AMD CEO Lisa Su has stepped in to soothe the publicly voiced concerns of George Hotz's AI server startup Tiny Corp. The company has been preparing its new TinyBox server for release but has been experiencing issues with its Radeon RX 7900 XTX-powered systems and is now asking for AMD to open source its GPU firmware. Several Tweets by Tiny Corp expressed frustration with bugs in AMD's AI acceleration toolkit and provocatively tagged rivals like Intel and Nvidia. Lisa Su noticed the commotion and personally assured Tiny Corp. that the “team is on it” to fix the issues, though she didn't explicitly promise to open source the firmware.
Tiny Corp is a startup that maintains the tinygrad neural network framework. Its new TinyBox servers are designed to offer PetaFLOPS-class performance for AI by using affordable consumer-class GPUs, thus providing big savings over a data center-class kit. These systems leverage the Radeon RX 7900 XTX GPUs and AMD's open-source stack for GPU compute, ROCm. ROCm support for AMD's consumer GPUs is still somewhat new, having been initiated late last year, but apparently, there are a few bugs to be ironed out with the 7900 XTX's firmware.
Thanks for the collaboration and feedback. We are all in to get you a good solution. Team is on it.March 6, 2024
Tiny Corp’s dissatisfaction with its Radeon-based solution appeared to come to a head on Tuesday. The Tiny Box development team was initially happy to say they received updated firmware from AMD. They also congratulated the company for being responsive and making “big strides” on its drivers.
Things soon turned sour, though, as the updates from AMD apparently didn’t iron out all the important wrinkles. A follow-up Tweet on Tuesday again highlighted “serious driver issues” before pleading for open-source firmware. This became a recurring theme with tweets issued late Tuesday/early Wednesday morning. With pre-order customers already lined up and production beginning in earnest, the Tweets became increasingly desperate.
A furious thread of Tweets from the server startup opened with an incendiary blast about bugs, asking AMD to “fix their basic s*t.” Tiny Corp also complained that “we are not AMD’s QA team” before stating that the Radeon RX 7900 XTX driver is unfit for its customers.
It is about now that the person in control of Tiny Corp’s social media accounts started publicly musing about giving up on AMD’s platform and adopting Intel GPUs / software. A septet of Acer BiFrost Arc A770 cards were bought up as alternatives during Tiny Corp’s seemingly live-Tweeted stream of consciousness. Tiny Corp also mentioned Nvidia GeForce GPUs but admitted the Nvidia P2P problem with consumer cards would not be unblocked by the Green team to pacify a server startup.
This is where Lisa Su piped up with a very promising response. “Thanks for the collaboration and feedback. We are all in to get you a good solution,” wrote the iconic AMD leader. “Team is on it.”
Thanks to the unsubtle Tiny Corp, we can also be quite sure we will learn about the company's call with AMD later today, during which it appears the company will ask AMD to open source part of its firmware.
You can now learn the results of that call in our follow-up article here.
