7 ms·

This has been discussed on HN before. I don't condone Intel behavior, but let's be honest here: AMD underinvests in software and expects others to pick up the

This has been discussed on HN before. I don't condone Intel behavior, but let's be honest here: AMD underinvests in software and expects others to pick up the slack. That isn't acceptable.

amelius 5y ago
I think it's great if a hardware company leaves the software for others. This leads to open specifications.
- ethbr0 5y ago
  At the firmware / driver level, fully open specifications for high performance hardware is an impossible dream. At best, detailed documentation is a lower priority item below "make it work" and "increase performance". At worst, it requires exposing trade secrets. Edit: It'd probably be more productive for everyone if we set incentives and work such that the goal we want (compilers that produce code that runs optimally on Intel, AMD, and other architectures) isn't contingent on Intel writing them for non-Intel architectures. (Said somewhat curmudgeonly, because everyone complains about things like this, but also doesn't really how insanely hard and frustratingly edge-case-ridden compiler work is)
- sedatk 5y ago
  No, just don't falsely market your product as fair or neutral.
  - dodobirdlord 5y ago
    It’s the Intel MKL, I don’t think Intel has ever even endorsed using it on other vendors CPUs, much less claimed that it is “fair” or “neutral”.
    - ReleaseCandidat 5y ago
      Well: On November 12, 2009 AMD and Intel Corporation announced a comprehensive settlement agreement to end all outstanding legal disputes between the companies, including antitrust and patent cross license disputes. In addition to a payment of $1.25B that Intel made to AMD, Intel agreed to abide by an important set of ground rules that continue in effect until November 11, 2019. Customers and Partners With respect to customers and partners, Intel must not:* [...] Intentionally include design/engineering elements in its products that artificially impair the performance of any AMD microprocessor. https://www.amd.com/en/corporate/antitrust-ruling https://www.amd.com/en/corporate/antitrust-ruling I like that 'in effect until November 11, 2019.' part :D
- mhh__ 5y ago
  If Intel did that there probably wouldn't be a software suite at all for their processors. Compare to vTune just about all open source profilers are either a bad joke or like programming in Basic in a C++ age.
stavros 5y ago
What should they have done instead? Built a compiler with a "cripple Intel" function? So people would have to download the executable that's fastest on their CPU, even though they use the same instruction set? The issue here is that they used a slower code path even on CPUs that could run the faster one, just because they were made by a competitor. You say "AMD should have made their own compiler", but why? What else should they have made? An OS? An office suite? Why?
- benbenolson 5y ago
  Very likely, this was not done intentionally. I think we can simply imagine a common scenario: some employee working for Company X, developing a compiler suite, and adding necessary optimizations for Company X's processors. Meanwhile, Company Y's processors don't get as much focus (perhaps due to the employee not knowing about Company Y's CPUIDs, supported optimizations for different models, etc.). Thus, Company Y's processors don't run as quickly with this particular library. Why does this have to be malicious intent? Surely it's not surprising to you that Company X's software executes quicker on Company X's processors: I should hope that it does! The same would hold true if Company Y were to develop a compiler; unique features of their processors (and perhaps not Company X's) should be used to their fullest extent.
  - djmips 5y ago
    I don't think you read the article. Go read it first before you make your hypothesis. If it was as easy to fix as using a environment variable (which no longer works) then it was done intentionally.
    - brasic 5y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > Please don't comment on whether someone read an article.
      - djmips 5y ago
hpcjoe 5y ago
AMD[1], NVidia[2] do "make" their own compilers. AMD is notorious for a "build it and they will come" mentality. Despite the fact that this hasn't worked. AMD needs to make it easy to adopt their hardware, and the way this is done is with software. When they finally get to the point that their driver/libs are as easy to install as Nvidia's , it might be too late. I've argued this with AMD folks before. The barriers to adoption need to be low. Friction needs to be low. They need to target ubiquity[3]. [1] https://developer.amd.com/amd-aocc/ https://developer.amd.com/amd-aocc/ [2] https://developer.nvidia.com/nvidia-hpc-sdk-downloads https://developer.nvidia.com/nvidia-hpc-sdk-downloads [3] https://blog.scalability.org/2008/02/target-ubiquity-a-business-model-for-accelerators-in-hpc/ https://blog.scalability.org/2008/02/target-ubiquity-a-busin...
- Cloudef 5y ago
  AMD is best on the linux right now. But thats mostly thanks to them opening up their hardware for driver developers.
  - hpcjoe 5y ago
    I was getting better performance out of the NVidia HPC SDK compilers, but then again, the old PGI compilers it is based upon (with an LLVM backend now), have always been my go-to for higher performance code. I've got some Epycs and Zen2s at home here, and I have both compilers. Haven't done testing in recent months, but they've been updating them, so maybe I should look into that again. Thanks for the nudge!
