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

It was just last week that Tiny Corp put their AMD Radeon graphics powered compute boxes "on hold" after being frustrated with the lack of select firmware source code and ultimately hitting various bugs. This wasn't the first time they had put their AMD Radeon graphics plans on-hold or dismissed it outright. With the start of the new week now comes plans to re-introduce an AMD Radeon graphics option for their compute boxes alongside their recently announced NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 compute rigs.

Overnight George Hotz' Tiny Corp tweeted:

A hard to find "umr" repo has turned around the feasibility of the AMD tinybox. It will be a journey, but it gives us an ability to debug.

We're going to sell both, red for $15k and green for $25k. When you realize your preorder you'll choose your color. Website has been updated.

If you like to tinker and feel pain, buy red. The driver still crashes the GPU and hangs sometimes, but we can work together to improve it.

Going to start documenting the 7900XTX GPU, and we're going right to the kernel in tinygrad with a KFD backend. Also, expect an announcement from AMD, it's not everything we asked for, but it's a start.

If you want "it just works" buy green. You pay the tax, but it's rock solid. Not too much more to say about it. Compare to more expensive 6x4090 boxes elsewhere.

Hopefully we get both colors of tinybox on MLPerf in June.

So due to discovering the UMR debugger, they've been able to better deal with some of the Radeon GPU issues they're encountering. UMR may not be marketed well and thus perhaps harder to find, but it's hardly something new. Seven years ago already I wrote about AMD open-sourcing their UMR debugger and since that 2017 debut I have covered more of their UMR debugging improvements for this user-space AMD graphics debugger for Linux. AMD engineers continue developing UMR and it remains open-source, just it perhaps need to be better promoted for developers.

For a few days they were exploring Intel Arc Graphics possibilities, but for now at least as of today their plans are for AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce powered compute "Tinybox" systems:

More details for those interested on Tinygrad.org.