> it can generate a 50 steps 512x512 image around 1 minute and 50 seconds.
I have the 4650G APU, and the best way to describe it is: lacking of support. This was even more true 3 yo than now. rocm (is) was absolutely dogshit then, I know this because I tried to do the same when that post was made. You have to compile everything from scratch, get the relevant patches, and even then, xformers which is a library that accelerate diffusion model inferencing was not supported for renoir or rocm back then. Yes, you can generate an image, but it was much slower, and rigged with bugs. You couldn'rt update rocm because it broke compatibility, and it was partly the reason I got into nixos. That being said, those APUs are a power house. Nowadays I can run decent agentic workflows on them (I have 64gb of ddr4 ram, ie APU can suck as much as it needs with the latest linux kernels).
Just note, diffusion models are still second class citizens on AMD apus even GPUs. But then again, nothing close right now on the market except for what apple offers.
The Ryzen AI CPU/GPUs (Ryzan AI 395+ etc) seem to have increasing support - https://lemonade-server.ai/ now has support for the NPU as well as the combined CPU/GPU (which I guess is a APU but is different to the G series of APUs I think?)
But I'm always interested in first hand experiences of how good is it really - I'm pretty cynical about the idea that AMD actually knows what it takes to build good software end-to-end.
I also have one, and indeed support is very much frictionless now compared to a year ago. But again, not thanks to AMD, as initially it was purely community driven. Strix halo was not even supported by ROCm (officially), and we had to deal with therock images, then donato made the toolbox, and then lemonade came through. I am really surprised how AMD approached this. They made big promises, they threw the hardware out, it really is amazing piece of hardware given what you can do with it, but it was left hanging without support for AI stack for months even though it had it in its name. Contrast that with the DGX spark (yes it had and still had bugs in its kernels, but cuda worked on day 1) and you can see the difference. Nvidia is selling an ecosystem, AMD is selling hardware. I really hope AMD focus on the software layer more.
I believe Lemonade is the AMD team right?
But yes I agree with you about their lack of prioritization for software!
Note that Lemonade Server uses NPU low-level code that's proprietary, not available as open source. It would be nice to work on a fully open alternative, perhaps by exposing the NPU itself as a Vulkan Compute-capable device, that shaders can be auto-compiled to.