Tiny Corp Changes Course Yet Again With Plans To Offer AMD Radeon GPUs

[pixelherodev]

reminds me of the USB devices for portable HDDs that had two usb type-A male adapters for power

I have one of these! Well, I have a CD player that uses one port for power+data and another just for power. The funny thing is, USB ports even as far back as my thinkpad put out enough power that this is _totally unnecessary_. And I'm not certain how they wired it, so I'm actually worried that using the second one might break something :P

also relevant that its maximum power draw is probably like 5W _tops_ :P

[novideo]

Close. TinyCorp isn't using AMD's open source drivers on these, and everybody knows their closed source drivers are pure shit. That's why Tinycorp wanted them to open source the parts that were so broken, so they could work to fix them. AMD's open source drivers are generally very well made, and extremely reliable. All of their closed source components (which unfortunately is basically ALL of it's compute platform) suck ass. Most AMD fan boys are running games, not compute tasks, so their praise of the platform makes sense.

Not like AMD's terrible compute platform matters anyway, since barely any 3rd party platforms or apps utilize ROCm. Or if they do, they put so little effort into it that it doesn't matter. Chicken and egg problem: nobody uses ROCm so nobody files bugs. Nobody uses ROCm because bugs. And Because of AMD's terrible closed-source software support, it's no guarantee that reported bugs would ever actually get fixed. At least not in a reasonable time frame. Open sourcing the stack is basically the only possibility of people taking AMD's hardware serious for compute stuff.

Which is a shame, because AMD's cards are almost as good as Nvidia cards in terms of raw hardware performance, for a fraction of the cost. Hell, GCN would have been a compute dream compared to Nvidia when it released if AMD's software didn't suck so much.

As for Tinycorp, yeah. They want to support AMD mostly because they hate Nvidia and their generally evil company practices. Not like AMD is a saint, but they're a far cry better than Nvidia most of the time.

The amdgpu kernel driver and ROCm user space stack are entirely free/libre and open source. Only the GPU firmware is proprietary, which is what tinycorp wanted AMD to open up.

[Daktyl198]

The amdgpu kernel driver and ROCm user space stack are entirely free/libre and open source. Only the GPU firmware is proprietary, which is what tinycorp wanted AMD to open up.

It appears my info is outdated (it's been a long time since I've looked into it). I swear the last time I looked it up, ROCm on Linux required the proprietary user-space AMD driver.

I do wonder how much the open source ROCm stack actually does compared to the firmware though.

[M@GOid]

I have one of these! Well, I have a CD player that uses one port for power+data and another just for power. The funny thing is, USB ports even as far back as my thinkpad put out enough power that this is _totally unnecessary_. And I'm not certain how they wired it, so I'm actually worried that using the second one might break something :P

also relevant that its maximum power draw is probably like 5W _tops_ :P

I have one of those portable DVD drives from LG. I had connected both USB plugs and it works fine.

[qarium]

I really do not understand tiny-corp it is very well known why AMD don't can open up the firmware fully and thats the DRM/Hollywood part with youtube/netflix and amazone-prima video demand robust DRM and thats always a closed source black box thats why the closed source firmware.

it looks like tiny-corp just trolls AMD....

its a miracle why tiny-corp does not go with OpenPOWER/LibreSOC/Solidsilicon.com/ and redsemiconductor.com/

https://www.solidsilicon.com/desktop/index.html

https://redsemiconductor.com/

for many years AMD did not need to compete with other gpu companies on price on linux because they where the only with good opensource driver.

but now nvidia with their BIG-Firmware approach also gives people open-source drivers and open-source kernel module

so right now AMD lost nearly all benefits its only that the Nvidia firmware is 62mb big big big and the AMD firmware is much smaller.

now there is a battle about the AI/deep learning people and all the closed-source AI people are already on nvidia and CUDA...

also the HDMI-FORUM who did NUKE the AMD opensource driver for HDMI2.1 show that there is no middle ground anymore

mean AMD now need to choose between they go full opensource or else they continue to play with the HDMI-forum/MPEG LA people and go down and become the next dinosaurs that did go extinct...

if AMD does not do open hardware.. i am sure the solidsilicon.com redsemiconductor.com people will do and tiny-corp should join them instead of waiting for a open-source firmware.

for many years for companies like Nvidia and AMD it was like DRM and Copyprotection was more important than the open-source compute people but
the wind is turned 180degree now the big money is in AI and of course opensource and open hardware.

one thing is for sure the Copyright and Patent people will be crushed by AI ... because modern AI can create any kind of art and also can create any kind of tech and copyright law and patent laws do not protect AI created artwork or tech.

this means copyright laws who outlaw the break of DRM and Copyprotection is more or less death... who need to break copyright law if a AI can create it in seconds.

this means big corporations like SONY or Disney they are defeated and their draconian copyright laws and laws to outlaw breaking DRM is more or less rendered outdated.

also what i do not understand about tiny-corp is why do they us 7900XTX instead of AMD PRO W7900 ?

the PRO W7900 has 48GB vram would make it a much better AI option.

