A beginner's guide to deploying LLMs with AMD on Windows using PyTorch

https://gpuopen.com/learn/pytorch-windows-amd-llm-guide/

128•beckford•4mo ago

Comments

behnamoh•4mo ago

I have a philosophy for which I have mixed feelings because I like it in principle despite it making me worse off in some other ways:

    Devs should punish companies that clearly don't give a shit about them.

When I see AMD, I think of a firm that heavily prioritized their B2B business over B2C. Not just gamers, but a lot of LLM enthusiasts have been calling AMD to offer something comparable to 4090/5090, and don't mess up drivers and software compatibility.

AMD's response? Nothing. They do build AI chips but they're for the megacorps. At one point I wanted to save for a MI300x. But AMD only sells them in batches of x8! (not factorial lol).

I've had it with AMD, and would rather penalize them (even if it costs them pennies) out of principle.

I had similar thoughts about Apple MLX a while back and wrote a mean post about it on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/19cdd9z/dont_ta...

But since then the cracked MLX team has kept delivering so much that I've now completely changed my mind about it. That, coupled with Apple's failed AI attempts and the recent addition of MatMul in A-chips (and ofc in M5), gives me hope about MLX's future and now I develop for it!

almostgotcaught•4mo ago

> I've had it with AMD, and would rather penalize them (even if it costs them pennies) out of principle.

strong jilted, jealous, lover vibes on this. just curious - how do you plan to carry out this revenge scheme on a multi-billion, multi-national, megacorp, other than angry posts on social media?

mcraiha•4mo ago

You can poison the LLM training data https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45529587

almostgotcaught•4mo ago

what's your point? AMD isn't in the business of selling LLM services?

kouteiheika•4mo ago

I feel exactly the same as OP. Personally, I just ignore them. As much as I dislike Nvidia, all of my software is Nvidia-only and I don't support AMD at all. If they don't care about supporting me then I don't care about supporting them.

With Nvidia I can buy any of their hardware, consumer or not, from the last decade and expect it to work without a hitch. Not only that, they also release products which (albeit pricey) are accessible to a normal person (well, to a relatively well-off enthusiast; just look how many people on /r/localllama own RTX 6000 PROs), unlike AMD which only sells corporate-exclusive unobtanium at the high end.

I have really high hopes for Tenstorrent's next product. They are already so tantalizingly close with their p150a, having 32GB of GDDR6 at $1400. If they double the VRAM and double the memory speed - I'm sold.

hodgehog11•4mo ago

I kind of feel the same way, but my take may not be quite as cynical. The way I see it, some companies just act really stupid, and there's a lot more room for forgiveness when you suspect incompetence than active disregard. There's a lot of talk about how amazing Lisa Su is as a leader, and while it's true that she has executed brilliantly on the goals she dictated for the company, the record will show that those goals were rather short-sighted in the long run.

It's been painfully obvious since at least 2018 that GPUs were going to explode in value as Nvidia developed an increasingly large monopoly on AI compute. In response to this, AMD put almost no-one on the driver stack. At the time, it was baffling. Now it's a near Blockbuster-level failure in corporate decision making. They reap what they sow.

But what will benefit the consumer in the long run is to break the monopoly. There are no real sides to take here other than "not Nvidia". If AMD provides a decent product, it makes sense to buy it to show that the support is there. It's not been sunshine and roses, but my recent experience with the 7900 XTX has been positive and substantially better than anything they had to offer in 2020. The fact that the AMD stack is still so weak is not a product of their lack of improvement, but rather how astonishingly far behind they were.

Having said that, the recent GPU prices from AMD have been baffling. If they don't improve, they'll continue to be in the dust.

janalsncm•4mo ago

What will likely break the monopoly is a Chinese competitor producing a worse but usable product within the next couple of years. AMD will be the next Compaq.