    - Cloudef 5y ago
      Ah, I should've clarified here I mainly meant the GPUs :) Though keep in mind if you do computing (through CUDA), nvidia is still necessary.
- salawat 5y ago
  You call Nvidia driver installation easy? Every bit of "ease" about that is hardly Nvidia's doing.
MereInterest 5y ago
There's a variety of options that are available here, and I don't buy the argument that AMD's behavior is automatically unethical. A. Company makes and sells hardware, and offers no software. B. Company makes and sells uniquely featured hardware, and offers software that uses those unique features. C. Company makes and sells hardware that adheres to an industry standard, and offers software that targets hardware adhering to that standard. D. Company makes and sells hardware that adheres to an industry standard, then uses their position in related markets to give themselves an unfair advantage in the hardware market. Of these, options A, B, and C are all acceptable options. AMD has traditionally chosen option A, which is a perfectly reasonable option. There's no reason that a company is obligated to participate in a complementary market. Option D is the only clearly unethical option.
- ReleaseCandidat 5y ago
  > AMD has traditionally chosen option A, which is a perfectly reasonable option AMD has optimized libraries https://developer.amd.com/amd-aocl/ https://developer.amd.com/amd-aocl/ and their own compilers: https://developer.amd.com/amd-aocc/ https://developer.amd.com/amd-aocc/
- ncmncm 5y ago
  Intel's legitimate course is to make their CPUs run actually faster than the competition, instead of tricking people into running slower code on the competition.
post_break 5y ago
And Intel has sandbagged us with 4 cpu cores for ages, leading to software that isn't being optimized for more cores. Suddenly AMD starts pushing many cores with high single core performance and Intel magically turns hyperthreading on for lower tier cpus and starts putting out way more cores.
CalChris 5y ago
AMD pays substantial royalties to Intel for x86. https://jolt.law.harvard.edu/digest/intel-and-the-x86-architecture-a-legal-perspective https://jolt.law.harvard.edu/digest/intel-and-the-x86-archit... However, this will become moot as even Intel is shifting towards LLVM. https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/technical/adoption-of-llvm-complete-icx.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/t...
IntelThrowaway1 5y ago
The thing that gets me about Intel's culture, as someone who worked there, was that Intel as an organisation was completely unable to actually accept they'd done anything wrong. Ever. There are lots of cases where Intel has either screwed up or done things that were unarguably anti-competitive. It happens at every company, I don't like Uber, but I'm not going to blame Uber today for the fuckery that Kalanick got up to. In each case you could ask the Intel HR, or Intel senior management what they thought about it and it was never Intel's fault. The answers to any questions about this sort of stuff would be full of pettifogging, passsive voice, and legalese. The result was the internal culture was an extremely low trust environment since you knew people were willing to be transparantly intellectually dishonest to further their careers. I haven't been there since Gelsinger arrived but I hope that changes, I wonder how much it can change in the legal environment we're in.
- kmeisthax 5y ago
  I don't think this is dishonesty - it's auteur mentality. In Intel's view, AMD was a second-source vendor that went rogue, and gets to free-ride on their patents because Intel couldn't be arsed to extend x86 to 64-bit. If they had their way, they'd own the x86 ISA interface and all their competition would be incompatible architectures that you have to recompile for. Crippling AMD processors with their C compiler wasn't dishonest, it was DRM to protect their """intellectual property"""[0]. Gelsinger was the head designer on the 486, so he was around during the time when Intel was obsessed with keeping competition out of their ISA and probably has a case of auteur mentality, too. [0] In case you couldn't tell, I really hate this word. The underlying concepts are, at best, necessary evils.
  - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
    > In Intel's view, AMD was a second-source vendor that went rogue, and gets to free-ride In Russia's view Ukraine is a breakaway province that was getting a free ride from all the transit gas fees and must be brought to heel. In medieval mentality women are property What i mean is, its really a tool to justify why your dishonest behaviour is okay
bri3d 5y ago
I think it's more nuanced than that: In the past, AMD just straight up had horrible software. More recently, AMD have been investing more in open software, probably with the goal that indeed, a community form and they get "leverage" / ROI for their investment. On the flip side, Intel invest heavily in high-quality but jealously guarded and closed source software. With this nuance, I'm not so sure it's clear cut which one is "acceptable," and it's an interesting ethical question about Open Source and open-ness in general.
- midjji 5y ago
  AMD still has horrible software, compare cuda to whatever crap AMD thinks you should use. Truth is its even hard to say what their alternative is, not to mention how horribly poorly they support what is, or at least should be their second if not most important/lucrative target.

