wmf 6 months ago

What if they understand that and they don't care? Getting one hyperscaler as a customer is worth more than the entire long tail.

  • stingraycharles 6 months ago

    The problem is that this is short-term thinking. You need students and professionals playing around with your tools at home and/or on their work computers to drive hyperscale demand in the long term.

    This is why it’s so important AMD gets their act together quickly, as the benefits of these kind of things are measured in years, not months.

  • lhl 6 months ago

    On the corp side you have FB w/ PyTorch, xformers (still pretty iffy on AMD support tbt) and MS w/ DeepSpeed. But let's see about some others:

    Flash Attention: academia, 2y behind for AMD support

    bitsandbytes: academia, 2y behind for AMD support

    Marlin: academia, no AMD support

    FlashInfer: acadedmia/startup, no AMD

    ThunderKittens: academia, no AMD support

    DeepGEMM, DeepEP, FlashMLA: ofc, nothing from China supports AMD

    Without the long tail AMD will continue to always be in a position where they have to scramble to try to add second tier support years later themselves, while Nvidia continues to get all the latest and greatest for free.

    This is just off the top of my head on the LLM side where I'm focused on, btw. Whenever I look at image/video it's even more grim.

    • jimmySixDOF 6 months ago

      Modular says Max/Mojo will change this and make refactoring between different vendors (and different lines of the same vendor) less of a showstopper but tbd for now

      • pjmlp 6 months ago

        The judge is still out there regarding if Max/Mojo is going to be something that the large majority cares about.

  • selectodude 6 months ago

    Then they’re fools. Every AI maestro knows CUDA because they learned it at home.

    • jiggawatts 6 months ago

      It’s the same reason there’s orders of magnitude more code written for Linux than for mainframes.

  • danielheath 6 months ago

    Why would a hyperscaler pick the technology that’s harder to hire for (because there’s no hobbyist-to-expert pipeline)?

  • moffkalast 6 months ago

    Then they will stay irrelevant in the GPU space like they have been so far.

  • littlestymaar 6 months ago

    Why should we care about them if they don't care?

    I mean of they want to stay at a fraction of the market value and profit of their direct competitor, good for them.

    • dummydummy1234 6 months ago

      I want a competitive market so I can have cheaper gpus.

      It's Nvidia, AMD, and maybe Intel.

cma 6 months ago

Nvidia started removing nvlink with the 4000 series, they aren't heavily focused on it either anymore and want to sell the workstation cards for uses like training models at home.

  • 7speter 6 months ago

    As a beginner, you can get a lot done on a 4060ti/5060ti 16gb, much less a 4090/5090.

    Heck I’ve been able to work through the early chapters of the FastAI book using a lowly Quadro p1000