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Sounds like AMD might still be using the 'tesla roadster' strategy, of selling fewer, more lucrative contracts for the time being. Probably not that they don't

Sounds like AMD might still be using the 'tesla roadster' strategy, of selling fewer, more lucrative contracts for the time being. Probably not that they don't care, just that for now, they have to focus.

sorenjan 5y ago
GPGPU have been a thing for two decades, they should have had this solved years ago. Lets hope SYCL gets wide support, Intel seems to bet on it and there's a Cuda backend available. If AMD wants to make themselves irrelevant for anything but gaming and HPC that's their choice.
- mastax 5y ago
  Years ago AMD was almost bankrupt and put everything into one last attempt at a CPU. Now AMD is hiring like crazy, and I hope they are able to catch up to their larger competitors in tooling and software. Here's what I think they'll do for the near future. They can't build an all-encompassing library ecosystem that supports all the hardware, all the existing software, has really good tooling, etc. in a reasonable amount of time. In consumer they can mostly get away with just supporting Microsoft's APIs, which they already do pretty well. If they design a really good compute GPU, they probably won't be able to make enough of them. They can sell all of their production with a few big deals to important customers, and they can attach engineers to those deals to help support the specific needs of those customers. That is much more practical than trying to catch up to CUDA in its entirety. Basically, status quo. As someone who isn't a big customer and who is mad at Nvidia I don't hope for this to happen, but it seems the most likely path.
rhn_mk1 5y ago
That sounds reasonable on the surface, but cards don't cost a lot, and sending them out for free to leverage community interest for the open source stack could be extremely cost effective.
- paulmd 5y ago
  Even better, you can provide support for gaming cards and then the community pays you for them instead of you having to pay for it out of dev-rel budget. And yet AMD is actively moving in the opposite direction and dropping support for older hardware from both their Windows driver, as well as from ROCm and their other compute software. It's hard to overstate what a positive impact gaming card support and donations of hardware to educational institutions and other devrel have been for CUDA - those are the people who are writing the next 10 years of your software, that sells the actual enterprise hardware. And at this point it's not just "can't afford to support it", AMD is doing fine these days, they just don't want to. Kind of baffling.
- generalizations 5y ago
  If they generate demand they can't keep up with (without messing up their strategy), it's entirely possible that negative perception would hurt then more than the 'don't care' perception they have now.

sorenjan 5y ago

GPGPU have been a thing for two decades, they should have had this solved years ago. Lets hope SYCL gets wide support, Intel seems to bet on it and there's a Cuda backend available. If AMD wants to make themselves irrelevant for anything but gaming and HPC that's their choice.

mastax 5y ago
Years ago AMD was almost bankrupt and put everything into one last attempt at a CPU. Now AMD is hiring like crazy, and I hope they are able to catch up to their larger competitors in tooling and software. Here's what I think they'll do for the near future. They can't build an all-encompassing library ecosystem that supports all the hardware, all the existing software, has really good tooling, etc. in a reasonable amount of time. In consumer they can mostly get away with just supporting Microsoft's APIs, which they already do pretty well. If they design a really good compute GPU, they probably won't be able to make enough of them. They can sell all of their production with a few big deals to important customers, and they can attach engineers to those deals to help support the specific needs of those customers. That is much more practical than trying to catch up to CUDA in its entirety. Basically, status quo. As someone who isn't a big customer and who is mad at Nvidia I don't hope for this to happen, but it seems the most likely path.

rhn_mk1 5y ago

That sounds reasonable on the surface, but cards don't cost a lot, and sending them out for free to leverage community interest for the open source stack could be extremely cost effective.

paulmd 5y ago
Even better, you can provide support for gaming cards and then the community pays you for them instead of you having to pay for it out of dev-rel budget. And yet AMD is actively moving in the opposite direction and dropping support for older hardware from both their Windows driver, as well as from ROCm and their other compute software. It's hard to overstate what a positive impact gaming card support and donations of hardware to educational institutions and other devrel have been for CUDA - those are the people who are writing the next 10 years of your software, that sells the actual enterprise hardware. And at this point it's not just "can't afford to support it", AMD is doing fine these days, they just don't want to. Kind of baffling.
generalizations 5y ago
If they generate demand they can't keep up with (without messing up their strategy), it's entirely possible that negative perception would hurt then more than the 'don't care' perception they have now.