this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2023
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[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (5 children)

Surely it cant be due to be AI performance?

The 7900xt is 103 tlops of fp16, 7900xtx is 122.

the 4070 is at 117 of fp16 (234 using sparsity) on a smaller chip and thats not banned.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (2 children)

The only thing 7900XTX/ W7900 beat the 4090 in is RAW video debayering in DaVinci Resolve that I'm aware of

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

7900xtx matches 4090 in Stable Diffusion as well. And I think it's also quite competitive in LLMs. Since LLMs are memory capacity and bandwidth bound, and 7900xtx and 4090 are close there.

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/stable-diffusion-performance-nvidia-geforce-vs-amd-radeon/

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

The 7900XTX beats a 4090 in Topaz AI, at least in benchmarks

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Used to... But not anymore in the latest versions.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I know that the xtx kept up with the 4090 in stable diffusion before the tensorRT update, so there might be some places where the xtx can be a replacement when you build software from the grounds up and willing to lose performance for the benefit of less eyes and hassle on Amd products

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Got a source for that keeping up?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (2 children)

That is, unfortunately, sorely outdated. Particularly with the advent of tensorRT. Best case vs best case the 4080 is about twice as fast today

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/stable-diffusion-benchmarks#section-stable-diffusion-512x512-performance

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

The gap would be even larger if, or to be precise WHEN, Fp8 and/or sparisity will be used on the Ada Lovelace cards.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Of note, TensorRT doesn't support SDXL yet.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

This is no longer true.
If you use NV's TensorRT plugin with the A1111 development branch, TensorRT works very well with SDXL (it's actually much less painful to use than SD1.5 TensorRT was initially).

The big constraint is VRAM capacity. I can use it for 1024x1024 (and similar-total-pixel-count) SDXL generations on my 4090, but can't go much beyond that without tiling (though that is generally what you do anyway for larger resolutions).

Just like for SD1.5, TensorRT speeds up generation by almost a factor of 2 for SDXL (compared to an "optimized" baseline using SDP).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Alright thanks. This stuff is moving very fast, and I was only looking at the master branch.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (2 children)

You cant compare using using two different impelementations. You compare only on A1111 or only on SHARK.

SHARK doesnt even seem be taking any adavantage of the 4090 being significatly slower than the 7900xtx.

The recent A1111 Olive branch made the performance of it almost equal SHARK model. A1111 also full uses the 4090.

The new results on the same A1111 implention are here -

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/amd-microsoft-olive-optimizations-for-stable-diffusion-performance-analysis/

You can divide the 4090's perf by half if you want no Tensor RT which is 35. Thats still significantly higher than the 7900xtx's 23

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

You compare only on A1111 or only on SHARK

That's seems like an arbitrary handicap. You should use whichever solution runs best on the respective hardware.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

It mentions Olive. I don't know what that is, but it's suggesting it could cause AMD to catch back up. Is that true? Or is it more likely going to get them an extra 10% performance instead of the extra 110% they need to catch up?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

The law only restricted raw FLOPs, so it has to be that. But the law has a chiplet subclause so it might be there’s some interaction there that pushes the AMD gpus over the edge.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (2 children)

the 4070 ti at 294mm2 (full ad104) with 160 Tflops of Fp16

The 7900xtx GCD is 300 mm2 (Full Navi31 GCD only) with 122 tflops of Fp16

Doubt its that.

Where there might be reasons is that RDNA doesnt hasve AI cores. The tasks are accelerated on the shader cores.Hence the term AI Accelarators. Now assumming nvidia cards ignore the tensor cores.

The 4090 can do only 82.6 Tflop of FP16 (Non-Tensor).

The 7900xtx would still retain its 122 tflops of FP16. making it faster in Fp16 performance.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

The actual rule has hard numbers, no need to speculate. And it's no more than 300 TFLOPS of fp16 (or 150 fp32, 600 fp8, etc) so it ain't TFLOPS that are the culprit. As for performance density, it's equivalent to those figures at an 830mm^2 die, so again not that.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Ok I didn’t know the actual numbers that’s helpful. Maybe they’re just holding off to apply for an export license? I heard the 4090 is in a “gray area”.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

No gray area, at base clocks the 4090 exceeds the limit by 10% already.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (2 children)

doesn't RDNA3 have WAVA MMA or Wave Matrix Multiply Accumulate which is their AI cores?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

It has the instruction sets in the compute units

They are called AI accelerators for that reason.

Not Ai cores.

The actual Matrix "Cores" , i.e. dedicated silicon, are on the instinct series

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

No. Tensor cores have seperate specialised matrix ALUs, AMD's WMMA are instructions on existing shader ALUs.

Tensor cores can process AI tasks in parallel to CUDA cores, RDNA3 can't do both on the same CU.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

RDNA3 is lacking in AI performance today, but there's no real reason to believe it can not compete if given billions for software development. The specs are there, but the software (in comparison to NVIDIA) is in a laughable state. For now.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

People also have the misconception that cuda is the only software advantage.

