Tiny Corp appears to have come to a firm decision about whether it will follow its original plan of using AMD GPUs or switch to Nvidia GPUs to power its Tiny Box server. The muddled answer is that it will make both. However, the price for this compact AI-accelerating server packing six GPUs will vary hugely depending on your choice: "red for $15k and green for $25k."
A hard to find "umr" repo has turned around the feasibility of the AMD tinybox. It will be a journey, but it gives us an ability to debug.We're going to sell both, red for $15k and green for $25k. When you realize your preorder you'll choose your color. Website has been…March 25, 2024
The TinyBox went public with much fanfare this February. Tiny Corp described it as an innovation that could help democratize PetaFLOPS-class performance for artificial intelligence. It was convinced of the AMD advantage at the time, explaining that the Radeon consumer-grade GPUs worked with superior 'full fabric' PCIe 4.0 x16 links and peer-to-peer interconnections necessary for large language models (unlike GeForce). Top performers like the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX were also much cheaper to buy and easier to find.
From its alluring sales spiel, Tiny Corp quickly filled its order books and at the time of our initial report had received 583 preorders, which it hoped to fulfill this April. But things went downhill quite quickly after this hyper-positive first sight of the TinyBox.
At the beginning of March, concerns over getting the AMD consumer-grade hardware to work as it had intended, in multi-GPU AI acceleration boxes, were making Tiny Corp and its founder George Hotz frustrated and irritable.
It turns out that the software behind the Tiny Box solution wasn't ready for prime time. The Tiny Corp team only expected they could make the TinyBox work as intended with Radeon GPUs. The reality was that “serious driver issues” were keeping the TinyBox from being a reliable solution. After a spell of publicly musing whether to dump AMD GPUs and equip Nvidia or Intel GPUs in their place, Tiny Corp / Hotz got in contact with AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su, no less, on social media, and she appeared to agree to more talks, to look at any issues arising, and get AMD software engineers to help. The “Team is on it,” Su Tweeted at that time.
Two or three weeks later we reported that Tiny Corp was still having difficulty getting its Radeon-powered TinyBox to live up to the expectations it had initially set. It stated that the "AMD TinyBox is on hold." Apparently, all Tiny Corp devs needed was AMD firmware access, but it didn't seem to be forthcoming for some reason, which may have been technical, legal, or something else.
Fast forward to today, and Tiny Corp says that it has found a useful userspace debugging and diagnostic tool for AMD GPUs that offers some hope. In light of this finding and its potential, the firm says it is going to sell both Radeon and GeForce TinyBox servers.
"If you like to tinker and feel pain, buy red. The driver still crashes the GPU and hangs sometimes, but we can work together to improve it," explains the Tweet. It also teased that AMD had done something to make a Radeon-powered TinyBox a more attractive solution "Expect an announcement from AMD, it's not everything we asked for, but it's a start," said Tiny Corp.
Of course, choosing GeForce comes with a price hit. "If you want 'it just works' buy green. You pay the tax, but it's rock solid," says to the recent Tweet. However, the AMD solution is $15,000, and choosing Nvidia means the price tag inflates to $25,000. That's a 67% price uplift.
Despite all the above drama, the TinyBox remains a product to keep an eye on. Reading between the lines, it looks like the AMD option has a chance to edge toward the 'it just works' status in the coming months, so it might be good to stand back and watch for now. Those with a desire for an Intel Arc-powered TinyBox were told today that there is a prototype but "no plans to ship it." However, Tiny Corp decisions appear to be extremely fluid, so check back tomorrow.
