AMD Navi "Blockchain" Card Support Being Added To Linux 5.10

[smitty3268]

I'm not sure how much sense it makes to include the previous Fusion/HSA work. That was pretty Windows-centric and...

When AMD bought ATI all those years ago the big talking point was how it was going to be a big deal to allow taking advantage of the GPU compute power in new revolutionary ways.

The fact that 14 years later NVidia has completely dominated the GPU compute landscape with no real signs of any competition has to be considered a massive failure. I get that for a while the company seemed to be going under, but still. Most other parts of the company have managed to turn around. At this point Intel's OneAPI seems like it might soon be overtaking AMD as well. At the very least I guarantee they'll support all their hardware without randomly skipping some generations, and allow running it on all distros not just some cherry picked approved enterprise distros.

I really hope AMD is finally pouring in the resources that their GPU compute team obviously needs, because I really want there to be competition. The hardware is there, waiting for the software.

[bridgman]

When AMD bought ATI all those years ago the big talking point was how it was going to be a big deal to allow taking advantage of the GPU compute power in new revolutionary ways.

The fact that 14 years later NVidia has completely dominated the GPU compute landscape with no real signs of any competition has to be considered a massive failure. I get that for a while the company seemed to be going under, but still. Most other parts of the company have managed to turn around.

2019 revenues - Intel 71B, NVidia 11B, AMD <7B competing head-to-head with both simultaneously. It wasn't possible to spend everywhere at the same time, unfortunately, but I suspect you would have a tough time disagreeing with how we did choose to allocate spending in the last few years.

Our GPU compute effort was necessarily limited to specific markets and has been generally successful there. Some of those successes you will have read about, others are not public yet, but I would argue that it has already "turning around". One of the downsides of that limited focus was (IMO) insufficient attention to grassroots users and developer platforms, but I expect you will start seeing improvement there as well.

At this point Intel's OneAPI seems like it might soon be overtaking AMD as well. At the very least I guarantee they'll support all their hardware without randomly skipping some generations...

There is a clear understanding that we need to support a broader range of our products, and even when we didn't have money for it we kept working on RDNA support in the background (evenings and weekends in some cases) to get the foundation solid.

Not sure what you mean by "skipping generations" - support for RDNA is running later than we would all like but I'm not aware of us skipping any generations. I guess you could maybe say that we skipped Vega APUs in terms of packaging and formal support although even there all of the code has been written, developer tested and upstreamed/published.

... and allow running it on all distros not just some cherry picked approved enterprise distros.

I don't agree with your comment about not allowing it to run on all distros. We don't provide prebuilt binary packages for all distros, but all of our code goes upstream and/or is released in public source repositories with build instructions and tools.

I do agree that the build environments are a bit clunky and so distros have not been enthusiastic about packaging the full stack, but we are making progress there as well.

I really hope AMD is finally pouring in the resources that their GPU compute team obviously needs, because I really want there to be competition. The hardware is there, waiting for the software.

Not sure I agree with your comment about "the hardware is there waiting for the software". We have been building the software including a frightening number of libraries over the last few years, and that software is all running on datacenter cards today. If you tweak your statement to say "the consumer hardware is there waiting for the software" that would be absolutely correct.

Anyways, now that x86 and gaming GPU are ramping up we can start putting a bit more money into GPU compute, but if we had done it sooner someone would have had to choose whether to sacrifice Zen 1/2/3 or RDNA 1/2.

[cl333r]

I don't even understand how can people get "free money" this way.

Here in our country it is sad to see that cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin are being used for criminal activities...
...which only makes me (and other people) trust the system less...

And cars are being used by thieves and terrorists, guns are used by criminal groups, and chairs, they all use chairs which makes me sad when I see ordinary people supporting chairs by buying them, not to mention cars, water, clothes, roads, whatnot. The analogy goes on - Hitler spoke German so I can't imagine why today's Germans speak his language, and American slave owners spoke English, also there are pedophiles who speak English "which only makes me (and other people) trust this language less..."

[fenixex]

When AMD bought ATI all those years ago the big talking point was how it was going to be a big deal to allow taking advantage of the GPU compute power in new revolutionary ways.

