When they originally announced tiny corp and the tinybox, the entire pitch was that AMD hardware were great, but their software was bad. [1] Now they're giving up on AMD hardware because the software is bad. Wasn't the whole point to solve that problem?

I'm hopeful for tinygrad as a piece of software, but I'm skeptical about the future of the tinybox if they keep waffling on the hardware so much.

[1] https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2023/05/24/the-t...

Something that isn't really talked about is that Tiny Corp has been kind of working against AMD's interests. Tinybox is/was about replacing MI300s with much cheaper 7900 XTXs. I'm not terribly surprised to discover that AMD is not investing in ROCm on consumer cards (which are a different architecture) even though they're technically supported.

But is this going to blow over in a few days? Again?

I can certainly appreciate frustration with the AMD stack, but be blunt, I was not impressed with Hotz's YouTube rant from before.[1] It didn't give the impression of a stable framework, and this doesn't either.

Also (at least from the end user llm inference side of things) ROCm is not nearly as unusable as it used to be. We would certainly be renting MI300s over A100s (or even H100s) if we could get any, and we use a number of different inference backends.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36193625

Identifying MES & CP as the barriers to an AMD tinybox and letting the community know is a huge service and is still great engineering even if they decide it's an immoveable barrier and walk away.

This was destined to be a hard problem. Surprised to see they are giving up so easily.

Unfortunate but understandable. AMD needs to move faster on software support in AI space if they want any of that money.

What advantage will remain if tensorflow and PyTorch works on AMD cards? https://www.xda-developers.com/nvidia-cuda-amd-zluda/

https://pytorch.org/ has a rocm support . This doesn’t make the outlook on this company very good …

given his background in the jailbreak community, I look forward to him jailbreaking the AMD GPU firmware load process :-D

relevant to his tenstorrent mention: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39658787

and an bunch more https://hn.algolia.com/?q=tenstorrent

Does Nvidia have any real competition that’s already shipped?

> We are also (sadly) exploring a 6x4090 box.

$12k for 6 4090 for 144GB GDDR vs $20k H100 PCIe 80GB HBM2 (price likely dropping later this year when B100 is released).

And H100 has a lot of features like async and loading directly to tensor cores not present in consumer cards.

I want to root for the little guy, but it seems the AI hardware landscape will be Nvidia for the next few years. And us GPU poors accessing it via cloud (shudders).

what's so tiny about a box that has 6 gpus?

Frequently people say on HN you should use AMD but looks like it's not going to work. I am glad to stick to straightforward Nvidia GPU / Epyc CPU stack. Don't want to innovate for this.