
Open Source Deep Learning on AMD and Beyond - hedgehog
http://vertex.ai/blog/open-source-deep-learning-on-amd-and-beyond
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flipgimble
AMD and OpenCL have fallen desperately behind NVidia and CUDA in terms of
industry adoption. CIDA is so far the industry standard for machine learning
on GPUs. For example tensor flow had a GPU backend using CUDA. Last time I
looked OpenCL support was in alpha stages.

This software platform dominance fueled a lot of hype around NVidia, but I'm
not sure how much it contributed to revenue. Research and specialized data
centers may still be a small percentage of sales compared to mass market. But
Intel and AMD both understand that if they don't catch up they will never
recover. They are gearing up for a future where every customer device needs
some efficient machine learning inference hardware. Then data centers will
need to purchase mind boggling amounts of throughput computing for training
from streams of incoming data. I'm sure each company is planning hardware
derived from current GPUs but more power efficient for the type of number
crunching ML algorithms.

~~~
hedgehog
This is all more or less true with the current public code. We're building our
own standalone stack that will interop with TF, Keras, PyTorch, etc. Basically
we are fixing the problem for AMD and Intel on desktop but also embedded chip
vendors as well. Currently our stack runs Google's Xception net in Keras
slightly faster than TF 1.2 + cuDNN 5.1 on Tesla K80 so there's good evidence
OpenCL itself is not that slow.

~~~
flipgimble
This is an admirable effort and thanks for doing it.

Have you experienced problems related to the lack of active support from AMD
or Intel for OpenCL drivers? Thats been my experience with OpenCL several
years ago. On a related note drivers for OpenGL on Linux and Windows from AMD
and Intel have been a huge problem for developer for years. Somehow only
NVidia cares and invests enough in non-windows driver support. This may be
changing with Vulkan however and more focus on GPU compute.

~~~
hedgehog
We have found bugs in both AMD and NVIDIA drivers but nothing that didn't get
fixed or that we couldn't work around. More difficult are the "special" quirks
in some embedded GPUs. I keep an eye on Vulkan etc but right now OpenCL looks
like the right choice for portability.

