After a week of struggling to get its AMD RX 7900XTX-based TinyBox running on open-source firmware, Tiny Corp says it will launch an Nvidia RTX 4090 version for users who want something that "just works."

The AI startup founded by security hacker George Hotz initially chose AMD's flagship gaming GPU for its TinyBox, a computer equipped with six graphics cards to handle AI workloads. Initially, Tiny Corp was happy to use AMD GPUs because it felt customers were "overpaying for petaflops" with Nvidia hardware, and criticized the CUDA software stack for being closed source.

Earlier in the month, however, the Tiny Corp X account (likely controlled by Hotz) began complaining of driver and firmware issues that caused crashes and hangs, threatening to undermine the Radeon GPU-powered computer. Several times Tiny Corp publicly asked AMD to open source the Micro Engine Scheduler (MES) firmware so that it could fix the bugs in question instead of waiting for AMD's internal patch. This put the launch of TinyBox on hold.

Meanwhile, Tiny Corp suggested it could use Intel's Arc Alchemist GPUs instead because Intel also has a large open-source presence, even if its graphics cards don't reach the high end. Even a GeForce RTX 4090-powered TinyBox was reluctantly considered because "at least we know the software is good there."