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Evaluating the Infinity Cache in AMD Strix Halo

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141 points zdw | 3 comments | 22 Oct 25 04:20 UTC | HN request time: 1.023s | source
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andrewstuart ◴[22 Oct 25 05:17 UTC] No.45665124[source]▶
Despite this APU being deeply interesting to people who want to do local AI, anecdotally I hear that it’s hard to get models to run on it.

Why would AMD not have focused everything it possibly has on demonstrating and documenting and fixing and showing and smoothing the path for AI on their systems?

Why does AMD come across as so generally clueless when it comes to giving developers what they want, compared to Nvidia?

AMD should do whatever it takes to avoid these sort of situations:

https://youtu.be/cF4fx4T3Voc?si=wVmYmWVIya4DQ8Ut

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sidkshatriya ◴[22 Oct 25 05:34 UTC] No.45665215[source]▶
> Why does AMD come across as so generally clueless when it comes to giving developers what they want, compared to Nvidia?

I have some theories. Firstly, Nvidia was smart enough to have a unified compute GPU architecture across all its architectures -- consumer and commercial. AMD has this awkward split between CDNA and RDNA. So while AMD is scrambling to get CDNA competitive, RDNA is not getting as much attention as it should. I'm pretty sure its ROCm stack has all kinds of hacks trying to get things working across consumer Radeon devices (which internally are probably not well suited/tuned for compute anyways). AMD is hamstrung by its consumer hardware for now in the AI space.

Secondly, AMD is trying to be "compatible" to Nvidia (via HIP). Sadly this is the same thing that AMD did with Intel in the past. Being compatible is really a bad idea when the market leader (Nvidia) is not interested in standardising and actively pursues optimisations and extensions. AMD will always play catch up.

TL;DR AMD made some bad bets on what the hardware would look like in the future and never thought software was critical like nvidia.

AMD now realizes that software is critical and what future hardware should look like. However it is difficult to catch up with Nvidia, the most valuable company in the world with almost limitless resources to invest in further improving its hardware and software. Even while AMD improves, it will continue to look bad in comparison to Nvidia as state of art keeps getting pushed forward.

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1. positron26 ◴[22 Oct 25 05:45 UTC] No.45665286[source]▶
While Nvidia's strategic foresight explains why Nvidia is ahead, it doesn't quite capture why the challenge is not something that only AMD can or should tackle alone.

The 7,484+ companies who stand to benefit do not have a good way to split the bill and dogpile a problem that is nearly impossible to progress on without lots of partners adding their perspective via a breadth of use cases. This is why I'm building https://prizeforge.com.

Nvidia didn't do it alone. Industry should not expect or wait on AMD to do it alone. Waiting just means lighting money on fire right now. In return for support, industry can demand more open technology be used across AMD's stack, making overall competition better in response for making AMD competitive.

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2. alessandru ◴[22 Oct 25 19:17 UTC] No.45673840[source]▶
who is waiting? amd and apple were part of opencl consortium. cuda simply ran away with the prize. amd needs to match nvidia on software spend. that is/was the difference.
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3. positron26 ◴[23 Oct 25 00:33 UTC] No.45676881[source]▶
> amd needs to

It's right there. You're whole mentality is about how one company will fix a problem that they cannot inherently have the expertise to fix. Nvidia fixed that the slow way, building a consortium of partners. This is the mindset of dependents waiting for the world to drop benefits on them. If 7k companies stand to make trillions of dollars, which I hope they do with this level of capex, it makes zero sense to pretend AMD can or should do all the work or can do it as fast or as well. I'm building a new model and you're arguing for what the old model should do.