AlmightySnoo 🐢🇮🇱🇺🇦

Yoko, Shinobu ni, eto… 🤔

  • 22 Posts
  • 36 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • ROCm is that its very unstable

    That’s true, but ROCm does get better very quickly. Before last summer it was impossible for me to compile and run HIP code on my laptop, and then after one magic update everything worked. I can’t speak for rendering as that’s not my field, but I’ve done plenty of computational code with HIP and the performance was really good.

    But my point was more about coding in HIP, not really about using stuff other people made with HIP. If you write your code with HIP in mind from the start, the results are usually good and you get good intuition about the hardware differences (warps for instance are of size 32 on NVidia but can be 32 or 64 on AMD and that makes a difference if your code makes use of warp intrinsics). If however you just use AMD’s CUDA-to-HIP porting tool, then yeah chances are things won’t work on the first run and you need to refine by hand, starting with all the implicit assumptions you made about how the NVidia hardware works.


  • HIP is amazing. For everyone saying “nah it can’t be the same, CUDA rulez”, just try it, it works on NVidia GPUs too (there are basically macros and stuff that remap everything to CUDA API calls) so if you code for HIP you’re basically targetting at least two GPU vendors. ROCm is the only framework that allows me to do GPGPU programming in CUDA style on a thin laptop sporting an AMD APU while still enjoying 6 to 8 hours of battery life when I don’t do GPU stuff. With CUDA, in terms of mobility, the only choices you get are a beefy and expensive gaming laptop with a pathetic battery life and heating issues, or a light laptop + SSHing into a server with an NVidia GPU.


  • It depends. I’m working in the quant department of a bank and we work on pricing libraries that the traders then use. Since traders often use Excel and expect add-ins, we have a mostly Windows environment. Our head of CI, a huge Windows and Powershell fan, once then decided to add a few servers with Linux (RHEL) on them to have automated Valgrind checks and gcc/clang builds there to continuously test our builds for warnings, undefined behavior (gcc with O3 does catch a few of them) and stuff.

    I thought cool, at least Linux is making it into this department. Then I logged into one of those servers.

    The fucker didn’t like the default file system hierarchy and did stuff like /Applications and `/Temp’ and is installing programs by manually downloading binaries and extracting them there.


  • Pascal is so incredibly good and simple that I was writing programs (sort of, half of the time it was gibberish) in it when I was 7 years old and what helped a lot was that at the time Turbo Pascal came with lots of cool examples/tutorials, so you could just play around with code snippets until you figure it out on your own. Those who witnessed how programming can be taught today to 7~10 year olds using JS or Python might relate, Pascal was just that simple and clean.

    Delphi was also amazing, it had the same simplicity of Visual Basic to make GUI apps while featuring a much better and more rigourous language.