LogicFailsMe•4mo ago

Indeed, but it will take more than a few years, the entire industry negging GPUs for a decade and half comes at a high price for them. And looking back historically, dominant companies like Intel had been sucking wind for over a decade before its ineptitude caught up with it. Microsoft was repeatedly punching itself in the face until Satya Nadella took over and pulled it back from the brink just by getting them to stop doing so. And a quarter century later, CSCO has nearly recovered to its dotcom peak stock value.

But Nvidia isn't inept yet, and despite some of its people being just as arrogant as Googlers at Google's prime, they still deliver a vastly better product and ecosystem than anyone else. The Chinese will crack that, but the first few generations are going to be a rough ride. Just check out the iterations on any knockoff of DeWalt tools they sell with cheaper parts until they nail the price/performance ratio to perfection to see how they roll. But also, Nvidia remains a moving target with near bottomless pockets now. Good luck with that.

abbadadda•3mo ago

Have you looked at AMD’s financials? They are fine. Intel is massively fucking up in the CPU space and they’re benefiting from that in a big way. Yes, they’re late to GPUs, but every percentage of market share they do make inroads on is raising the boat. They’re not sinking by any means and there are more revenue streams for AMD than just CPUs/GPUs.

patapong•4mo ago

OpenAI now suddenly has a potentially hundreds of billions of dollars in incentives to improve the GPU Ai stack for AMD. I am quite intrigued to see what that might lead to.

buyucu•4mo ago

AMD is bad, but still preferable to paying the Nvidia tax.

Hopefully Huawei will go global with their new chips soon, and we can all get cheap compute.

fransje26•4mo ago

Cue the 1000% tariff on said affordable Huawei chip.

pharrington•4mo ago

I mean I also want AMD to simply make the better video card. I'd give them advice if I could, but that ain't my field of expertise.

z3ratul163071•4mo ago

it's not only the support. they are unable to write good software.

period.

a96•3mo ago

They're a hardware company. They should stay the hell away from software and just publish specs so actual software people can do it properly.

breakingcups•4mo ago

Luckily you have NVIDIA to fall back on, with their affordable, consumer-focused LLM chips...

overfeed•4mo ago

I too love Nvidia for prioritizing B2C over B2B! /s

fooker•3mo ago

Given that you can buy a 48GB RTX6000 on newegg right now, yes?

zby•4mo ago

What do you think about: https://unlockgpu.com/? I put it on hold because the shareholder resolutions has to propose some concrete board level changes - and it seems (or seemed a few months ago) that AMD really started implementing such changes.

pjmlp•4mo ago

They love gamers, just not on GNu/Linux.

Playstation, XBox, Windows, gaming handhelds.

_aavaa_•4mo ago

The steam deck is famously Linux and uses AMD

pjmlp•4mo ago

GNU/Linux like proper laptops and desktops, not gaming handhelds.

100% of the gamers that don't overlap with FOSS folks, don't care SteamOS is somehow based on the Linux kernel, the Steam Runtime and a Win32/DirectX translation layer, otherwise there would not be games to play.

tuna74•4mo ago

Calling a Linux distro Gnu/Linux today is wrong because the actual Gnu code running is such a small part of everything.

SteamOS uses Linux as much as Linux distros like Fedora and Arch and other Linux based systems like Android.

A lot of gamers are also FOSS folks although not as hardcore as RMS.

pjmlp•4mo ago

Not at all, it makes a point, ChromeOS, WebOS, Android, are also based on the Linux kernel and hardly considered Linux distributions for everyday use, in a way similar to GNU/Linux expectations.

How little do game studios care to port their titles from Android/NDK into SteamOS, even though both are "Linux".

tuna74•4mo ago

Android and iOS games are usually not interesting for SteamOS gamers.

What really makes ChromeOS different from Ubuntu except it is not developed in the open?

pjmlp•3mo ago

Userspace is a browser.

rpdillon•3mo ago

You have a misunderstanding. SteamOS is essentially Arch Linux.

Edit: Misunderstanding is mine. I think you guys are discussing something else. I was trying to assert that SteamOS is GNU/Linux, unlike the others.

