AMD announces unified UDNA GPU architecture — bringing RDNA and CDNA together to take on Nvidia's CUDA ecosystem
Two become one.
Squish them like bug. Show me you can do it, AMD.
Narrator: They couldn't.
AMD seems to be doing great: https://seekingalpha.com/article/4718576-amd-stock-ai-accelerators-drive-revenue-and-margin-outlook-upgrade-buy
Anything to help them take on Nvidia and stay competitive is a good move. However, I wish they would also announce a recommitment to driver and software stability. I had to move to Nvidia for my workstation rig after having constant stability issues with numerous AMD cards across multiple builds. I can handle a few rough edges or performance that isn't top-of-the-line but I can't put up with constant crashes ad driver timeout errors. It's annoying in games and devastating when I'm working.
I wish their GPU line received even a portion of the polish and care that their CPU line did.
As a Linux user, I had to trade in my Nvidia laptop for one with an AMD GPU due to how unstable the Nvidia drivers were and how many problems they were giving me. With the AMD laptop, I have had zero issues.
I did the same move for similar reasons! Although I still keep windows around on another SSS - and even the Windows Nvidia drivers were being funky for me.
Nvidia shares a lot of logic between their Windows and Linux driver as far as I'm aware, so I suppose it makes sense.
Damn, I've had the exact opposite experience. I had to move away from a 1080 Ti that I was having constant instability with, even after I went back to the retailer and got a new card.
Unfortunately at the time, AMD didn't have anything performance competitive. But it was worth the downgrade for the better drivers.
The annoying part is their drivers are stable....sometimes.
Its an endless game of seeing if any specific version is broken in a way that annoys you and rolling back if you find an issue.
Not exactly a premium experience.
Yeah, this too. My dad's last GPU was AMD and he had to flip flop between versions to fix crashes. I wasn't as lucky as no driver version was able to calm the crashing.
This checks out after what they recently did to the ZLUDA project. As an owner of an AMD gpu I agree that ROCM support is really bad. It works half of the time and fairly poorly.
Even worse on Linux. Even worse on more exotic distros like Bazzite where I still can't get koboldcpp to run, which was already kind of a hassle on my previous distro.
Yeah I hear ya. How do you happen to be running it? I use NixOS and its a challenge there for me but I found atleast some success using docker since the dependencies are so out of control for AI at the moment.
Also give Ollama-rocm + Open Webgui a shot as an alternative to koboldcpp if you cant get atleast some text generation to work because that is the only thing I have got working with rocm.
CDNA is actually DNA made using RNA as a template. Very important for the viral ecosystem.
Don't forget mRNA in the process!
Could be mRNA. Could be gRNA. But I think this article wants them in all caps.
When AMD moved on from its GCN microarchitecture back in 2019, the company decided to split its new graphics microarchitecture into two different designs, with RDNA designed to power gaming graphics products for the consumer market while the CDNA architecture was designed specifically to cater to compute-centric AI and HPC workloads in the data center.
I wonder if CDNA will be more akin to Tensor Cores on RTX GPUs, leading to better ray tracing performance of gaming.
Tensor cores have nothing to do with raytracing. They're cut-down GPU cores specialising in tensor operations (hence the name) and nothing else. Raytracing is accelerated by RT cores, doing BVH traversal operations and ray intersections, the tensor cores are in there to run a denoiser to turn the noisy mess that real-time RT produces into something that's, well, not messy. Upscaling, essentially, the only difference between denoising and upscaling is that in upscaling the noise is all square.
And judging by how AMD has done this stuff before nope they won't do separate cores, but make sure that the ordinary cores can do all that stuff well.
Will I even be able to afford one? Still rocking a Radeon VII here..
If you bought it for $700 back in the day, that's $1000+ in current dollars
Yep. My paycheck has sadly not scaled in a similar manner :(
Fermi 2.0?
Or is this going to be more like kepler where the consumer grade stuff doesn't have all of the power hungry features, and the datacenter stuff gets them?
