Wednesday, November 7th 2018
It Can't Run Crysis: Radeon Instinct MI60 Only Supports Linux
AMD recently announced the Radeon Instinct MI60, a GPU-based data-center compute processor with hardware virtualization features. It takes the crown for "the world's first 7 nm GPU." The company also put out specifications of the "Vega 20" GPU it's based on: 4,096 stream processors, 4096-bit HBM2 memory interface, 1800 MHz engine clock-speed, 1 TB/s memory bandwidth, 7.4 TFLOP/s peak double-precision (FP64) performance, and the works. Here's the kicker: the company isn't launching this accelerator with Windows support. At launch, AMD is only releasing x86-64 Linux drivers, with API support for OpenGL 4.6, Vulkan 1.0, and OpenCL 2.0, along with AMD's ROCm open ecosystem. The lack of display connector already disqualifies this card for most workstation applications, but with the lack of Windows support, it is also the most expensive graphics card that "can't run Crysis." AMD could release Radeon Pro branded graphics cards based on "Vega 20," which will ship with Windows and MacOS drivers.
29 Comments on It Can't Run Crysis: Radeon Instinct MI60 Only Supports Linux
So, yeah, it can play Crysis, after all.
You had to know the flack you were gonna get with this article. And to be fair, there are many ways to run Windows based software on Linux. And to suppose the Windows support isn't incoming might be a tad naive. Delayed, maybe, but non-existent? I'll believe that when AMD confirms it.
Was that really necessary? It's really starting to become quite annoying, these silly references with AMD GPUs. And they don't help the utter state of confusion for some around Vega 20 either.
In the supercomputer world, you generally have thousands of CPUs and / or GPUs and the licensing costs are staggering in these situations if using Windows.
Still, this whole "OMG OH NOES this datacenter product isn't for gamers OMG OMG AMD hates gamers!!!!11!!1!" stuff is getting too old, it ought to be put out to pasture a long time ago.
Micro$oft is still operating "in the past" with the way they manage licensing and that forces customers that have high core / thread counts to look for alternatives: the higher the core counts, the more they are driven away from Windows and unless whatever is needed to run on the supercomputer only runs on Windows, they'll look for other OSes.
It's a GPU that's not intended for playing games, so why do you people even care?
And not in a good way, and it happens in nearly every piece @btarunr puts out, editorial or not. What happened to just reporting the news?See above. There was no reason to put the title it had, and it was obvious this was going to happen because of it. Hell, even without it, its hard enough...
OTOH Having AMD devote thier resources to their Linux drivers is a *MASSIVE* win for Linux users everywhere! :toast:
(www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/nvidia-gpus-can-be-tricked-to-support-amd-freesync.247162/)
And generally speaking, you get your rear handed to you on higher difficulty settings because the computer gets super-human accuracy and reactions, not because the AI is good or not.