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- cross-posted to:
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This is again a big win on the red team at least for me. They developed a “fully open” 3B parameters model family trained from scratch on AMD Instinct™ MI300X GPUs.
AMD is excited to announce Instella, a family of fully open state-of-the-art 3-billion-parameter language models (LMs) […]. Instella models outperform existing fully open models of similar sizes and achieve competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art open-weight models such as Llama-3.2-3B, Gemma-2-2B, and Qwen-2.5-3B […].
As shown in this image (https://rocm.blogs.amd.com/_images/scaling_perf_instruct.png) this model outperforms current other “fully open” models, coming next to open weight only models.
A step further, thank you AMD.
PS : not doing AMD propaganda but thanks them to help and contribute to the Open Source World.
It’s not a monopoly just because you say it is.
There’s no Nvidia support because it’s an AMD API. There’s also no Intel support because Intel has their own thing as well. It being open source doesn’t mean anything here except maybe that they can offload some maintenance to Linux devs.
It’s not arbitrary. Nvidia created it, so they use it. They’re not obligated to work with competitors.
If AMD had any form of hardware competition for compute over the last 15-20 years, maybe we’d get somewhere. But no, Nvidia created the market, provided the solution, and maintains a lead in the market.
I wish it was different, but AMD missed the boat repeatedly and they’re still not producing interesting enough hardware for compute to get people onto their software platform.
I’m saying if they licensed CUDA to AMD, but throttled performance or just didn’t fix bugs on AMD cards, it would be anti-competitive. That’s much closer to what happened with Microsoft.
The consumer isn’t part of this, the legal fight would be whether AMD can reverse engineer the CUDA API and ABI to work with their own backend solution. That’s a bit more extreme than the Oracle case since the Nvidia libraries were never open, whereas the Java APIs absolutely were.
Yeah fuck all my arguments, right? It must be just because I don’t like it. Swallow that sneering abuse. They have a monopoly because of what words mean.
And anyone could put it anywhere, because it’s open-source. But nobody bothers. Because only CUDA is relevant. CUDA has a monopoly in this space.
“Arbitrary control” is rephrasing what you keep saying, when you insist Nvidia has absolute authority to change shit without telling anybody.
AMD’s compute capabilities have been on-par with their graphics capabilities, which are goddamn near as good as Nvidia’s, except nobody uses AMD for compute, specifically and exclusively because of CUDA’s monopoly on GPU compute.
That’s worse. That’s worse than my obvious bait example. What the fuck?!
Walk me the through how “go to hell” is less anti-competitive than “okay, we’ll cooperate, but poorly.”
WHO DO YOU THINK THEY’RE COMPETING FOR?!
The purpose of CUDA is to let customers run code! They’re the only people who could possibly get locked in! All obstacles to CUDA’s availability, on any other vendor, are obstacles directly for these customers, who are just trying to run their own god-damned code.
How do you write shit like ‘Nvidia’s total enclosure is more extreme than Oracle’ and teleport to pretending that’s a defense of Nvidia? Oracle is the devil. Being worse than them… is not… better. I shouldn’t have to explain this to you - it is what you are saying.
Well yeah, so does AMD. Nvidia having more market share doesn’t change that.
They don’t use AMD for compute because the value proposition isn’t there. Yes, CUDA is part of that, but that’s because Nvidia had been developing and supporting it for almost 10 years before AMD made ROCm.
AMD consistently does a poor job with software support. In fact, ATI/AMD was atrocious on Linux for a long time before AMD decided to embrace FOSS as a competitive advantage, which is why I got an Nvidia card in the first place like 10-15 years ago. AMD is now trying to use “open source” to gain mindshare, but it doesn’t seem to be working at the datacenter.
AMD is late like they always are, and that’s why they’re behind.
Yes, because that’s what Microsoft did. Nvidia is nowhere near that, they’re just refusing to give their IP away.
Agreed.
I never claimed Nvidia was “good,” I claimed they’re not violating anti-trust. Here are actual examples of anti-trust:
You have to go out of your way to violate anti-trust rules, just refusing to share or having a dominant position doesn’t cut it.
Stop snipping sentences in half as if that’s what I fucking said!
“So does AMD” means IT IS ARBITRARY, in direct contradiction to when you declared, “it’s not arbitrary.” I only mentioned “arbitrary control of the platform” referencing your defense of Nvidia’s “control of the API” which you still declare is absolute. Experience cognitive dissonance, god damn you!
AMD is not behind. AMD is excluded.
AMD’s compute capabilities are presumably on-par, dollar for dollar, just like their graphics capabilities. Yet I have to say “presumably” because Nvidia’s spent a king’s ransom ensuring that direct competition does not occur.
Nvidia has reserved the APIs for GPU compute to themselves. CUDA performance on AMD isn’t worse - it’s nothing. It is excluded. AMD does not have a chance to run CUDA programs. It could! - as evidenced by multiple projects which ran CUDA on AMD hardware - but the threat of legal action ensures one vendor controls the de-facto standard for GPU compute.
Having only one vendor that matters is what a monopoly is.
I’m snipping the relevant part so you or someone else can go look it up without it adding too much noise to my comment.
Arbitrary means there’s no reason or purpose for it. They want to iterate quickly, and being forced to stick to a standard gets in the way of that.
If you want a standard, OpenCL is right there. Performance sucks because neither major vendor has cared much about it, but that’s the cross platform API to use.
