Tiny Corp Puts Their AMD-Powered Compute Boxes "On Hold"

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Tiny Corp Puts Their AMD-Powered Compute Boxes "On Hold"

Tony Corp has been frustrated before with AMD / ROCm and planned to drop AMD graphics cards in their planned compute boxes over it only to go back to AMD GPUs with their open-source driver stack later. It's now happened again following frustrations over firmware binaries. After recently lobbying AMD to at least open-source some relevant pieces of their firmware and at ~70% confidence over their plans, Tiny Corp announced on Tuesday they are dropping AMD GPUs again from their compute plans...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Tiny-Corp-Drops-AMD-Again

[WonkoTheSaneUK]

Typo in the very first word. Should be Tiny, not Tony.

[Joe2021]

Walled garden is one thing, but a driver "still being very unstable" is a completely different story.

[Panix]

AMD's gpu division is a joke and a clown show.

[pabloski]

Walled garden is one thing, but a driver "still being very unstable" is a completely different story.

Both things often go hand in hand. If there is one thing Linux has shown the world, is that by being opensource you get bugs fixed very fast. For a kernel written in C, Linux is a rock!! I wonder how many proprietary operating systems can reach the same level of robustness.

[cend]

It has been noted that whoever working on AMD's GPGPU software has a very weird mindset...

[skeevy420]

Both things often go hand in hand. If there is one thing Linux has shown the world, is that by being opensource you get bugs fixed very fast. For a kernel written in C, Linux is a rock!! I wonder how many proprietary operating systems can reach the same level of robustness.

None of that matters if 1+1 only equals 2 on Windows. tiny corp's problem stems from the Pro stack and ROCm having limited hardware availability and limited OS support. Openness doesn't matter if the software doesn't work or if the GPU itself has bugs. Nobody wants to spend a few million on GPUs only to have to turn around and audit the GPU's open source code to figure out why they don't work. They just want it to operate correctly right from the start so they can get to work.

NVIDIA might be closed, but they offer full hardware availability, full OS support, and 1+1 equals 2 on all platforms so people can buy it and get to work.

If AMD's software worked correctly to begin with, Open Source would mean a hell of a lot more. It would go from "It's open so I can fix their bugs and maybe turn this into a usable product that might be able to get something done" to "It's open and works so I know I can get something done and I can make it even better if I'm inclined".

The state of AMD's software and their lack of long term support with their hardware makes AMD a gamble for professionals.

[skeevy420]

I feel like I should come back and mention that I've been using AMD GPUs for 11 years now and AMD CPUs for 4. I actually switched to AMD graphics when they announced AMDGPU for Linux. I only use them for games so none of the above actually affects me too much outside of not having an equivalent for Adrenaline on Linux (and, yes, I know that Linux can do most everything it offers via Twenty Different Programs).

Ignoring the lack of official software, AMD GPUs are very damn good for Linux gaming. That said, I'm playing some games on Windows again because my 7800X3D & 6700 XT combo can really utilize VSR in a lot of games. The more premium my setup, the more I'd rather use Windows because I can utilize my hardware to its fullest extent.

[schmidtbag]

AMD's compute drivers have always been the worst thing about their products. It's a shame because their server and workstation hardware on paper looks incredibly good, but like skeevy420 mentioned, it doesn't matter how good it is if it doesn't work or have long-term support.

What I really don't get is why does it suck so much? I would think that OpenGL and Vulkan would be more difficult to write drivers for, and I'm sure there's some OpenCL code that they can mooch off. After all, from what I can tell, Intel's work on their compute stack seems to be coming along rather smoothly and they've had much less time to work on it, while also having to divide resources for their graphics APIs/drivers.
There must be something fundamentally broken about ROCm if it's taking this long just to simply be usable, let alone performant or have long-term support.

[pabloski]

Nobody wants to spend a few million on GPUs only to have to turn around and audit the GPU's open source code to figure out why they don't work.

Humm, TinyCorp is saying exactly the opposite. They WANT to debug the software stack, all the way to the firmware, but they cannot!

NVIDIA might be closed, but they offer full hardware availability, full OS support, and 1+1 equals 2 on all platforms so people can buy it and get to work.

And bugs too, this is why Torvalds gave them the middle finger some years ago.

If AMD's software worked correctly to begin with, Open Source would mean a hell of a lot more. It would go from "It's open so I can fix their bugs and maybe turn this into a usable product that might be able to get something done" to "It's open and works so I know I can get something done and I can make it even better if I'm inclined".

The state of AMD's software and their lack of long term support with their hardware makes AMD a gamble for professionals.

This is another can of worm. AMD is shit on the software front and we know it. Open or not, it will not change. This is why openness would give the community the power to make it better. If they cannot, at least let the community do it. This is the question TinyCorp is raising.