This has been discussed on HN before. I don't condone Intel behavior, but let's be honest here: AMD underinvests in software and expects others to pick up the slack. That isn't acceptable.

amelius 5y ago

I think it's great if a hardware company leaves the software for others. This leads to open specifications.

ethbr0 5y ago
At the firmware / driver level, fully open specifications for high performance hardware is an impossible dream. At best, detailed documentation is a lower priority item below "make it work" and "increase performance". At worst, it requires exposing trade secrets. Edit: It'd probably be more productive for everyone if we set incentives and work such that the goal we want (compilers that produce code that runs optimally on Intel, AMD, and other architectures) isn't contingent on Intel writing them for non-Intel architectures. (Said somewhat curmudgeonly, because everyone complains about things like this, but also doesn't really how insanely hard and frustratingly edge-case-ridden compiler work is)
sedatk 5y ago
No, just don't falsely market your product as fair or neutral.
- dodobirdlord 5y ago
  It’s the Intel MKL, I don’t think Intel has ever even endorsed using it on other vendors CPUs, much less claimed that it is “fair” or “neutral”.
  - ReleaseCandidat 5y ago
    Well: On November 12, 2009 AMD and Intel Corporation announced a comprehensive settlement agreement to end all outstanding legal disputes between the companies, including antitrust and patent cross license disputes. In addition to a payment of $1.25B that Intel made to AMD, Intel agreed to abide by an important set of ground rules that continue in effect until November 11, 2019. Customers and Partners With respect to customers and partners, Intel must not:* [...] Intentionally include design/engineering elements in its products that artificially impair the performance of any AMD microprocessor. https://www.amd.com/en/corporate/antitrust-ruling https://www.amd.com/en/corporate/antitrust-ruling I like that 'in effect until November 11, 2019.' part :D
mhh__ 5y ago
If Intel did that there probably wouldn't be a software suite at all for their processors. Compare to vTune just about all open source profilers are either a bad joke or like programming in Basic in a C++ age.

stavros 5y ago

What should they have done instead? Built a compiler with a "cripple Intel" function? So people would have to download the executable that's fastest on their CPU, even though they use the same instruction set? The issue here is that they used a slower code path even on CPUs that could run the faster one, just because they were made by a competitor. You say "AMD should have made their own compiler", but why? What else should they have made? An OS? An office suite? Why?

benbenolson 5y ago
Very likely, this was not done intentionally. I think we can simply imagine a common scenario: some employee working for Company X, developing a compiler suite, and adding necessary optimizations for Company X's processors. Meanwhile, Company Y's processors don't get as much focus (perhaps due to the employee not knowing about Company Y's CPUIDs, supported optimizations for different models, etc.). Thus, Company Y's processors don't run as quickly with this particular library. Why does this have to be malicious intent? Surely it's not surprising to you that Company X's software executes quicker on Company X's processors: I should hope that it does! The same would hold true if Company Y were to develop a compiler; unique features of their processors (and perhaps not Company X's) should be used to their fullest extent.
- djmips 5y ago
  I don't think you read the article. Go read it first before you make your hypothesis. If it was as easy to fix as using a environment variable (which no longer works) then it was done intentionally.
  - brasic 5y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > Please don't comment on whether someone read an article.
    - djmips 5y ago

hpcjoe 5y ago

AMD[1], NVidia[2] do "make" their own compilers. AMD is notorious for a "build it and they will come" mentality. Despite the fact that this hasn't worked. AMD needs to make it easy to adopt their hardware, and the way this is done is with software. When they finally get to the point that their driver/libs are as easy to install as Nvidia's , it might be too late. I've argued this with AMD folks before. The barriers to adoption need to be low. Friction needs to be low. They need to target ubiquity[3]. [1] https://developer.amd.com/amd-aocc/ https://developer.amd.com/amd-aocc/ [2] https://developer.nvidia.com/nvidia-hpc-sdk-downloads https://developer.nvidia.com/nvidia-hpc-sdk-downloads [3] https://blog.scalability.org/2008/02/target-ubiquity-a-business-model-for-accelerators-in-hpc/ https://blog.scalability.org/2008/02/target-ubiquity-a-busin...

