Nvidia had the first movers advantage. Nvidia spent so many years perfecting CUDA to work well with PyTorch. Before ROCM, there was only CUDA. There were so many developers building their use cases on top of PyTorch+CUDA, and bringing all that feedback to PyTorch, this made CUDA battle ready and stable. AMD can get there, especially now with demand for compute, but as someone already said here, the biggest focus needs to be on PyTorch
> AMD’s software experience is riddled with bugs [...] AMD’s weaker-than-expected software Quality Assurance (QA) culture and its challenging out of the box experience.<p>This has anecdotally been true since forever. Back in the day, OpenCL implementations were passing conformance test but performance was poor. They could not turn hardware capabilities into performance for compute users. Drivers were buggy. Documentation was poor compared to NVidia's docs and forum. Offerings were inconsistent (look up Sycl from Codeplay) and ownership of what it is like to develop for AMD was unclear. The notion that it might not have improved or is only now improving is puzzling. It can't be for the lack of recognizing the problem. Intuitively it does not seem so difficult. I'm curious what the reasons are.
Mirrors the geohotz rants about AMD at the time, though as others point out this - 2024 - is ancient news in AI world and not quite sure what value it adds to the current discussions
Has this changed, If I want to go hands on with development using pytorch or whatever is used now, would you recommend an AMD card?<p>Genuine question, I have not followed this topic closely for years :)
Please just get everything in PyTorch to work, and work well (and across all graphics cards too). This is the starting point and it doesn't matter how you do it. But the fact you cannot even do some very basic stuff on AMD is going to mean you are left unused by researchers, so getting further up the stack is going to be almost impossible.
Please amend the title, this is a December 2024 article and the conclusions are misleading in 2026
Correction: Why wasn't it competitive 2 years ago; basically half the AI summer ago.
NVIDIA has such a big moat around their CUDA architecture such that I don't think AMD will ever be able to outcompete them in AI compute unless they somehow find 2-3 nobel prize level breakthroughs today.
If AMD's betting the company on their AI compute, they had best follow the advice in the article because the only way to compete with NVIDIA is to meet/exceed not just the performance but also the DevX.
These days it's for sure the dev environment that is lacking, hardware is okay (potentially great?!), software abysmal. To run a local llm in a stable manner implies using Vulkan.. any attempt at ROCm is totally hamstrung by haphazard support of hardware alongside with an online presence poisoned by people primarily discussing work-arounds rather than work when it comes to AMD as a platform. Argh.
You can't have good performance without good DevX. There's a reason why we get a new python dsl for nvidia GPUs every week.
I love how they just butcher that article.<p>I remember when it came out a little over a year ago, and its just as wrong as it is today as it was then.
The important part of Hardware, is Software<p>After all, if the Software does not work, its just a Paperweight
AMD just doesn't seem to be that good at software.
[2024]