Meta and Microsoft say they will buy AMD's new AI chip as an alternative to Nvidia's

misk@sopuli.xyz to Technology@lemmy.world – 303 points –
Meta and Microsoft say they will buy AMD's new AI chip as an alternative to Nvidia's
cnbc.com
24

Who is that for? I would like to give the middle finger to 75% of those companies.

This is Linus Torvalds, creator, namesake, and supreme dictator of the Linux kernel. It's from a video of him talking about his frustrations in working with NVIDIA. Essentially, NVIDIA treats Linux like a second-class citizen and its components don't play nicely with the rest of the Linux code base. In this scene, Torvalds shows his middle finger and says "NVIDIA, fuck you!".

linus torvalds(linux kernel) response to nvidia (who consistently treats linux as a nobody for consumers)

It’s far worse than just simply ignoring what their users and customers want.

Nvidia makes a shit ton of money off of Linux. Between what their Tegra chips were sold for and their data center products being used on Linux (most recently in the AI space), their company is practically built in its success in using Linux for all their backend and supercomputing research.

They are literally as successful as they are, from using Linux themselves, but they treat the community like shit. They take take take, and then they go and shit on the front lawn.

Their senior leadership is ethically bankrupt trash and can go fuck themselves.

Nvidia and Linux = Apple and open source, literary same story

Took long enough - at a certain point Nvidia's pricing just to get CUDA doesn't make sense when compared to the cost of just investing in ROCm and OneAPI.

All they had to do was find the right balance, but apparently they decided to see how much money the printer could make...

I keep hearing how good AI is at coding these days, why can't they just use it to rewrite all the model and library code up to full AMD support?

/s

Large companies that are themselves (near) monopolies see the risk of only having one supplier. This should be evident to all spectators.

Nuh, free markut regulgates itself. Smol govment only way (except for suppressing the minorities).

I mean, this is kinda the free market at work? Nvidia built and dominated a market, and AMD and Intel are pouring billions in to give people an alternative which will drive prices down?

True, but this will also help boost alternatives to nvidia for consumers too I'd wager, and with that probably also better Linux support along with it.

I would kill to run my models on my own AMD linux server.

Does GPT4all not allow that? Or do you have specific other models?

I haven't super looked into it but I'm not interested in playing the GPU game against the gamers so if AMD can do a Tesla equivalent with gobs of RAM and no display hardware I'd be all about it.

Right now it's looking like I'm going to build a server with a pair of K80s off ebay for a hundred bucks which will give me 48GB of RAM to run models in.

if AMD can do a Tesla equivalent with gobs of RAM and no display hardware I’d be all about it.

That segment of the market is less price-sensitive than gamers, which is why Nvidia is demanding the prices that they are for it.

An Nvidia H100 will give you 80GB of VRAM, but you'll pay $30,000 for it.

AMD competing with Nvidia in the sector more-strongly will improve pricing, but I doubt very much that it's going to make compute cards cheaper than GPUs.

Besides, if you did wind up with compute cards being cheaper, you'd have gamers just rendering frames on compute cards and then using something else to push the image to the screen. I know that Linux can do that with PRIME, and I assume that Windows can as well. That'd cause their attempt to split the market by price to fail. Nah, they're going to split things up by amount of VRAM on the card, not by whether there's a video interface on it.

I suspect that a better option is to figure out ways to reasonably split up models to run on lower-VRAM GPUs in parallel.

Some of the LLMs it ships with are very reasonably sized and still be impressive. I can run them on a laptop with 32GB of RAM.

This is very interesting! Thanks for the link. I'll dig into this when I manage to have some time.

Here's an article about the chips for those uninterested in business crap: https://www.servethehome.com/amd-instinct-mi300x-gpu-and-mi300a-apus-launched-for-ai-era/

Thanks, I usually submit biz related stuff here, hardware related stuff to c/hardware@lemmy.ml. It's not very active but I haven't really found a good replacement to r/hardware on Lemmy.