ROCm Device Support Wishlist

For context, the submitter of the issue is Anush Elangovan from AMD who's recently been a lot more active on social after the SemiAnalysis article, and taking the reigns / responsibility of moving AMD's software efforts forward.

However you want to dissect this specific issue, I'd generally consider this a positive step and nice to see it hit the front page.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ROCm/comments/1i5aatx/rocm_feedback...

https://www.reddit.com/user/powderluv/

ROCm is a mistake. It's fundamentally broken by compiling to hardware specific code instead of CUDA's RTX, so it will always be plagued with this issue of not supporting all cards, and even if a certain GPU is supported today they can stop supporting it next version. It has happened, it will continue happen.

It's also a strange value proposition. If I'm a programmer in some super computer facility and my boss has bought a new CDNA based computer, fine, I'll write AMD specific code for it. Otherwise why should I? If I want to write proprietary GPU code I'll probably use the de facto industry standard from the industry giant and pick CUDA.

AMD could be collaborating with Intel and a myriad of other companies and organizations and focus on a good open cross platform GPU programming platform. I don't want to have to think about who makes my GPU! I recently switched from an Intel CPU to an AMD, obviously to problem. If I had to get new software written for AMD processors I would have just bought a new Intel, even though AMD are leading in performance at the moment. Even Windows on ARM seems to work ok, because most things aren't written in x86 assembly anymore.

Get behind SYCL, stop with the platform specific compilation nonsense, and start supporting consumer GPUs on Windows. If you provide a good base the rest of the software community will build on top. This should have been done ten years ago.

Really telling they have to ask us for what cards we want as opposed to supporting all cards by default from day 1 like Nvidia.

All because they went with a boneheaded decision to require per-device code compilation (gfx1030, gfx1031...) instead of compiling to an intermediate representation like CUDA's PTX. Doubly boneheaded considering the graphics API they developed, Vulkan, literally does that via SPIR-V!

I’m constantly baffled and amused on why AMD keeps majorly failing at this.

Either the management at AMD is not smart enough to understand that without the computing software side they will always be a distant number 2 to NVIDIA, or the management at AMD considers it hopeless to ever be able to create something as good as CUDA because they don’t have and can’t hire smart enough people to write the software.

Really, it’s just baffling why they continue on this path to irrelevance. Give it a few years and even Intel will get ahead of them on the GPU side.

My wishlist for ROCm support is actually supporting the cards they already released. But that's not going to happen.

By the time an (consumer) AMD device is supported by ROCm it'll only have a few years of ROCm support left before support is removed. Lifespan of support for AMD cards with ROCm is very short. You end up having to use Vulkan which is not optimized, of course, and a bit slower. I once bought an AMD GPU 2 years after release and 1 year after I bought it ROCm support was dropped.

I can understand wanting to prioritize support for the cards people want to use most, but they should still plan to write software support for all the cards that have hardware support.

rocm is kind of a joke. Recently I wanted to write some golang code which talks to rocm devices using amd smi. You have to build and install the go amd smi from source, the go amd smi repo has dead links and there is basically no documentation anywhere on how to get this working.

Compare this to nvidia where I just imported the go nvml library and it built the cgo code and automatically links to nvidia-ml.so at runtime.

AMD supports only a single Radeon GPU in Linux (RX 7900 in three variants)?

Windows support is also bad, but supports significantly more than one GPU.

Add support for every APU. They can have much more RAM than discrete graphics.

Why are people in AMD assuming other people don't want more software support for their GPUs by default? This is not nice.

I figure that list is only what’s officially supported, meaning things not on that list may or may not work?. For example, my 6800 XT runs stable diffusion just fine on Linux with PyTorch ROCm.

A lot of people think rocm is basically a big pile of crap.

What are the chances for amd to consider alternatives: - adopt oneapi and try to fight Nvidia together with intel - Vulkan and implement pytorch backend - sycl

They should just support all cards. Just like Nvidia does.

And they drop support too quickly too. The Radeon Pro VII is already out of support. It's barely 5 years since release.

This way it will never be a counterpart to CUDA.

Really hoping for support for an AMD Radeon Pro W5700 I have kicking around.

As someone from the rendering side of GPU stuff, what exactly is the point of ROCm/CUDA? We already have Vulkan and SPIR-V with vendor extensions as a mostly-portable GPU API, what do these APIs do differently?

Furthermore, don't people use PyTorch (and other libraries? I'm not really clear on what ML tooling is like, it feels like there's hundreds of frameworks and I haven't seen any simplified list explaining the differences. I would love a TLDR for this) and not ROCm/CUDA directly anyways? So the main draw can't be ergonomics, at least.

i really need amd to make an apu with eight channels and ddr5