Lisa Su Says The "Team Is On It" After Tweet About Open-Source AMD GPU Firmware

George Hotz with Tiny Corp that is working on Tinygrad and TinyBox for interesting developments in the open-source AI space has previously called out AMD over ROCm issues. Yesterday yielded new tweets by "the tiny corp" over AI training runs crashing with MES errors and then called for AMD open-sourcing the firmware to which AMD CEO Lisa Su has responded.

Tiny Corp tweeted over the issues:

"At it stands, I'm not okay with shipping the 7900XTX platform. What should we do?
...
We are not AMD's QA team, and we have no relationship with them. I saw some stuff last year that gave me hope, but this platform has been out for 14 months now, and there's still serious issues.

It upsets me that the MES isn't open source. While more stuff is open source than NVIDIA, if there's blobs we do not own the hardware, and I don't feel great about investing time into this.

The compiler bug today is icing on the cake. At first I thought it was the `launch_bounds` feature, but it looks like it can be triggered without that. Not being able to trust a compiler undermines so much trust in the entire platform.

It would set us back, but maybe we should switch to either 3090s or @intel
GPUs. Either way, we aren't shipping the tinybox (or ordering bulk 7900XTX) until this is figured out.
...
I'm sure @AMD doesn't want these bugs either, but they are focused in the wrong place.

They should immediately stop development of high end ML libraries and fix their basic shit. Their compiler and driver have bugs, why should anyone spend a minute building anything on top until that stuff is addressed.

It looks like a problem with testing methodology. Fuzzers would catch these issues. What a waste to invest in higher level crap until the basics are good."

To which was then another tweet:

"If AMD open sources their firmware, I'll fix their LLVM spilling bug and write a fuzzer for HSA. Otherwise, it's not worth putting tons of effort into fixing bugs on a platform you don't own."

Specifically the firmware they are after is currently at least the MES firmware for the Micro Engine Scheduler "MES" of the GPU.

Lisa responded:

"Thanks for the collaboration and feedback. We are all in to get you a good solution. Team is on it."

We'll see what comes of this and apparently a call is scheduled for today between Tiny Corp and AMD. It will be interesting to see if AMD ends up open-sourcing their MES firmware or has some interim solution. Due to legal/code review it's unlikely to be a quick process and even more unlikely they would open up large swaths of their firmware. But due to customer demand they have been working on more open-source firmware in general such as with Sound Open Firmware support, the interesting openSIL efforts on the CPU side, and last year did publish their SEV firmware as open-source. Stay tuned.

Update: Tiny Corp At "70%" Confidence For AMD To Open-Source Some Relevant GPU Firmware