I'm not defending their software. It does honestly have a ton of issues.
George Hotz tried to get a consumer card to work. He also refused my public invitations to have free time on my enterprise cards, calling me an AMD shill.
AMD listened and responded to him and gave him even the difficult things that he was demanding. He has the tools to make it work now and if he needs more, AMD already seems willing to give it. That is progress.
To simply throw out George as the be-all and end-all of a $245B company... frankly absurd.
The fact that consumer and "pro"(?) GPUs don't use (mostly) the same software is not confidence inspiring. It means that AMD's already apparently limited capacity for software development is stretched thinner than it otherwise would be.
Also, if the consumer GPUs are hopelessly broken but the enterprise GPUs are fine, that greatly limits the number of people that can contribute to making the AMD AI software ecosystem better. How much of the utility of the NVIDIA software ecosystem comes from gaming GPU owners tinkering in their free time? Or grad students doing small scale research?
I think these kinds of things are a big part of why NVIDIA's software is so much better than AMD right now.
that greatly limits the number of people that can contribute to making the AMD AI software ecosystem better
I’d say it simply dials it down to zero. No one’s gonna buy an enterprise AMD card for playing with AI, so no one’s gonna contribute to that either. As a local AI enthusiast, this “but he used consumer card” complaint makes no sense to me.
> No one’s gonna buy an enterprise AMD card for playing with AI
My hypothesis is that the buying mentality stems from the inability to rent. Hence, me opening up a rental business.
Today, you can buy 7900's and they work with ROCm. As George pointed out, there are some low level issues with them, that AMD is working with him to resolve. That doesn't mean they absolutely don't work.
Agreed that AMD needs to work on the developer flywheel. Again, not defending their software.
One way to improve the flywheel and make the ecosystem better, is to make their hardware available for rent. Something that previously was not available outside of hyperscalers and HPC.
> To simply throw out George as the be-all and end-all of a $245B company... frankly absurd.
I didn't do that, and I don't appreciate this misreading of my post. Please don't drag me into whatever drama is/was going on between you two.
The only point I was making was that George's experience with AMD products reflected poorly on AMD software engineering circa 2023. Whether George is ultimately successful in convincing AMD to publicly release what he needs is beside the point. Whether he is ultimately successful convincing their GPUs to perform his expectations is beside the point.
Clearly you've experienced some kind of personality clash and/or a battle of egos. I can't fault you for holding a low opinion of him as a result, but I'm unimpressed with personal beefs being used as evidence to impeach credibility.
My point is as I wrote in both posts. George was able to demonstrate evidence of poor engineering which "reflected poorly on AMD". From this I could form my own conclusion that AMD aren't in an engineering position to become "serious contenders in AI".
The poor software engineering evident on consumer cards is an indictment of AMD engineers, and the theoretical possibility for their enterprise products to have well engineered firmware wouldn't alleviate this indictment. If anything it makes AMD look insidious or incompetent.
George Hotz tried to get a consumer card to work. He also refused my public invitations to have free time on my enterprise cards, calling me an AMD shill.
AMD listened and responded to him and gave him even the difficult things that he was demanding. He has the tools to make it work now and if he needs more, AMD already seems willing to give it. That is progress.
To simply throw out George as the be-all and end-all of a $245B company... frankly absurd.