Full disclosure, we have a contract with AMD to get Llama 405B training on MI350X on MLPerf.

Things are turning around for AMD. If you have an AMD card, go to pytorch.org, click Linux+ROCm and install PyTorch. 3 years ago, this was hopeless. Today, most mainline things work. I ran nanochat on MI300X and it just worked. I think that's true about MI350X now too. The MI350X machine is stable.

They are clearly behind NVIDIA, nobody doubts that. And a lot of investment into software will be required to catch up, ecosystem, compiler, and driver. But 2 years ago they seemed hopeless, now they don't. Things take time. HipKittens is a great codebase to study to see where AMD's LLVM backend is still lacking; compare it to the CUDA Kittens.

For training, it's NVIDIA and Google in first. AMD in second. And nobody in third. Intel and Tenstorrent are not remotely close. Huawei examples segfaulted. Groq gave up selling chips. Cerebras isn't available anywhere. Trainium had a 5 day wait time to get one instance and I lost interest.

• WithinReason

  today at 9:43 AM

  How far is Tinygrad from being able to represent/search the kind of optimisations listed in the article? i.e.:

    1. data layouts to avoid local memory bank conflicts
    2. read patterns from global memory to optimize L2 cache reuse
    3. warp specialisation
  

  How complex is it to add these into tinygrad?

• fulafel

  today at 5:24 AM

  Does consumer hardware (non-MI) need proprietary kernel drivers for running rocm + pytorch?

  • georgehotz

    today at 8:07 AM

    Nope! Works fine with in-tree somewhat recent kernel. The AMD driver is actually open source, not just a wrapper into a big on device blob like the NVIDIA one. tinygrad also has a driver that doesn't even need the kernel module, just mmapping the PCIe BAR into Python.

• latchkey

  today at 2:40 AM

  As CEO of an AMD NeoCloud for the past 2 years, it is so nice to hear all this and also see the turn around. It is what I bet my business on from the start and I can concur with what George is saying 100%.

  The out of box experience can be a bit rough around the edges on bleeding edge stuff, but it isn't anything near as bad as it used to be. For example, a month ago nanochat wasn't working well and now it is. The important thing is that people now care enough to make it work.

  At the end of the day, AI does need viable options. Having a monopoly on all AI hardware and software might be a good thing for share holders, but isn't a good thing for what is looking like a fundamental technology, akin to the internet.

  • ivape

    today at 5:57 AM

    That’s interesting, I was specifically looking for AMD hardware being offered by neoclouds, they seem to be rare.

    I like your bet though. The difference between NVDA and AMD has never really existed on a hardware level for decades. AMD has always been on par, and software is software, it will catch up.

    AMD will be a stock many people will miss because the opportunity has presented itself at the height of AI bubble talk, and this will leave many in the dust. Doubling and tripling of their market cap is pretty much a forgone conclusion.

    • latchkey

      today at 7:52 AM

      You're right, it is a much smaller ecosystem, but I think that is partly intentional as a way to focus efforts and not feed into the bubble, which I feel is a smart move. These are the official partners [0]. I'm Hot Aisle.

      George was very smart, $500k in the $90's. I saw it coming even earlier than him, but that's cause I was already aware the hardware was good from my own experiences.

      [0] https://www.amd.com/en/products/accelerators/instinct/eval-r...

One thing I don't understand about Nvidia’s valuation is that right now a small number of algorithms have 'won,' such as Transformers. The data is very important. Compared to the past where customized code was much more common, such as modeling code and HPC, the ecosystem was very important and it was almost impossible to implement all CUDA and related code.

Competitors now only need to optimize for a narrow set of algorithms. If a vendor can run vLLM and Transformers efficiently, a massive market becomes available. Consequently, companies like AMD or Huawei should be able to catch up easily. What, then, is Nvidia’s moat? Is InfiniBand enough?"

• vagab0nd

  today at 2:04 PM

  If your competitor has a 5-year lead, and is working as hard as you are, or harder, then you are not gonna catch up any time soon. Also yes networking.

