95K views · Jun 4, 2023 · 5:33:21 · 0 HN recommenders · 11 mentions · discussed 2023–2024
A long George Hotz live-stream from June 2023 in which he works on tinygrad and rants about AMD's drivers, ultimately declaring he is giving up on AMD. It also touches on hardware and compiler topics.
Why Hacker News points people here: Mostly cited as the source of Hotz's AMD driver rant, which some commenters found validating and others found unflattering.
“Now I know it wasn't just me.”HN comment, 2023
“he "gave up on AMD", "this driver will never, ever be good".”
Hotz giving up on AMD over bad drivers.
It seems he reached out to AMD and Su, but got back a horrible patch and wasted a lot of time and he "gave up on AMD", "this driver will never, ever be good". this video
Hotz stream clip on powerlessness in industrial society.
Here is a timestamped clip of George Hotz Twitch stream from 6 days ago making the same point about rationalizing his own emotional state of powerlessness in Industrial Society and its Future this video
“you can watch george hotz rant about how amd driver sucks”
Hotz rant on AMD driver quality.
short answer is they have somewhat competent hardware but software sucks or you can watch george hotz rant about how amd driver sucks this video
“Now I know it wasn't just me.”
Hotz's rant validated the commenter's own AMD driver problems.
Hmm. I found this video and link I feel a lot better about my journey with AMD now; there seemed to be some major issues with their GPU drivers. Now I know it wasn't just me.
“3090s over 4090s. 3090s have NVLink”
Hotz recommends 3090s over 4090s for running big models.
> according to George Hotz In this video from June, George Hotz says to go with "3090s over 4090s. 3090s have NVLink... 4090s are $1600 and 3090s are 750. RAM bandwidth is about the same." Has he changed his recommendations since then? this video
“he had a moment in the spotlight recently for a long rant [1] where he "gave up on AMD”
Context on Hotz's rant giving up on AMD drivers.
So for reference, this geohot is George Hotz who has a company Tiny Corp [0] in the space. Among a long list of things, he had a moment in the spotlight recently for a long rant [1] where he "gave up on AMD" because their drivers sucked more than he expected. The situation is reasonably complex - AMD have some programmers working on ROCm who seemed to be operating at standard fare when that is really not what AMD needs right now (I personally, suspect there is/was a PM in a key position who didn't "get it", although I am not sure what it is either). As far as I know it got the attention of Lisa Su. I'm cheering him on, even though his complaints were a little melodramatic. My experience is the driver technically supports everything I could possibly want. The problem is if I spend an evening trying to do anything with OpenCL or ROCm the kernel hard-locks and I go to bed early. If the problem inside is what it looks like from the outside (repeating myself, a key manager somewhere just doesn't get the space) they really need some pressure from grumpy customers like George to realign their software development process. That context might be related to this particular case. I see a suspicious folder called "crash" in this repo. [0] link [1] this video - as I recall he ran the demo suite and it crashed.
“has made me more skeptical of tinygrad”
Even with this very notable reconciliation, the freewheeling YT video: this video And a harder look at the ML space outside of PyTorch eager mode has made me more skeptical of tinygrad.
“that youtube doesn't make him come off looking that good”
He flamed out, then is back after Lisa Su called him (lmao) link this video link link On a personal level that youtube doesn't make him come off looking that good... like people are trying to get patches to him and generally soothe him/damage control and he's just being a bit of a manchild. And it sounds like that's the general course of events around a lot of his "efforts". On the other hand he's not wrong either, having this private build inside AMD and not even validating official, supported configurations for the officially supported non-private builds they show to the world isn't a good look, and that's just the very start of the problems around ROCm. AMD's OpenCL runtime was never stable or good either and every experience I've heard with it was "we spent so much time fighting AMD-specific runtime bugs and specs jank that what we ended up with was essentially vendor-proprietary anyway". On the other other hand, it sounds like AMD know this is a mess and has some big stability/maturity improvements in the pipeline. It seems clear from some of the smoke coming out of the building that they're cooking on more general ROCm support for RDNA cards, and generally working to patch the maturity and stability issues he's talking about. I hate the "wait for drivers/new software release bro it's gonna fix everything" that surrounds AMD products but in this case I'm at least hopeful they seem to understand the problem, even if it's completely absurdly late. Some of what he was vi
“this definitely doesn't scream stability to me”
They're talking about the meltdown he had on stream [1] (in front of the mentioned pirate flag), that ended with him saying he'd stop using AMD hardware [2]. He recanted this two weeks after talking with AMD [3]. Maybe he'll succeed, but this definitely doesn't scream stability to me. I'd be wary of investing money into his ventures (but then I'm not a VC, so what do I know). [1] this video [2] link [3] link
> "... aww shit they have alignment, ok well, we don't want any alignment. our AIs are unaligned" lmao this video
“it's hilarious especially if you never heard 'remove dead loop' before these two times”
When I got to slide 5 I LMAO when they wrote "LLVM doesn’t remove the dead loop" in bright red it reminded me so much of the geohot drama on his batshit twitch archive on youtube where some AMD GPU driver author says something about 'remove the dead loop' in their patch to fix the driver which was causing hotz's linux to actually kernel panic. Please read slide 5 here and then watch this video it's hilarious especially if you never heard 'remove dead loop' before these two times. To be honest, I still don't know what 'remove dead loop' actually means.
