Devs should punish companies that clearly don't give a shit about them.
AMD's response? Nothing. They do build AI chips but they're for the megacorps. At one point I wanted to save for a MI300x. But AMD only sells them in batches of x8! (not factorial lol).
I've had it with AMD, and would rather penalize them (even if it costs them pennies) out of principle.
I had similar thoughts about Apple MLX a while back and wrote a mean post about it on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/19cdd9z/dont_ta...
But since then the cracked MLX team has kept delivering so much that I've now completely changed my mind about it. That, coupled with Apple's failed AI attempts and the recent addition of MatMul in A-chips (and ofc in M5), gives me hope about MLX's future and now I develop for it!
It's been painfully obvious since at least 2018 that GPUs were going to explode in value as Nvidia developed an increasingly large monopoly on AI compute. In response to this, AMD put almost no-one on the driver stack. At the time, it was baffling. Now it's a near Blockbuster-level failure in corporate decision making. They reap what they sow.
But what will benefit the consumer in the long run is to break the monopoly. There are no real sides to take here other than "not Nvidia". If AMD provides a decent product, it makes sense to buy it to show that the support is there. It's not been sunshine and roses, but my recent experience with the 7900 XTX has been positive and substantially better than anything they had to offer in 2020. The fact that the AMD stack is still so weak is not a product of their lack of improvement, but rather how astonishingly far behind they were.
Having said that, the recent GPU prices from AMD have been baffling. If they don't improve, they'll continue to be in the dust.
But Nvidia isn't inept yet, and despite some of its people being just as arrogant as Googlers at Google's prime, they still deliver a vastly better product and ecosystem than anyone else. The Chinese will crack that, but the first few generations are going to be a rough ride. Just check out the iterations on any knockoff of DeWalt tools they sell with cheaper parts until they nail the price/performance ratio to perfection to see how they roll. But also, Nvidia remains a moving target with near bottomless pockets now. Good luck with that.
AMD is the least evil option so far. We're all disappointed in them, but at least they still exist.
Playstation, XBox, Windows, gaming handhelds.
100% of the gamers that don't overlap with FOSS folks, don't care SteamOS is somehow based on the Linux kernel, the Steam Runtime and a Win32/DirectX translation layer, otherwise there would not be games to play.
Plug a usb dock into the steam deck and you have a “proper” computer.
SteamOS uses Linux as much as Linux distros like Fedora and Arch and other Linux based systems like Android.
A lot of gamers are also FOSS folks although not as hardcore as RMS.
How little do game studios care to port their titles from Android/NDK into SteamOS, even though both are "Linux".
Edit: Misunderstanding is mine. I think you guys are discussing something else. I was trying to assert that SteamOS is GNU/Linux, unlike the others.
The only thing they can do is to provide drivers which they do.
period.
Don't get involved in parasocial relationships with corporations - if they were human, they'd all be amoral psychopaths with a harrowing addiction to profits.
> When I see AMD, I think of a firm that heavily prioritized their B2B business over B2C
That's ironic to read as a gamer who saw Nvidia roll-over to scalpers and Bitcoin farms. Selling out to big tech would have been better, frankly - there's some hope of technical cooperation to improve the product. Then again, corporations are not our friends.
AMD will continue to have my custom as long as they have better bang-for-buck compared to Intel or Nvidia.
strong jilted, jealous, lover vibes on this. just curious - how do you plan to carry out this revenge scheme on a multi-billion, multi-national, megacorp, other than angry posts on social media?
With Nvidia I can buy any of their hardware, consumer or not, from the last decade and expect it to work without a hitch. Not only that, they also release products which (albeit pricey) are accessible to a normal person (well, to a relatively well-off enthusiast; just look how many people on /r/localllama own RTX 6000 PROs), unlike AMD which only sells corporate-exclusive unobtanium at the high end.
I have really high hopes for Tenstorrent's next product. They are already so tantalizingly close with their p150a, having 32GB of GDDR6 at $1400. If they double the VRAM and double the memory speed - I'm sold.
Some of us consider modern IDEs and advanced debugging tools a much better support for development.
https://bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/parc/techReports/CSL-89-4_UN...
python -c "import torch; print(torch.cuda.is_available())"
Use rocm-smi to be double sure.