• jillesvangurp

  today at 8:26 AM

  You are right to question their moat. My view on this is that there's a lot of pressure from essentially all other trillion dollar companies (MS, Google, Amazon, Apple, etc.) to not get locked into a NVidia only ecosystem. Each of those do their own chips. They also use Nvidia but not exclusively. An Android or IOS phone has no nvidia capable chips whatsoever. Neither do most laptops. Apple's M series CPUs don't support it at all typically. And with the exception of some gaming or workstation class laptops, most windows/linux laptops come with either AMD or Intel GPUs. Or lately Qualcomm ARM based architectures with custom GPUs.

  Nvidias valuation and moat are centered around data center class GPUs used for training. I don't think they effectively have that space to themselves for much longer. Google is already using their own TPUs at scale for both training and inference. They still use some Nvidia stuff but they seem to be able to keep that off the critical path for anything that needs to run at "Google scale". OpenAI just ordered a bunch of AMD hardware. A lot of AI engineers use Apple laptops that rely on the M series hardware.

  In short, the Cuda moat is shrinking. It's still relevant of course and there are a lot of tooling and frameworks that depend on it. That's why everybody still uses it. But not exclusively. And there's a lot of extremely well funded and active development to cut loose from it. AMD of course wants in. So does Intel. And so does everybody else. This HipKittens thing looks like it makes some big steps towards a more neutral software ecosystem.

• wmf

  yesterday at 10:48 PM

  Infiniband is being replaced with UEC (and it isn't needed for inference). For inference there is no moat and smart players are buying/renting AMD or Google TPUs.

  • patagurbon

    today at 12:37 AM

    Do you have evidence for this? I don’t think Nvidia is switching to Ultra Ethernet, just adding it to the product line-up

    • wmf

      today at 1:40 AM

      Sorry, I don't mean Nvidia is adopting UEC (they probably hate it). I should have said UEC can substitute for Infiniband.

  • mandelken

    yesterday at 10:57 PM

    I didn't know you can you buy Google TPUs now?

    • mattlondon

      today at 9:22 AM

      You can pay to use them https://cloud.google.com/tpu

    • knowitnone3

      today at 2:50 AM

      You can buy older less capable TPUs https://www.seeedstudio.com/Coral-USB-Accelerator-p-2899.htm...

      • fooblaster

        today at 3:46 AM

        these are not remotely like anything Google uses in the datacenter, even a decade ago.

• LtdJorge

  yesterday at 10:56 PM

  The vast amount of CUDA libraries for anything you can think of. I think there’s where they have the biggest leverage.

  • observationist

    yesterday at 11:43 PM

    AI is going to be so ubiquitous, something principled and open is going to supersede cuda at some point, as HTML5 did for Flash. CUDA isn't like an x86 vs ARM situation where they can use hardware dominance for decades, it's a higher level language, and being compatible with a wide range of systems benefits NVIDIA and their competitors. They're riding out their relative superiority for now, but we're going to see a standards and interoperability correction sometime soon, imo. NVIDIA will drive it, and it will gain them a few more years of dominance, but afaik nothing in their hardware IP means CUDA compatibility sacrifices performance or efficiency. They're also going to want to compete in the Chinese market, so being flexible about interoperability with their systems gains them a bit of market access that might otherwise be lost.

    There's a ton of pressure on the market to decouple nvidia's proprietary software from literally everything important to AI, and they will either gracefully transition and control it, or it will reach a breaking point and someone else will do it for (and to) them. I'm sure they've got finance nerds and quants informing and minmaxing their strategy, so they probably know to the quarter when they'll pivot and launch their FOSS, industry leading standards narrative (or whatever the strategy is.)

    • toasterlovin

      today at 5:22 AM

      > as HTML5 did for Flash

      Uh, Flash died because Apple refused to support it on mobile Safari. Perhaps Flash would have died anyway, but that is the proximate cause. And Apple's competitors were falling over themselves to market Flash support as a competitive advantage vs. iPhone.

    • bigyabai

      today at 5:39 AM

      > but we're going to see a standards and interoperability correction sometime soon, imo.

      I thought this too, in 2015. OpenCL looked really promising, but Apple bailed and neither AMD nor Intel had the funding to keep up with Nvidia's research. It sorta floundered, even though Nvidia GPUs smugly ran OpenCL code with benchmark-leading performance.

