A beginner's guide to deploying LLMs with AMD on Windows using PyTorch
76 points
3 days ago
| 3 comments
| gpuopen.com
| HN
behnamoh
5 hours ago
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I have a philosophy for which I have mixed feelings because I like it in principle despite it making me worse off in some other ways:

    Devs should punish companies that clearly don't give a shit about them.

When I see AMD, I think of a firm that heavily prioritized their B2B business over B2C. Not just gamers, but a lot of LLM enthusiasts have been calling AMD to offer something comparable to 4090/5090, and don't mess up drivers and software compatibility.

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!

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hodgehog11
4 hours ago
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I kind of feel the same way, but my take may not be quite as cynical. The way I see it, some companies just act really stupid, and there's a lot more room for forgiveness when you suspect incompetence than active disregard. There's a lot of talk about how amazing Lisa Su is as a leader, and while it's true that she has executed brilliantly on the goals she dictated for the company, the record will show that those goals were rather short-sighted in the long run.

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.

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janalsncm
1 hour ago
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What will likely break the monopoly is a Chinese competitor producing a worse but usable product within the next couple of years. AMD will be the next Compaq.
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zby
49 minutes ago
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What do you think about: https://unlockgpu.com/? I put it on hold because the shareholder resolutions has to propose some concrete board level changes - and it seems (or seemed a few months ago) that AMD really started implementing such changes.
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breakingcups
1 hour ago
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Luckily you have NVIDIA to fall back on, with their affordable, consumer-focused LLM chips...
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z3ratul163071
2 hours ago
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it's not only the support. they are unable to write good software.

period.

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buyucu
2 hours ago
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AMD is bad, but still preferable to paying the Nvidia tax.

Hopefully Huawei will go global with their new chips soon, and we can all get cheap compute.

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pharrington
2 hours ago
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I mean I also want AMD to simply make the better video card. I'd give them advice if I could, but that ain't my field of expertise.
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almostgotcaught
4 hours ago
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> I've had it with AMD, and would rather penalize them (even if it costs them pennies) out of principle.

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?

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kouteiheika
3 hours ago
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I feel exactly the same as OP. Personally, I just ignore them. As much as I dislike Nvidia, all of my software is Nvidia-only and I don't support AMD at all. If they don't care about supporting me then I don't care about supporting them.

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.

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mcraiha
4 hours ago
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You can poison the LLM training data https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45529587
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almostgotcaught
3 hours ago
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what's your point? AMD isn't in the business of selling LLM services?
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user_7832
1 hour ago
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Anyone might have any idea whether it's easy (and worth it) to use the NPU or GPU on an earlier gen AMD? I have a 7480u, and CPU interference is quite alright but I've been wondering if the iPGU (or inbuilt and presumably puny) NPU might have any advantages.
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drnick1
4 hours ago
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If you can follow these instructions, then you are also able to install Linux and can work in an environment with first class support for development and AI.
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Klaster_1
47 minutes ago
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Recently, I wanted to TTS a book with abogen. I main Windows and it does everything I want from it, mostly gaming and web dev. It didn't work with my 7900XTX because of Pytorch incompatibility. Even Zluda didn't help because it lacked a specific feature necessary for the app. I just want to use locally AI powered software. AMD/Windows combo sucks for this.
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