For AI and compute… They’re far behind. CUDA just wins. I hope a joint standard will be coming up soon, but until then Nvidia wins
I got a W6800 recently. I know a nvidia model of the same generation would be faster for AI - but that thing is fast enough to run stable diffusion variants with high resolution pictures locally without getting too annoyed.
The completely different software stack is a killer. It’s not that you can’t find versions of a model to run, but almost everything that hits the GPU for compute is going to be targeting CUDA, not RocM. From a compatibility standpoint alone this killed AMD for me. I just do not want to spend my time fighting the stack to get these models running.
Yeah, it’s not that I like this state of affairs, but right now the vendor lock-in is so one-sided that it’s hard to say there’s a viable alternative to CUDA. I hope that changes one day.
Admittedly I’m just toying around for entertainment purposes - but I didn’t really have any problems of getting anything I wanted to try out with rocm support. Bigger annoyance was different projects targetting specific distributions or specific software versions (mostly ancient python), but as I’m doing everything in containers anyway that also was manageable.
I got a W6800 recently. I know a nvidia model of the same generation would be faster for AI - but that thing is fast enough to run stable diffusion variants with high resolution pictures locally without getting too annoyed.
The completely different software stack is a killer. It’s not that you can’t find versions of a model to run, but almost everything that hits the GPU for compute is going to be targeting CUDA, not RocM. From a compatibility standpoint alone this killed AMD for me. I just do not want to spend my time fighting the stack to get these models running.
on the one hand, cuda is vendor lock-in and if we’d all just agreed on an open standard decades ago then we wouldn’t be in this mess
but on the other hand, rocm is crap and adaptivecpp is very half baked right now, at least in my limited experience
Yeah, it’s not that I like this state of affairs, but right now the vendor lock-in is so one-sided that it’s hard to say there’s a viable alternative to CUDA. I hope that changes one day.
Admittedly I’m just toying around for entertainment purposes - but I didn’t really have any problems of getting anything I wanted to try out with rocm support. Bigger annoyance was different projects targetting specific distributions or specific software versions (mostly ancient python), but as I’m doing everything in containers anyway that also was manageable.