      Nvidia won the datacenter because of hardware. You could release a perfect CUDA-to-Vulkan translator tomorrow, and they still wouldn't be dethroned until better hardware replaced it. Intel is swirling the drain, Qualcomm is hedging their bets on mobile, AMD is (still) too underfunded - Apple is the only company with the design chops and TSMC inroads to be a serious threat, and they can't release a datacenter product to save their life. It's understandable why people think Nvidia is a monopoly, Team Green is pulling a full-on "Luigi wins by doing nothing" in 2025: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/luigi-wins-by-doing-absolutel...

      The market has almost no pressure to decouple from Nvidia - nobody else has mature solutions. It requires a preestablished player to make a similarly risky play, which might rule out everyone who's sitting at the table.

  • bryanlarsen

    yesterday at 11:35 PM

    To rephrase the OP's point: transformers et al are worth trillions. All the other CUDA uses are worth tens or hundreds of billions. They've totally got that locked up, but researchers is a smaller market than video games.

• ehnto

  today at 7:30 AM

  They also don't actually have a moat in the sense that they have patented technology keeping others out of the game. The other chip makers are coming for their lunch eventually.

• mountainriver

  today at 2:17 AM

  Transformers aren’t really one thing, the way they are implemented is wildly different. If it wasn’t then vllm and TRL would be easy

  • today at 3:21 AM

• ekropotin

  today at 5:48 AM

  It’s all about deeply entrenched ecosystem NVIDIA had been building around CUDA for decades. It’d super hard to replicate this hardware-software platform.

  Plus strategic partnerships with cloud providers.

  And InfinityBand, yes

• ivape

  today at 6:03 AM

  I don’t think NVDA will have anything like a real moat, and more like whatever the difference was between iOS and Android. The gist of it is, the big bang of AI has happened and that universe is rapidly expanding, just like it once did for smart phones. There is the Apple of AI which is NVDA, and then there is Android (AMD). Moats are irrelevant here because the universe has just started rapidly expanding for them.

  Apple didn’t really “win” out against Android, and it would be a very wrong way of measuring what actually happened. Yet, Apple could have been seen as more premium during various points of that timeline. The truth of the matter was, it was never a swimming race at any point in that smartphone timeline. It was simply a flood that you could convince yourself was an orderly race.

  I believe the same is happening now, and it’s in Nvidias interest to maintain the narrative that there is a race and they are winning it. Believing something like this during the smartphone era would have been foolish.

• o11c

  today at 12:12 AM

  The thing the "just optimize AI" crowd misses is that this isn't like optimizing a programming language implementation, where even the worst implementation is likely only 100x slower than a good implementation.

  AI is millions of times slower than optimal algorithms for most things.

You'd think AMD would swing in on something like this and fund it with the money needed to succeed. I have no knowledge of it but my guess is no, AMD never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity - when it comes to GPUs and AI.

• AMDAnon

  yesterday at 11:42 PM

  AMD pays the bare minimum in software to get a product out the door. The company does not even have working performance testing and regressions routinely get shipped to customers. Benchmarks the executives see are ad hoc and not meaningful.

  HipKittens is an improvement but AMD does not have the ability to understand or track kernel performance so it'll be ignored.

  This isn't fixable overnight. Company-wide DevOps and infrastructure is outsourced to TCS in India who have no idea what they're doing. Teams with good leadership maintain their own shadow IT teams. ROCm didn't have such a team until hyperscalers lost their shit over our visibly poor development practices.

  Even if AMD did extend an offer to hire all the people in the article, it would be below-market since the company benchmarks against Qualcomm, Broadcom, and Walmart, instead of Google, Nvidia, or Meta.

  We haven't had a fully funded bonus in the past 4+ years.

  • schainks

    today at 8:10 AM

    > We haven't had a fully funded bonus in the past 4+ years.

    This is WILD to hear considering how well it appears AMD is executing from the outside.

  • JonChesterfield

    today at 3:32 AM

    This doesn't sound right. I definitely got yelled at over trivial performance regressions which looked like noise so people were measuring performance.

