Fastai wirh Swift = Mac GPU Support in the future?

Ok, to be honest, I haven’t gotten to this part of the course yet but I heard that Swift for Tensorflow may become a huge part of fastai in the future.

And Swift is huge with Mac programming.

According to this, Swift builds on top of LLVM which supports AMD Cards: https://github.com/tensorflow/swift/blob/master/docs/WhySwiftForTensorFlow.md

Putting 2 and 2 together, does this mean that GPU support for Fastai may finally be coming to the Mac (which typically uses AMD Gpus) via S4TF?

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S4TF uses Tensorflow, which doesn’t have great support for AMD yet. So it’s dependent on that.

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AMD has it’s ROCm TensorFlow port (up to date with latest TF 1.14), but MacOS GPU is not listed there.
Linux GPU should work and i know companies that use AMD Radeon VII (16GiB memory) in their machines and it works with TensorFlow! (no licence restriction from AMD to use only expensive GPU in servers)

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I would definitely support more competition in the deep learning GPU space. If the goal is to make deep learning more available to a wider audience, cost is still an important factor and if we can bring that down by getting AMD into the space, I’m all for it.

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