even better, APUs. how about those vega APUs in everyone's AMD laptops and desktops?
oh, right, those are EOL'd, security updates only/separate driver package with a quarterly release cycle, even though they're still on store shelves...
just to emphasize: it is crazy to me that at this moment of frenzy over AI/ML, that AMD is not making better use of their iGPUs. The Vega iGPU is really powerful compared to its contemporaries, it's not WMMA or DP4a capable (iirc) but it still can brute force a lot more than you'd think, it certainly is capable of doing at least a little bit of inference.
Remember that the "AI core" in the new meteor lake and hawk point stuff is not really all that gangbusters either... it's a low-power sidekick, for the same types of stuff that smartphones have been doing with their AI cores for ages. Enhancing the cameraphone (these cameras would be complete shit without computational/AI enhancement). Recognizing gestures, recognizing keywords for voice assistant activation.
AMD's pitch for the AI core is enhancing game AI. Windows 11/12 assistant. That type of stuff.
Vega can absolutely just brute-force its way through that stuff, and it gets more people onto the platform and developing for AMD. It is crazy that if nothing else they aren't at least making sure the APUs can run shit.
And again, it's pretty damn unethical imo to be pulling support from products that are still actively marketed and sold. That's a cheezy move. AMD dropped support for Terascale before NVIDIA dropped support for fermi, and NVIDIA went back and added Vulkan support to all their older stuff during the pandemic too. Then they dropped the 28nm GCN families, while NVIDIA is still supporting maxwell. And then they dropped Polaris and Vega, and NVIDIA is still supporting Maxwell (albeit I expect them to drop it very soon imo).
The open driver is great under linux because it bypasses AMD's craptacular support. But AMD doesn't support consumer GPUs in ROCm under Linux, and de-facto they don't seem to support ROCm on the open driver in the first place anyway, you have to use AMDGPU-PRO (according to geohot's investigations).
This is such a crazy miss. Yes, it's not a powerhouse, but in the era of Win12 moving to AI everything, and games moving to AI-driven computer opponents, etc - Vega can do that ok, and it at least would give people something to open the door and get them developing.
If there's a contender for breakout against CUDA, sadly it really seems to be Apple. They've got APUs with PS5-level bandwidth and unified memory, and that's just M1 Max, and they have Metal, and it's supported everywhere across their ecosystem. It lets people dip their toes into AI/ML if nothing else, and lets people dip their toes into metal development. That's the kind of environment that NVIDIA spent a decade fostering, and it's also not a coincidence that the second stop for all these data scientists playing with models is not ROCm but their apple laptops. llama.cpp and so on. Everyone likes the hardware they have in their gaming PC or in their laptop, and it's an absolute miss for AMD to not make themselves available in that fashion when they already have the market penetration. Crazy.
>The open driver is great under linux because it bypasses AMD's craptacular support. But AMD doesn't support consumer GPUs in ROCm under Linux, and de-facto they don't seem to support ROCm on the open driver in the first place anyway, you have to use AMDGPU-PRO (according to geohot's investigations).
While they don't officially support any consumer GPU aside from 7900XT(X) and VII, I haven't encountered any issues using it on a 6700XT with the open source drivers, pretty much the only tinkering required was to export HSA_OVERRIDE_GFX_VERSION=10.3.0. It was quite a pleasant surprise after never getting my RX480 to work even though it was officially supported back in the day.
oh, right, those are EOL'd, security updates only/separate driver package with a quarterly release cycle, even though they're still on store shelves...