_aavaa_•4mo ago

What, prey tell, is a “proper” laptop and desktop?

Plug a usb dock into the steam deck and you have a “proper” computer.

rpdillon•3mo ago

The steam deck is essentially a laptop (and I think made it through FCC on that basis). Plug in a USB hub, HDMI, keyboard, mouse, and I'm all set. I actually bought an extra one because now that the mobile device ecosystem is locked down so completely, it's my main escape hatch for a portable PC.

tokai•4mo ago

What do you mean, AMD has been the go too for linux gamers for a long time.

pjmlp•4mo ago

OP was talking about which customers AMD actually cares about, apparently not enough about GNU/Linux gamers.

veber-alex•3mo ago

What do you expect AMD to do about gaming on Linux? Port all games to Linux or something?

The only thing they can do is to provide drivers which they do.

pjmlp•3mo ago

Apparently not, which was the point being made by OP.

PhilippGille•3mo ago

OP talked about LLMs, not gaming. It's a different software stack.

yonaguska•4mo ago

I haven't been following the market until recently, but isn't the AMD Ryzen Max AI a consumer friendly AI option? Is it just not serious enough relative to the Nvidia offerings?

curt15•4mo ago

Does ROCm work on Ryzem Max AI?

jakogut•4mo ago

It works on the GPU, and the NPU is supposed to work on Windows using a framework called lemonade (I haven't tried), but the NPU is not supported with the same software stack on Linux yet.

rpdillon•3mo ago

Yes, I have an AMD Ryzen AI Max+ chip with memory set to allocate 96 gigs to the GPU and 32 gigs to the CPU. I got it last week, and I've been running gpt-oss-120b at q5 at 40t/s. I run Linux with llama.cpp compiled against ROCm 7.

lostmsu•3mo ago

Did you try the native mxfp4 (obviously, Vulkan/ROCm would have to load and upscale it)?

fooker•3mo ago

Barely.

overfeed•4mo ago

> Devs should punish companies that clearly don't give a shit about them.

Don't get involved in parasocial relationships with corporations - if they were human, they'd all be amoral psychopaths with a harrowing addiction to profits.

> When I see AMD, I think of a firm that heavily prioritized their B2B business over B2C

That's ironic to read as a gamer who saw Nvidia roll-over to scalpers and Bitcoin farms. Selling out to big tech would have been better, frankly - there's some hope of technical cooperation to improve the product. Then again, corporations are not our friends.

AMD will continue to have my custom as long as they have better bang-for-buck compared to Intel or Nvidia.

a96•3mo ago

And the problem with this attitude is that it keeps driving people toward a greater evil like nvidia, intel or the chinese communist party.

AMD is the least evil option so far. We're all disappointed in them, but at least they still exist.

drnick1•4mo ago

If you can follow these instructions, then you are also able to install Linux and can work in an environment with first class support for development and AI.

Klaster_1•4mo ago

Recently, I wanted to TTS a book with abogen. I main Windows and it does everything I want from it, mostly gaming and web dev. It didn't work with my 7900XTX because of Pytorch incompatibility. Even Zluda didn't help because it lacked a specific feature necessary for the app. I just want to use locally AI powered software. AMD/Windows combo sucks for this.

pjmlp•4mo ago

These instructions assume there is already a working OS where everything is supported.

Some of us consider modern IDEs and advanced debugging tools a much better support for development.

https://bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/parc/techReports/CSL-89-4_UN...

user_7832•4mo ago

Anyone might have any idea whether it's easy (and worth it) to use the NPU or GPU on an earlier gen AMD? I have a 7480u, and CPU interference is quite alright but I've been wondering if the iPGU (or inbuilt and presumably puny) NPU might have any advantages.

leopoldj•3mo ago

The blog doesn't verify if the code is actually using the GPU. The code will work perfectly fine on CPU, albeit slowly. You should run this to be sure:

    python -c "import torch; print(torch.cuda.is_available())"

Strange that torch.cuda.is_available() is used for AMD also.

Use rocm-smi to be double sure.

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