After a push from the community to do so—notably by Tiny Corp’s George Hotz—AMD has finally begun open-sourcing some of its GPU software packages and documentation, including open-sourcing its MES (Micro-Engine Scheduler). Open sourcing MES was one of the things Tiny Corp predicted AMD would do last month, although they seemed to predict a turnaround time significantly earlier than what we actually got. As it is, we’re still waiting for a full release—this is just AMD announcing its intention to do so.
For those unfamiliar with Tiny Corp, it’s important to know that they are responsible for building the “TinyBox,” which is their AI-powered server design using AMD hardware. While the TinyBox does show off the potential power of AMD’s raw GPU PC, it seems that deeper issues have forced Tiny Corp to build an Nvidia version as well, citing that the AMD machine just isn’t performing as intended.
Ongoing updates to AMD’s ROCm platform alongside this news should hopefully mean AMD TinyBox will be competitive as an AI solution against Nvidia sooner rather than later. Since MES was the most important thing to be open sourced according to TinyCorp, the resulting bug fixes could be enough to make AMD TinyBox (and AMD AI hardware in general) look more competitive against Team Green. As it stands, it seems almost everyone is hoping to undermine Nvidia’s dominant position in AI hardware and professional workloads.
According to the original AMD announcement on Twitterthe release of MES documentation and source code is scheduled for the end of May, and will include a GitHub tracker for easy collaboration with the community.
At the time of writing, TinyCorp and George Hotz have yet to make any official comment on this AMD announcement, but recently highlighted its “TinyBox green” and “TinyBox red” kits for pre-order, noting that AMD’s box achieves the same compute for $10k cheaper, but will require expertise to make it work. The catchphrase is “Make AMD great, with or without their help”— luckily, it looks like AMD is going to help anyway.