We have previously written about tinybox. The $15,000 AI server system is powered by AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics cards and can reportedly deliver 37% of the computing performance of the Nvidia H100.
However, it seems that the creators of tinybox have had problems with bugs affecting the Radeon-based platform. After parent company tiny corp posted several tweets expressing frustration with AMD's AI acceleration toolset, blatantly labeling AMD rivals Nvidia and Intel, AMD CEO Lisa Su, stepped in and said his team was working to fix the issues.
Unfortunately, the solutions weren't good enough for the small company, which fired off another round of frustrated tweets, asking AMD to “fix its basic stuff” and suggesting that the tech giant open-source its firmware so the small startup could do what it wanted. needed. AMD seemed unable to, that is, “fix its LLVM spill bug and write a fuzzer for HSA.”
If AMD open source their firmware, I will fix the LLVM spill bug and write a fuzzer for HSA. Otherwise, it's not worth putting a lot of effort into fixing bugs on a platform you don't own. https://t.co/c4I2So27YGMarch 5, 2024
The dilemma
After things got even more heated, Su tweeted: “Thank you for the collaboration and comments. We are all willing to get you a good solution. The team is in it.”
While that might be good news for a small business (time will tell), Su could very well face backlash for essentially intervening to support the use of its consumer products on a server aimed at the business.
As jlake3 commented Tom Hardware, “tinybox is buying consumer cards rather than data center models, but seems to expect a service level agreement for data centers? They got revised firmware within 6 hours of the first linked tweet and a call with engineering the next day, which is longer than I'd think a startup that buys a bunch of gaming cards would qualify when there are real paying enterprise customers, and It seems like we're having a public crisis because AMD isn't doing more for a startup with less than 100 servers built and none shipped yet (and expressly avoiding the use of professional GPUs).”
He also made another good comment. “As for Nvidia, their EULA prohibits the use of GeForce products for data center CUDA applications, so they definitely wouldn't hire anyone to talk to tinybox in this situation, except maybe a lawyer.”
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