Hi Petter, On 2024-01-29 00:34, Petter Reinholdtsen wrote:
[Cordell Bloor]If there are any potential contributors to packaging AI, HPC and graphics libraries or applications on Debian who are only held back by a lack of access to hardware, please let me know. I can provide access to AMD GPUs and other hardware accelerators.My main obstacle is that I do not know which hardware is going to work, and if any I got is new enough to be working, nor how to test if it is going to work. I am sure I could figure it out, but have been too busy elsewhere to start investigating. I asked on IRC (#debian-ai) once how to figure out which cards will work, but got no reply, so I moved on.
Thanks for the feedback. We have a supported GPU list [1], but it's certainly not obvious how to use that information to determine what hardware to acquire. I should add a section on how to go from the gfx number in the support table to the marketing name that you'd see on store shelves. I'll leave the complexity to the wiki page, and here I'll just say there are three consumer GPU architectures I would recommend:
1. Navi 21 (gfx1030) is the best-supported AMD GPU architecture in consumer cards. This is the architecture of the RX 6950 XT, RX 6900 XT, RX 6800 XT, RX 6800, Radeon PRO W6800 and Radeon PRO V620.
2. Navi 31 (gfx1100) is a well-supported AMD GPU architecture. It is only officially supported by AMD on Windows, but it should work fine on Linux. The version of rocm-hipamd packaged for Debian is too old to support Navi 31, but I plan to update to a new upstream release within the next month. This is the architecture of the RX 7900 XTX, RX 7900 XT, Radeon PRO W7900, and Radeon PRO W7800.
3. Vega 20 (gfx906) used to be the best-supported AMD GPU architecture in consumer cards. Unfortunately, upstream is no longer testing on this hardware. I personally own six of these cards, so I will be trying to maintain support for as long as possible. This is the architecture of the Radeon VII, MI50 and MI60.
There are many other architectures that work --- especially on Debian, where we have put effort into expanding compatibility beyond the upstream support list --- but those are the ones that get the most attention from AMD and the community, so they're going to be the easiest to get started with.
I will reach out privately and we can discuss what specific card would work best for you.
Are you going to ship GPUs around the globe? I am in Norway.
Norway is no problem. Sincerely, Cory Bloor[1]: https://salsa.debian.org/rocm-team/community/team-project/-/wikis/Supported-GPU-list