    They've paid serious amounts in RSUs over the last six years. Not top of market by any stretch but firmly in the category of engineers don't care what the steak costs. Bonus might be team dependent, I remember being annoyed and nicely surprised by it in different years.

    The aql profiler confuses me quite a lot but it's definitely a tool for measuring performance.

    • slavik81

      today at 6:54 AM

      I don't think anon is correct, but I can understand how they'd come to their conclusions. I certainly didn't choose AMD to maximize my pay, though it's always been a comfortable salary.

      With regards to performance, there are some things tracked carefully and other things that are not tracked at all. I suspect that is why some folks think we're really good at it and others think we're terrible. There's lots of room for improvement, though. Excitement over trivial performance regressions is more a sign of immaturity than of good tracking.

    • AMDAnon

      today at 5:35 AM

      > I definitely got yelled at over trivial performance regressions which looked like noise so people were measuring performance.

      It depends on team, we have some testing, and progress is being made. But it's not "working" or comprehensive as we get complaints from our big customers. We should be replicating their setup internally and not have them catch problems.

      > Not top of market by any stretch but firmly in the category of engineers don't care what the steak costs.

      We need to pay top of market to steal people from our competitors. We can't pay less than Nvidia and outcompete them. Paying less is a signal we're aiming for second and to copy the market leader.

  • observationist

    yesterday at 11:49 PM

    The MBAs are in charge, and now AMD is the new Intel?

    It's not only not fixable overnight, but it's not fixable at all if the leadership thinks they can coast on simply being not as bad as Intel, and Intel has a helluva lot of inertia and ability to simply sell OEM units on autopilot.

    Sounds like the AMD board needs to get their heads out of their asses and shake up leadership.

    • AMDAnon

      today at 12:03 AM

      The MBAs have always been in charge to an extent.

      But the real issue is we don't want to invest in beating Nvidia on quality. Otherwise we wouldn't be doing stock buybacks and instead use the money on poaching engineers.

      The mindset is that we maintain a comfortable second place by creating a shittier but cheaper product. That is how AMD has operated since 1959 as a second source to Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel. It's going to remain the strategy of the company indefinitely with Nvidia. Attempting to become better would cost too much.

      > Sounds like the AMD board needs to get their heads out of their asses and shake up leadership.

      Knocking out Lisa Su would be stupid, since she has the loyalty of the whole company and is generally competent.

      What they should do is bump TC by 60-70% and simultaneously lay off 50% of the engineers. Or phase in the same over a longer period of time. The company is full of people that do nothing because we've paid under market for so long. That's fine when competing against Intel, it's not acceptable when competing against Microsoft, Amazon, OpenAI, Google, and Nvidia.

      Lisa Su is the only CEO in the S&P500 who can get away with mass layoffs and still have the loyalty of the rest of the employees.

      • Aurornis

        today at 2:14 AM

        > What they should do is bump TC by 60-70% and simultaneously lay off 50% of the engineers.

        I was part of company with a similar problem. If AMD’s situation is similar to what I dealt with, it’s more complicated. When you start doing deep cut layoffs at the IC level combined with expectations of big salary increases for those who remain, the office politics escalate to a level I didn’t know was possible.

        All of those people who do nothing find a way to join forces with those people who are showing those inflated benchmarks to execs and before you know it the layoffs are about as accurate as random chance when it comes to cutting the dead weight from the company.

        In my experience, the change needs to start closer to the top: Upper layers of management need to be shaken up. Middle management audited by new upper management hires who have fresh eyes and aren’t afraid to make honest evaluations. High performing teams who are stuck under management hell need to be identified and rotated into other projects that are critical for the company but have become occupied by fiefdom-building managers. Hiring needs to ramp up to bring in new talent that was previously priced out by the low comp.

        It’s hard. I wish there was an easy way to cut the low performers, but they have an amazing way of teaming up with the bad managers. Maybe because they have so much free time to do office politics because they’re not doing much work.

        • FuckButtons

          today at 6:02 AM

          "Maybe because they have so much free time to do office politics because they’re not doing much work.”