Their AI foundries and AI Enterprise. are their biggest AI software and support.

Jensen at Microsoft Ignite told Satya that they want be the TSMC of AI.

Just like cpu/gpu makers use tsmc foundries to make chips,

Companies will use Nvidia foundries like Nemo, bionemo, picaso, etc to make AI models.

In addition there is their Omniverse and DGX Cloud.

DGX cloud even allows them to straight up bypass any restrictions and let chinese customers use Hopper chips remotely.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (2 children)

told Satya that they want be the TSMC of AI.

That's just a pipedream. They are peacocking and it's obviously failing since Microsoft shat directly in their face with Maia.

Nvidia's ecosystem advantages will only diminish over the years since Microsoft, Google and Amazon etc will develop their own.

This is Glide vs Direct3D all over again. You know which one won.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

That's just a pipedream.

Their current balance sheets seem to indicate otherwise...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

You do know they have already started it right?

Adobe for example uses Nvidia Foundry for their AI Foundry.

They have been building these foundries for years now. Before even ai got popular and Microsoft jumped on Open AI

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Apparently the AMD significantly outperforms Nvidia in specific calculations used for nuclear weapons simulation software.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Amd is better at fp32 and FP64

During 2017 ish Nvidia and Amd focused on different parts with data centre cards.

Amd went in on Compute with fp32 and fp64.

Nvidia went full in on AI with Tensor cores and fp16 performance.

Amd got faster than Nvidia in some tasks. But Nvidia's bet on AI is the clear winner.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Nobody knows the actual flops of the mi300

The mi250x had 95.7 tflops of fp32 due the matrix cores

https://www.amd.com/en/products/server-accelerators/instinct-mi250x

That's more than the H100 even

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Most people dont realize this is the original justification for the bans.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

AMD has had traidionally very competitive FLOPs with their shaders. The issue is that their software stack, for lack of a better word is; shit.

For specific customers, like national labs or research institutions, they can afford to pay a bunch of poor bastards to develop some of the compute kernels using the shitty tools. Because at the end of the day, most of their expenses are in terms of electricity and hardware, with salaries not being the critical cost for some of these projects. I.e. grad students are cheap!

However, when it comes to industry, things are a bit difference. First off, nobody is going to take a risk w a platform with little momentum behind it. Also they need to have access to talent pool that can develop and get the applications up and running as soon as possible. Under those scenarios, salaries (i.e. the people developing the tools) tend to be almost as important consideration as the HW. So you go with the vendor that gives you the biggest bang for your buck in terms of performance and time to market. And that is where CUDA wins hands down.

At this point AMD is just too behind, at least to get significant traction in industry.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Great more price rises 💀

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Why is this downvoted?

Do people think Nvidia and AMD loosing their biggest market is not going to affect prices?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Really depends on demand regionally. The 7900 xtx isn't really flying off the shelves in the west. It's kind of expensive and I'd say the GPU market in general feels a bit tapped out on the consumer side.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

long term wise the more gpus people buy the better it is for consumers since the prices would be lower as most of their expenses are fixed and not dependant on the number of gpus manufactured (that extends all the way down the supply chain to Taiwan and the Netherlands too)

So yeah, it might (and probably won't) affect the prices right away, or even the prices for 7900 specifically, but it will be accounted for when they decide on the prices for the next generation

tl;dr rip the third world

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

as most of their expenses are fixed

I don't think "most" is accurate, but the point remains.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Because it’s the opposite of how supply and demand work? Supply hasn’t changed but demand is going to taper down in the long run because a large market was just taken offline. Same supply with less demand means lower prices.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

I think people are thinking longer term. If companies know they can't sell to the Chinese market, naturally they're reduce supply to match, but you still have most of the same fixed costs.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

It only lowers prices for a brief period, and then it jumps significantly.

  • short term = oversupply = same product for lower price
  • long term = company reacts to reduced market by decreasing production & support. Price jumps. Product quality declines, and possibly discontinued if bad enough.

Sanctions dont make the market more robust or healthier. They artificially carve it into pieces, which in the longterm creates poorer products, creates monopolies, and eventually ends up enforcing those monopolies by strangling off any would-be competition.

In this example:

  • Losers: amd, companies dependent on amd, all consumers
  • Winners: bureaucracy, government/regulators, dell, "competition" of amd i.e. nvidia&intel, financial institutions, black markets
[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Actually in general, it will lead to lower prices. But yes, in a narrow set of circumstances it could lead to higher prices, although I find it highly unlikely to be the case here.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Literally nobody will care imo, didn’t see a single AMD card on shelves when I visited recently.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Often these are rebranded. Same for nvidia. But high end stuff is rare because it’s genuinely expensive and the common people still can’t afford this type of thing.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

I don’t think you get it. There were no AIBs in stores because demand for them is very low. Usually they’re found in SI-made prebuilts.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

We must stop Chinese military from playing video games in 4K!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

“Hey!! We’re banned too!!!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

When you can't compete, cheat.