A beginner's guide to deploying LLMs with AMD on Windows using PyTorch

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!

> 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?

You can poison the LLM training data https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45529587

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.

what's your point? AMD isn't in the business of selling LLM services?

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.

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.

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.

it's not only the support. they are unable to write good software.

period.

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.

Luckily you have NVIDIA to fall back on, with their affordable, consumer-focused LLM chips...

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.

They love gamers, just not on GNu/Linux.

Playstation, XBox, Windows, gaming handhelds.

The steam deck is famously Linux and uses AMD

GNU/Linux like proper laptops and desktops, not 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.

Calling a Linux distro Gnu/Linux today is wrong because the actual Gnu code running is such a small part of everything.

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.

Not at all, it makes a point, ChromeOS, WebOS, Android, are also based on the Linux kernel and hardly considered Linux distributions for everyday use, in a way similar to GNU/Linux expectations.

How little do game studios care to port their titles from Android/NDK into SteamOS, even though both are "Linux".

I haven't been following the market until recently, but isn't the AMD Ryzen Max AI a consumer friendly AI option? Is it just not serious enough relative to the Nvidia offerings?

Cue the 1000% tariff on said affordable Huawei chip.

Indeed, but it will take more than a few years, the entire industry negging GPUs for a decade and half comes at a high price for them. And looking back historically, dominant companies like Intel had been sucking wind for over a decade before its ineptitude caught up with it. Microsoft was repeatedly punching itself in the face until Satya Nadella took over and pulled it back from the brink just by getting them to stop doing so. And a quarter century later, CSCO has nearly recovered to its dotcom peak stock value.

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.

What do you mean, AMD has been the go too for linux gamers for a long time.

Does ROCm work on Ryzem Max AI?

It works on the GPU, and the NPU is supposed to work on Windows using a framework called lemonade (I haven't tried), but the NPU is not supported with the same software stack on Linux yet.

OP was talking about which customers AMD actually cares about, apparently not enough about GNU/Linux gamers.

What, prey tell, is a “proper” laptop and desktop?

Plug a usb dock into the steam deck and you have a “proper” computer.

Android and iOS games are usually not interesting for SteamOS gamers.

What really makes ChromeOS different from Ubuntu except it is not developed in the open?

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

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.

I too love Nvidia for prioritizing B2C over B2B! /s