And then Intel gave hidden rebates to Dell, HP, Nec, Lenovo on a condition that they only bought all, or almost all, their x86 CPUs from Intel.
They also made direct payments to HP, Acer, Lenovo to stop or delay the launch or products containing AMD's CPUs.
This was 10 years ago.
Just this week Lenovo, who was the biggest beneficiary from Intel's partner program (~700 mil. $ per quarter), removed? the AMD powered Yoga slim laptops which they announced few month prior, now only offering Intel's.
Curious

[Alexmitter]

I don't even understand how can people get "free money" this way.

Here in our country it is sad to see that cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin are being used for criminal activities...
...which only makes me (and other people) trust the system less...

Its not "free", someone had to put in work, in this case calculation power for it. Its exactly the same concept other Fiat currencies work.

But that here has nothing to do with currencies, just with the type of database those currencies usually use called blockchain.

[akuhtr]

I don't even understand how can people get "free money" this way.

Here in our country it is sad to see that cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin are being used for criminal activities...
...which only makes me (and other people) trust the system less...

If you want know how to get "free money" look how fiat currency are created (US dolar for example). With comparison with that, bitcoin and other crypto mining is really hard work.
US dolar is most used for criminal activities. Btc, Monero,... are really only in small portion of criminal activities. They are mostly used by Investors and people which don't want get their money stolen by government (like in Cyprus). And crypto (bitcoin) also helps people in countries with hyperinflation (Venezuela)

[tildearrow]

And cars are being used by thieves and terrorists, guns are used by criminal groups, and chairs, they all use chairs which makes me sad when I see ordinary people supporting chairs by buying them, not to mention cars, water, clothes, roads, whatnot. The analogy goes on - Hitler spoke German so I can't imagine why today's Germans speak his language, and American slave owners spoke English, also there are pedophiles who speak English "which only makes me (and other people) trust this language less..."

What I meant is that in my country Bitcoin is mostly used for criminal activities when compared to other purposes (I could estimate at least 30-40% here).

Except for the gun part, I think you are exaggerating a bit *giggles*

[Jumbotron]

I'm not sure how much sense it makes to include the previous Fusion/HSA work. That was pretty Windows-centric and designed around completely different hardware - APUs with 48-bit addressing (same as the CPU) and using IOMMUv2 for transparent GPU access to unpinned CPU memory via recoverable page faults.

The dGPUs of the time were much more limited - 40 bit addressing, GPUVM and only able to access pinned memory that had been explicitly mapped to GPU by the driver. Discrete GPUs (ours and our competitors) are only now catching up with the APU capabilities we had in 2014.

We were able to re-use some of the earlier code - compiler front end, runtime and kernel driver skeleton mostly - but most of what we consider the ROCm stack today was written from scratch including compiler back end, memory management and of course all the libraries.

I think the threads between you and smitty3268 have pretty much covered what i was getting at. Perhaps it was AMD's marketing at the time, but I was left with the impression that the whole Fusion/HSA era was in big part the ability to move compute kernels around to various hardware bits (CPU's, GPU's, DSP's and FPGA's) and a large number of these compute kernels would be OpenCL kernels. HSAIL was supposed to facilitate this.

Now...it seems all of that plus HSAIL has been deprecated for ROCm and HIP. Look...I can't program myself out of wet paper bag anymore as I could in my Fortran/Vax days, but I can still grok a lot of stuff. But i will be the first to say that I grok imperfectly at times. Perhaps this is one.

Anyway...I know the pre-Lisa Su/Zen/RDNA/CDNA era was rough in many ways. And there are always going to be initiatives started by one set of execs with a lot of fanfare and excitement that have to be offloaded for a change in the market or economic reasons or just a wholesale change in management and vision. It truly looks like AMD is finally firing on 7 cylinders going to the full 8 in a hurry. Get the software right and that will be the "supercharger" and watch out Intel and Nvidia !!

[Guest]

As I anticipate a lot of comments, let's make it quick: No, blockchain doesn't solve your problems and yes everybody telling you otherwise wants to scam you.

Below this comment will only contain garbage and you can just skip it and do more rewarding things instead of reading here.

Damn! You dashed my hopes! I thought it would bring about world peace. Back to the drawing board.

[karolherbst]

Damn! You dashed my hopes! I thought it would bring about world peace. Back to the drawing board.

hearing what others say about blockchain there are really people believing this.