Tiny Corp continues to publicly grumble about development issues it is having with its AMD-based TinyBox system. The corporation and its founder, George Hotz, have repeatedly been quite vociferous on social media about what they see as AMD's shortcomings. In the latest flare-up, Tiny Corp has hinted at abandoning AMD GPUs to explore Intel or even Nvidia hardware. Hotz has again asked AMD to open source Radeon firmware — with a deadline of the "end of the week" attached.
The TinyBox is designed to democratize AI acceleration by leveraging six Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics cards in a 12U rack case. It costs just a drop in the ocean (around $15,000) compared to systems based on enterprise hardware. However, the savings are largely made by using gamer hardware in a data center-targeted solution. AMD has been outwardly cooperative in reaction to previous social media skirmishes, but one wonders if it is really in its interest to make gaming hardware enterprise-ready, as it already has solutions for the data center market.
The AMD tinybox is on hold until we can build and run the relevant firmware on our GPUs.The driver is still very unstable, and when it crashes or hangs we have no way of debugging it. We have no way of dumping the state of a GPU. Apparently it isn't just the MES causing these…March 19, 2024
You can get a closer look at the most recent Tiny Corp vs. AMD skirmish in the Tweet/X post above. Tiny Corp is trying to publicly shame AMD, again, and is framing open-sourcing its Radeon firmware as the only reasonable choice available to AMD. The company also complains about the AMD drivers and claims that the issues can be fixed to make the AMD TinyBox "amazing" — if only AMD would cooperate.
Another thread within the lengthy public Tweet mentions AMD's rivals, as if this might spur AMD into action. The Tweet mentions TinyBox machines leveraging Intel Arc GPUs, adding XMX support, considering Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 GPUs, and contrasts AMD's business practices with the "open" Tenstorrent.
A few follow-up Tweets by Tiny Corp take a softer tone. This one seems grateful to AMD for engaging and trying to fix the driver and related issues. However, this one throws some shade on the AMD driver team, suggesting fixes can't be made because they're beyond the guile of the development team (and not due to any unwillingness).
Tiny Corp founder George Hotz made a separate but related statement earlier today after a Twitter-based tech enthusiast instructed Lisa Su to hire him (see image above). Hotz replied that he doesn't need further employment, but requested AMD "open source the 7900XTX firmware+docs and remove the signature check." In a bold further move, Hotz added the "end of the week" deadline for AMD.
Somehow, we don't think this is the end of the Tiny Corp and AMD saga.