          I mean, isn’t that always the way? Honestly, I feel like you could do a lot worse than just firing most of the people who demonstrate above average social skills. Sure, some would be fired unnecessarily, but I can’t think of any engineers that have seemed almost pathologically shy that also didn’t want to work hard.

      • sho

        today at 6:17 AM

        Came into this thread hoping for good news about GPUs and instead there's some surprisingly thoughtful management discussion!

        > What they should do is bump TC by 60-70% and simultaneously lay off 50% of the engineers.

        Tell me you're an engineer without telling me you're an engineer. The problem is they don't know which half and they can't know. It's an issue of legibility and transparency - put yourself into the shoes of the C-suite. You're staring down a complete black box of, what, 5,000 people. How can you possibly know who's good and who's not? Think of the information they have at hand - what the chain of command tells them. What if the chain of command itself is the problem? Think about how you yourself could protect a bad employee if you were a manager. You could! How can they possibly find the truth?

        People rightly hate stack ranking, but you can see why ideas like that exist - attempts to come up with organizational pruning algorithms that are resistant to the managers themselves being the problem.

        And this is also why CEOs incoming with a turnaround mission often do a clean sweep and stack the c-suite with all their friends. Not because they're giving jobs to their mates - although sure, that does happen - but because they're trying to establish at least a single layer of trust, which can then in time hopefully be extended downwards. But it all takes time, and for some organizations, they never do manage it. When unlimited orgs all compete for the same limited number of good managers - well, some of them are going to lose.

        Ironically I'm bullish on AI being able to greatly help with all of this. Maybe running on AMD GPUs...

      • latchkey

        today at 2:42 AM

        Get rid of half the lawyers who are sitting in the way most of the time and take the risks necessary to move closer to the top.

  • BNE

    today at 12:48 AM

    > Teams with good leadership maintain their own shadow IT teams.

    Yes, this is true. Painfully true.

  • FuckButtons

    today at 5:55 AM

    Madness. I see the accountants are in charge then.

• 0manrho

  today at 12:24 AM

  > AMD never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity

  Well said, their Instinct parts are actually, at a hardware level, very very capable pieces of kit that - ignoring software/dev ecosystem - are very competitive with NVidia.

  Problem is, AMD has a terrible history of supporting it's hardware (either just outright lack of support, cough Radeon VII; or constantly scrapping things and starting over and thus the ecosystem never matured) and is at a massive deficit behind the CUDA ecosystem meaning that a lot of that hardware's potential is squandered by the lack of compatibility with CUDA and/or a lack of investment in comparable alternative. Those factors has given NVidia the momentum it has because most orgs/devs will look at the support/ecosystem delta, and ask themselves why they'd expend the resources reinventing the CUDA wheel to leverage AMD hardware when they can just spend that money/time investing in CUDA and NVidia instead.

  To their credit, AMD it seems has learned it's lesson as they're actually trying to invest in ROCm and their Instinct ecosystem and seem to be sticking to their guns on it and we're starting to see people pick it up but they're still far behind Nvidia and CUDA.

  One key area that Nvidia is far ahead of AMD on in the hardware space is networking.

  • AMDAnon

    today at 12:50 AM

    > constantly scrapping things and starting over and thus the ecosystem never matured

    AMD hires talented people at below-market and doesn't promote them or give raises. This causes employees to aim at resume-driven development by reinventing the wheel so they can get a job somewhere else.

    It's a similar problem to Google, except at Google it's because promotions are explicitly for people that ship new products.

  • BNE

    today at 12:54 AM

    Our hardware is arguably better (spec for spec) apart from critical areas like memory bandwidth, and GPU to GPU bandwidth. You can tweak your implementations to get the same if not better performance. We do that, we see this, our customers see this.

    ROCM pre Rock, suffers from the ossification in the engineering organization. The Rock seeks to completely change that, and the team driving it is amazing. Try out the pre-alpha installer. It is already better than the default installer.

    There is hope.

    • 0manrho

      today at 3:21 AM

      > There is hope.

      Indeed. For clarity, I agree the performance is certainly there. My comment about being behind was in the context of marketshare and ecosystem maturity compared to CUDA. In fact, I'd say there's more than just hope but actual meaningful progress and commitment being made there, and I'm happy to see it.