AMD is only excluded in the sense that Windows APIs don’t work on Linux directly. But just like how WINE exists, HIP exists (AMD created) to run the same code on both. But then you run into the very obvious issue that AMD has a motivation to optimize for their GPUs and not Nvidia’s.
But why deal with that abstraction if you only use Nvidia GPUs anyway?
No, a monopoly has exclusive control of a market. We also use the term to mean a company that abuses its massive market share and therefore acts like a monopoly, such as:
Each of those engaged/engages in anti-competitive behavior with lawsuits, technical barriers, and essentially bribes.
Not sharing your IP isn’t a “technical barrier,” no company is under any obligation to do that. AMD has demonstrated that it can build a bridge to CUDA and ROCm, so unless Nvidia is directly sabotaging users of that or a similar bridge (and not just changing their API for other reasons), they’re not acting like a monopoly.
Arbitrary means they don’t need a reason. Nvidia’s control is total. It was always describing a thing you said. This is the third time I’ve explained this, and you keep pretending I must mean something else. I’m tired of tabooing words to trick you into accepting your own stated opinions.
Like insisting monopoly is absolute, and in the next sentence, acknowledging the definition everyone actually uses. The next sentence.
Nobody’s talking about sharing. These are legal barriers to letting AMD do the work, themselves. They are not permitted to compete directly. Open options don’t matter because adoption is a feature you can’t design. CUDA has a monopoly.
The entire crux of this conversation is you suggesting Nvidia would sue AMD for announcing CUDA support. I shouldn’t have to convince you of this. What are you doing?
There are two common definitions of “monopoly”:
I’m using the first, and I don’t think Nvidia meets that mark. They’re not winning because they’re making unfair agreements with datacenters, making deals with software vendors to drop/not add ROCm and OneAPI support, or abusing the legal system to block competitors’ products. The closest they get is the threat of a legal battle if AMD violates their copyright or appears to violate their copyright.
Nvidia has copyrights on CUDA, so they get a say in how it’s used. Whether APIs can be copyrighted isn’t a totally solved legal question, and I’m guessing there are still some unsolved questions around fair use as well.
So I don’t see Nvidia threatening to sue AMD over copyright of CUDA as particularly anti-competitive, because it is their IP afterall.
Nvidia has simply out-innovated AMD, such as:
And what has AMD innovated? They’re largely playing catch-up because Nvidia takes more risks and invests more in GPU R&D.
This was also the case with Intel v AMD between the big lawsuit resolution and Ryzen, when AMD did essentially a Hail Mary with the chiplet design after years of lagging behind, which paid huge dividends in manufacturing costs, allowing them to focus on specific parts of the chip and enjoy better yields. AMD is sort of innovating by bringing chiplet design to GPUs, but it absolutely feels like too little too late, and that’s just going to improve profit margins, it won’t fix the feature gap.
AMD has poor GPU market share because they consistently released mediocre products, and were late to each of the big shifts in GPU tech. They have no right to Nvidia’s IP, and the longer they keep playing catchup, the harder it’ll be to unseat Nvidia’s dominant position.
But freely sharing it, and half-assing the AMD version - that would be monopoly behavior.
Uh huh.
And a bridge is proof that deliberate incompatibility is not anti-competitive… but you’d endorse Nvidia suing if AMD really used it.
Uh huh.
Thank goodness you’ve backed this up with court cases saying APIs are bad to withhold and fine to re-implement, or I’d start to think it’s all a bit fucking silly.
Nvidia performs fire and motion. “It’s just cover fire so that they can move forward and you can’t.” They tried proprietary physics, proprietary sound, proprietary hair, and a bunch of other nonsense besides the two and a half things that turned out to matter.
Every single one of them was pulled out of their ass specifically so they could go “AMD can’t do [blank]!” and avert direct competition. They used to bribe developers into implementing their latest gimmick. I don’t know offhand if they told devs not to bother making it work on AMD hardware. But we can guess. Then - the moment AMD proved their hardware could obviously do the same kind of computations - Nvidia dropped that gimmick and pulled out a fresh one.
CUDA is the only one of those ATI-era stupid GPU tricks that AMD did not recreate. That’s why it’s still around, and HairWorks is not, even though games still have hair. Expect raytracing to stop getting any attention once it’s not an “incomparable advantage.” (DLSS might stick around simply because modern game performance blows.)
AMD has poor GPU market share because Nvidia had a higher high end and used every ounce of their market advantage to lock in customers and prevent fair competition.
And you’d endorse Nvidia suing if AMD made it apples-to-apples.
What? I never claimed that.
When did I endorse Nvidia doing anything?
That’s called R&D. You try a bunch of stuff and keep what works. And yeah, marketing depts will spin that the best they can to get people on board. That’s how competition works.
Source? That sounds like monopolistic behavior if done with clear market dominance.
This sounds like AMD not innovating on their own and instead playing catchup.
I doubt that. Raytracing is a bit gimmicky, but it also dramatically improves visuals, so it’s unlikely to go away anytime soon. Maybe they’ll generalize it to a CUDA routine, but I doubt the approach is disappearing.
The first part matters for gaming cards, where people like to be on the “winning team” or whatever. That’s why AMD has been slurping up CPU marketshare in the DIY market, they took the performance crown and that matters for average consumers.
But that doesn’t matter as much for datacenters, which care a lot more about efficiency and cost. Workstations care about top end performance, but they’re not a big part of the market.
AMD lost the datacenter for two reasons:
Nvidia established a lead and maintained it. That’s all.