Tiny Corp. CEO Expresses "70% Confidence" in AMD Open-Sourcing Certain GPU Firmware

[T0@st]

Lately Tiny Corp. CEO—George Hotz—has used his company's social media account to publicly criticize AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX GPU firmware. The creator of Tinybox, a pre-orderable $15,000 AI compute cluster, has not selected "traditional" hardware for his systems—it is possible that AMD's Instinct MI300X accelerator is quite difficult to acquire, especially for a young startup operation. The decision to utilize gaming-oriented XFX-branded RDNA 3.0 GPUs instead of purpose-built CDNA 3.0 platforms—for local model training and AI inference—is certainly a peculiar one. Hotz and his colleagues have encountered roadblocks in the development of their Tinybox system—recently, public attention was drawn to an "LLVM spilling bug." AMD President/CEO/Chair, Dr. Lisa Su, swiftly stepped in and promised a "good solution." Earlier in the week, Tiny Corp. reported satisfaction with a delivery of fixes—courtesy of Team Red's software engineering department. They also disclosed that they would be discussing matters with AMD directly, regarding the possibility of open-sourcing Radeon GPU MES firmware.

Subsequently, Hotz documented his interactions with Team Red representatives—he expressed 70% confidence in AMD approving open-sourcing certain bits of firmware in a week's time: "Call went pretty well. We are gating the commitment to 6x Radeon RX 7900 XTX on a public release of a roadmap to get the firmware open source. (and obviously the MLPerf training bug being fixed). We aren't open source purists, it doesn't matter to us if the HDCP stuff is open for example. But we need the scheduler and the memory hierarchy management to be open. This is what it takes to push the performance of neural networks. The Groq 500 T/s mixtral demo should be possible on a tinybox, but it requires god tier software and deep integration with the scheduler. We also advised that the build process for amdgpu-dkms should be more open. While the driver itself is open, we haven't found it easy to rebuild and install. Easy REPL cycle is a key driver for community open source. We want the firmware to be easy to rebuild and install also." Prior to this week's co-operations, Tiny Corp. hinted that it could move on from utilizing Radeon RX 7900 XTX, in favor of Intel Alchemist graphics hardware—if AMD's decision making does not favor them, Hotz & Co. could pivot to builds including Acer Predator BiFrost Arc A770 16 GB OC cards.



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[Camm]

Hotz is kind of a **** and is absolutely a child, but hey, the eggs he's breaking atm could have some really great outcomes, so guess we'll have to tolerate his invidious pedantry for the time being.

 

[GodisanAtheist]

It would be stupid for AMD to walk away from working with Holtz.

They have nothing their competitors want from a software perspective and are broadly seen as the has been in the GPU market.

While I would never want to encounter an AI driven card shortage, AMD working with a dedicated partner to get their client side software up to spec would be a boon for them and get them in on the ground floor of AI with start-up companies who use the Tinybox and it's ilk.

 

[JohH]

Open firmware would almost always be an improvement for customers. I don't care how it happens.

But ultimately I don't think RDNA3 is a good fit for whatever that company is trying to do.

 

[AnarchoPrimitiv]

What? Wouldn't it take double the amount or more for those Arc cards to match a 7900xtx?

 

[gerard.bow]

Unfortunately, open firmware does absolutely nothing for the private end customer! You can flash a lot, but thanks to signing, the AMD driver then refuses to work.
Super great update from the manufacturer, forget it. XFX in particular has never released a firmware update for a GPU in its life, although they have already released updates with a new GOP for cards produced later.
With regard to GOP, AMD is also constantly releasing updates, but as I said, none of the manufacturers implant them for the end customer. AMD would have to put the GPU manufacturers through the wringer, just like with its AGESA updates for the chipsets.
The big joke is that up to the 6000 generation of Dell and Co, I had extracted the GOP parts from their updates from their notbook updates and then integrated them into my desktop bios.
With the 7000 series, of course, this is no longer possible without mod drivers.

 

[fec32a4de]

Why would ANY GPU manufacturer open source FW. That would open up a very strange can of worms. Idiotic from a business point of view and security nightmare.

Lets ask Microsoft to open source Windows next.

Closed source software exists for a reason. We need both open source software and closed source.

 

[Gooigi's Ex]

Closed source software exists for a reason. We need both open source software and closed source.

Tell that to the herd of Android fanboys. They will tell you how evil Apple is with its closed OS

Also Nvidia fanboys that love Android phones and hate Apple confuses me to my core.

 

[R-T-B]

This is firmware blobs people, not the VBIOS. They are different. If you haven't used linux, you'd not even know they exist as the binary windows driver bundles them.

 

[trsttte]

They will tell you how evil Apple is with its closed OS

Don't confuse things, apple can have it's closed source all they want, just like windows does, what it shouldn't be able to do is limit what you can and can't do with your device. Very different things.

 

[Readlight]

Someone make review off all generation flagship video cards from x1950 XTX.

 

[Gooigi's Ex]

Don't confuse things, apple can have it's closed source all they want, just like windows does, what it shouldn't be able to do is limit what you can and can't do with your device. Very different things.

Right and Google is doing the same thing with Android but it’s for a “reason”.

 

[trsttte]

Right and Google is doing the same thing with Android but it’s for a “reason”.

No it's not, taking under table bribes and other anticompetitive bs which is a different discussion, I can install whatever apk I want without paying a single dime to google or requiring any special permission or paying for a developer account or whatever. I can also compile whatever I want and selling it on my website, and that app can further sell and advertise other products without google being able to do anything about it.

With Apple, even to include a link saying you should register and pay through the website is too much, it needs to be hidden in a help screen in very specific ways - and that is now after losing in court, before they just couldn't mention it AT ALL.