[Spacefish]

They ranted about the Memory Scheduler inside the GPU not being Open Source, it´s a firmware blob as of today.
AMDs IP-Blocks on the card are highly modular, they all have their own firmware blobs.

But would be nice if they open source some of that code as well. Guess it would be a bad idea to give some people the power to compile the relevant FW for the block which outputs the PCIe ID to the host system or controlls the power domains.. As we would see a lot of trashed cards by pushing the voltage too much and people faking PCIe Ids to sell an sell "fake" cards as we have seen with nvidia kepler and older cards..

[blackshard]

you clearly completely missed the mark here, they didn't rant over the inability to debug AMD, they ranted about the inability to do so, WHILE amd having complete and utter trash reliability, unlike Nvidia. See Nvidia is actually good for compute unlike AMD. AMD and it's fanboys hides behind the shield of "It's open source" to deflect criticism about it's trash reliability. So Tinycorp tried to put money where their mouth is, and fix it for them. Then they came up against "Well shit, it may be open source in some areas, but not where the problem we need to fix is"

You see, tinycorp wants really badly to support AMD and they physically couldn't, at least that was true until they found UMR, Now they have a tool which can help debug these issues.

I don't question about reliability, but my best guess is that you're talking about the hardware and I guess AMD hardware is as good as nvidia. Moreover, in the one of the last posts they were asking for AMD to opensource parts of the firmware to help them debug, not kernel or user space drivers.

Anyway, despite the AMD vs. nvidia argument, my criticism is against the company: it does not makes me feel very safe if you steer away your product roadmaps (if you ever have any) three times a week just to gain some publicity and/or some public opinion pressure. It looks to me not serious when you start doing a research, then you stop because you find an obstacle, steer away, then get back because you "found" a tool that has always been there but you didn't find because you were too eager to post on your blog your rant and say continously that "yes, we are almost there", then "no, we won't do that anymore"...

[Quackdoc]

in the one of the last posts they were asking for AMD to opensource parts of the firmware to help them debug, not kernel or user space drivers.

Yes. Because the the GPU's are so bloody buggy, they need want the firmware to be open to debug it.

Anyway, despite the AMD vs. nvidia argument, my criticism is against the company: it does not makes me feel very safe if you steer away your product roadmaps (if you ever have any) three times a week just to gain some publicity and/or some public opinion pressure. It looks to me not serious when you start doing a research, then you stop because you find an obstacle, steer away, then get back because you "found" a tool that has always been there but you didn't find because you were too eager to post on your blog your rant and say continously that "yes, we are almost there", then "no, we won't do that anymore"...

They never changed roadmaps, nor even had a solid roadmap until now. They have always said that the specs were subject to change and that refunds will be honored "specs subject to change. all preorders fully refundable until your tinybox ships". What tinycorp is doing is what no other company does, being open about the decisions, and their roadblocks.

This has nothing to do with publicity, Tinygrad is making plenty of strides in compute, Tinycorp is not having issues as tinygrad is used in comma.ai's devices. It's all about being open to the public, hell Hotz does development streams on twitch for petes sake where he talks about these issues, tries to go through debugging them etc.

This is why companies operate behind closed doors and don't tell people what they are working on, what issues they run into etc. Because people say they do it for "publicity". I will say it probably does have to do with public opinion pressure however, They want to publically pressure AMD to make a product worth half a damn. something they have yet to do in the compute industry.

[varikonniemi]

LOL about the poeple complaining they should use instinct or w7900 and pay 3-5 times more for little real benefit, because of course you are not supposed to use hardware to it's full capacity, you should pay extra to get the rebranded, certified part that most certainly works (or does not) work better.

[ET3D]

While the hardware sounds interesting and reasonably priced, the bipolar nature of TinyCorp makes me unlikely to recommend to my company that we buy this.