    • today at 1:02 AM

• elteto

  yesterday at 11:04 PM

  From the performance comparison table, basically AMD could be NVIDIA right now, but they aren’t because… software?

  That’s a complete institutional and leadership failure.

  Ironically, building chips is the actual _hard_ part. The software and the compilers are not trivial but the iteration speed is almost infinite by comparison.

  It goes to show that some companies just don’t “get” software. Not even AMD!

  • bryanlarsen

    yesterday at 11:39 PM

    CUDA was started in 2004. AMD was basically broke until they hit a home run with Ryzen in 2017.

  • wmobit

    yesterday at 11:36 PM

    I'd go so far as to say it's the exact opposite. It's faster and easier to change the hardware than the software.

    • elteto

      today at 2:39 AM

      Counterproof: attempt to modify your graphics card. Then attempt to modify a piece of code. Which one was easier?

      • Mehvix

        today at 7:03 AM

        You're saying it like hardware and software are disjoint. You design hardware with software in mind (and vice versa); you need to if you want performance rivaling nvidia. This codesign, seeing their products are not only usable but actually tailored to maximize resource utilization in real workloads (not driven by w/e benchmarks), is where AMD seems to lack.

        Why oversimplify the premise and frame your take as some 'proof'. Just use the term counter-argument/example

• suprjami

  today at 1:44 AM

  AMD have had people contribute optimised ROCm kernels in the past. They closed the PR without merge. ROCm are not interested in this. Baffling behaviour.

• wmf

  yesterday at 11:25 PM

  It is now funded and working.

• LtdJorge

  yesterday at 10:55 PM

  First rule of AMD stock is nobody understands AMD stock. I guess it’s also the same for AMD’s software endeavors.

without having implemented inference, just by looking at it from a math perspective this is base linear algebra/BLAS. I am very much wondering what a lean inference optimized API with covering 80% of all use cases across dtypes and sparsity would look like. Probably a far cry from what's in CUDA and probably all that's needed for practical inference.

With these new developments, are there any implications for getting LLMs running well on consumer AMD chips ?

For example, the following laptop which I'm thinking of picking up, has both a strong AMD CPU/IGPU and a RTX 5080. Could we see the AMD side competing with the RTX?

I know a dedicated gpu will always be faster though.

>HP OMEN MAX 16-ak0003nr 16" Gaming Laptop Computer - Shadow Black Aluminum AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 375 (2.0GHz) Processor; NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 16GB GDDR7; 32GB DDR5-5600 RAM; 1TB Solid State Drive

• ehnto

  today at 7:29 AM

  I run Qwen3 Coder 30b through Ollama on an RTX7900XTX. It works great, I suspect some load gets passed to the 32gb system memory and Ryzen 7 CPU.

  It's not quite as fast as like Sonnet 4 from an API, but it's really not that bad.

  It's really great for quick questions so I don't have to google stuff, and it's probably Sonnet4 level of competency at achieving coding tasks.

  No API served model has been fast enough to remove the urge to do something else while waiting for bigger tasks, so the UX is more or less the same in that regard.

  Opencode + ollama + Qwen3 Coder has been a very reasonable alternative to ClaudeCode with Sonnet4.

  That is amazing for something running locally.

  It is possible that if you actually need AI to be doing all your coding, that you're going to feel differently about the setup. But as a small assistant it's great.

  • christkv

    today at 1:46 PM

    That's great I have been eyeing a Strix Halo and was wondering how well smaller models are doing. This is great news from the perspective of running local agents.

  • electroglyph

    today at 8:19 AM

    not the best model to use as a showcase, it's blistering fast on anything that isn't a toaster

    • ehnto

      today at 10:39 AM

      Great! That's what I am pointing out, it's a 30b param model that fits into an AMD card and runs great. That's what we want.

Ahh, composable-kernel. The highest offender in the list of software that have produced unrecoverable OOMs in my Gentoo system (it’s actually Clang while compiling CK, which uses upwards of 2.5GB per thread).

Totally ignored B300 for some reason