AI company Tiny Corp. says it is 70% confident that AMD will make some or all of its Radeon GPU firmware open source by the end of next week, according to an X post made earlier today. The somewhat hopeful prediction comes after Tiny Corp and AMD discussed the issues the former has been having with readying its upcoming RX 7900 XTX-powered TinyBox, which is intended to be used for AI work. Should AMD make the firmware open source, it would allow Tiny Corp. and others to fix bugs on their own, and potentially squeeze more performance out of AMD GPUs.
Call went pretty well.We are gating the commitment to 6x7900XTX 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.… https://t.co/Zh6df2utIKMarch 6, 2024
You might be surprised that AMD is embroiled in a controversy over open source; after all, the company’s Radeon Open Computer (ROCm) software has been open source since it came out in 2016 and has supported Radeon and Radeon Pro cards for a few months now. However, ROCm is software, and software is just one of the things that GPU performance and behavior hinges on. Firmware can just be as important, but the Micro Engine Scheduler (MES) firmware on AMD GPUs is not open source and is instead developed solely by AMD.
So, when AI startup Tiny Corp. experienced MES-related bugs with RX 7900 XTX cards that were supposed to go into its TinyBox computer, the only solution was for AMD to release a patch. Tiny Corp. (or perhaps its founder George Hotz) made these issues public on its X account yesterday and said, “It upsets me that the MES isn’t open source” and said AMD “should immediately stop development of high end ML libraries and fix their basic sh*t [compiler and drivers].”
Given how incendiary Tiny Corp. was (it also floated the idea of switching to Nvidia or Intel GPUs), AMD inevitably noticed the posts, and its CEO Lisa Su publicly stated a solution for the bugs was in the works. A few hours after posting about the buggy firmware, Tiny Corp. announced that it would meet with AMD representatives the next day (today). Tiny Corp. also opened a poll asking X users whether they believed AMD would make the firmware open source; at the time of writing, 52.8% of votes were cast for “no.”
After the meeting, Tiny Corp. said it was 70% confident that AMD would at least make the scheduler and memory hierarchy management portions of the firmware open source, which is what the AI startup specifically wants. “We aren’t open source purists… 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 company’s X account said.
Should AMD’s decision land in that 30% zone, then at a minimum, it could cause Tiny Corp. to abandon the RX 7900 XTX for the TinyBox and choose another vendor, most likely Intel, as Nvidia’s GPUs are expensive and even less open source. However, there could be wider repercussions for AMD beyond just losing a single company. Open source is a big selling point of AMD’s AI hardware-software ecosystem. If AMD doesn’t find a happy medium, it might discourage other companies (especially companies prioritizing open source) from using AMD’s platform.
