with AMD's

Re:Google's First Tensor Processing Unit: Architecture by Kelteseth on Tuesday March 26, 2024 @05:19AM (#39825710)
If AMD fixes or open sources their proprietary firmware blob[0]. Geohot streamed all weekend on Twitch, reverse engineering the AMD firmware. It was quite entertaining learning about how that low level hardware firmware works[1] and his rants about AMD of course.

[0] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Tinybox-Radeon-Again-UMR

[1] https://www.twitch.tv/georgehotz

Re:Google's First Tensor Processing Unit: Architecture by KeplerBoy on Tuesday March 26, 2024 @05:33AM (#39825802)
Geohot is wrangling with unsupported consumer hardware.

The datacenter stuff is on a different architecture and driver stack. The number one supercomputer on the top500 list (frontier at ORNL) is based on AMD GPUs and AMD is probably more invested in supporting that.

Re:Google's First Tensor Processing Unit: Architecture by QuadmasterXLII on Tuesday March 26, 2024 @08:26AM (#39826992)
I mean, that's kinda nvidia's whole shtick: anyone can play around synthesizing cat pictures on their gaming GPU and if they make a breakthrough, the same software will transfer to X million dollar supercomputers.
Re:Google's First Tensor Processing Unit: Architecture by kkielhofner on Tuesday March 26, 2024 @09:44AM (#39827730)
I work with Frontier and ORNL/OLCF. They have had and continue to have issues with AMD/ROCm but yes, they do of course get excellent support from AMD. The entire team at OLCF is incredible as well (obviously) and they do amazing work.

Frontier certainly has some unique quirks but the documentation is online[0] and most of these quirks are inherent to the kinds of fundamental issues you'll see on any system in the space (SLURM, etc).

However, most of the issues are fundamentally ROCm and you'll run into them on any MIxxx anywhere. I run into them frequently with supported and unsupported consumer gear all the way up.

[0] - https://docs.olcf.ornl.gov/systems/frontier_user_guide.html

Re:Google's First Tensor Processing Unit: Architecture by refulgentis on Tuesday March 26, 2024 @08:18AM (#39826915)
Geohot doesn't know what he's talking about and I'm kinda ashamed to see this lazy thinking leak onto HN. There was an article a couple weeks back on AMD open sourcing drivers in the Linux kernel tree that you should look into.
Re:Google's First Tensor Processing Unit: Architecture by Kelteseth on Tuesday March 26, 2024 @09:00AM (#39827285)
Care to explain a bit more? His rant was about the firmware having crashes not the Linux driver.
Re:Google's First Tensor Processing Unit: Architecture by refulgentis on Tuesday March 26, 2024 @09:33AM (#39827608)
Firmware crashes => days long "open source it and I'll fix it. no? why does AMD hate its customers?"

I got an appointment and have exactly one minute till I have to leave, apologies for brevity: they can't open source the full driver because then they'd have to release HDMI spec stuff that the consortium says they can't. (I don't support any of that, my only intent is to communicate George isn't really locked in here when he starts casting aspersions or claiming AMD doesn't care)

Re:Google's First Tensor Processing Unit: Architecture by immibis on Tuesday March 26, 2024 @06:54AM (#39826303)
Subscriber only videos, so nobody can confirm that he did that, nor archive whatever valuable information he released. At least not without paying some money in the next 7-14 days before they're deleted.
Re:Google's First Tensor Processing Unit: Architecture by ionelaipatioaei on Tuesday March 26, 2024 @07:57AM (#39826746)
Re:Google's First Tensor Processing Unit: Architecture by nl on Sunday March 31, 2024 @08:19AM (#39883592)
Vulcan is a driver-level API. It competes with DirectX and OpenGL.

CUDA is a language you write kernels. It competes with OpenAI's Triton language.

Here's what CUDA looks like: https://github.com/tspeterkim/flash-attention-minimal/blob/m...

This is what Triton looks like: https://triton-lang.org/main/getting-started/tutorials/06-fu...

By contrast Vulcan looks like this: https://github.com/KhronosGroup/Vulkan-Samples/blob/main/sam...

(It's true to some extent that maybe you could use Vulcan shaders to write deep learning kernels, maybe? I'm not aware of anyone doing it though)