Cloudef 5y ago
AMD is best on the linux right now. But thats mostly thanks to them opening up their hardware for driver developers.
- hpcjoe 5y ago
  I was getting better performance out of the NVidia HPC SDK compilers, but then again, the old PGI compilers it is based upon (with an LLVM backend now), have always been my go-to for higher performance code. I've got some Epycs and Zen2s at home here, and I have both compilers. Haven't done testing in recent months, but they've been updating them, so maybe I should look into that again. Thanks for the nudge!
  - Cloudef 5y ago
    Ah, I should've clarified here I mainly meant the GPUs :) Though keep in mind if you do computing (through CUDA), nvidia is still necessary.
salawat 5y ago
You call Nvidia driver installation easy? Every bit of "ease" about that is hardly Nvidia's doing.

MereInterest 5y ago

There's a variety of options that are available here, and I don't buy the argument that AMD's behavior is automatically unethical. A. Company makes and sells hardware, and offers no software. B. Company makes and sells uniquely featured hardware, and offers software that uses those unique features. C. Company makes and sells hardware that adheres to an industry standard, and offers software that targets hardware adhering to that standard. D. Company makes and sells hardware that adheres to an industry standard, then uses their position in related markets to give themselves an unfair advantage in the hardware market. Of these, options A, B, and C are all acceptable options. AMD has traditionally chosen option A, which is a perfectly reasonable option. There's no reason that a company is obligated to participate in a complementary market. Option D is the only clearly unethical option.

ReleaseCandidat 5y ago
> AMD has traditionally chosen option A, which is a perfectly reasonable option AMD has optimized libraries https://developer.amd.com/amd-aocl/ https://developer.amd.com/amd-aocl/ and their own compilers: https://developer.amd.com/amd-aocc/ https://developer.amd.com/amd-aocc/
ncmncm 5y ago
Intel's legitimate course is to make their CPUs run actually faster than the competition, instead of tricking people into running slower code on the competition.

post_break 5y ago

And Intel has sandbagged us with 4 cpu cores for ages, leading to software that isn't being optimized for more cores. Suddenly AMD starts pushing many cores with high single core performance and Intel magically turns hyperthreading on for lower tier cpus and starts putting out way more cores.

CalChris 5y ago

AMD pays substantial royalties to Intel for x86. https://jolt.law.harvard.edu/digest/intel-and-the-x86-architecture-a-legal-perspective https://jolt.law.harvard.edu/digest/intel-and-the-x86-archit... However, this will become moot as even Intel is shifting towards LLVM. https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/technical/adoption-of-llvm-complete-icx.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/t...

IntelThrowaway1 5y ago

The thing that gets me about Intel's culture, as someone who worked there, was that Intel as an organisation was completely unable to actually accept they'd done anything wrong. Ever. There are lots of cases where Intel has either screwed up or done things that were unarguably anti-competitive. It happens at every company, I don't like Uber, but I'm not going to blame Uber today for the fuckery that Kalanick got up to. In each case you could ask the Intel HR, or Intel senior management what they thought about it and it was never Intel's fault. The answers to any questions about this sort of stuff would be full of pettifogging, passsive voice, and legalese. The result was the internal culture was an extremely low trust environment since you knew people were willing to be transparantly intellectually dishonest to further their careers. I haven't been there since Gelsinger arrived but I hope that changes, I wonder how much it can change in the legal environment we're in.

kmeisthax 5y ago
I don't think this is dishonesty - it's auteur mentality. In Intel's view, AMD was a second-source vendor that went rogue, and gets to free-ride on their patents because Intel couldn't be arsed to extend x86 to 64-bit. If they had their way, they'd own the x86 ISA interface and all their competition would be incompatible architectures that you have to recompile for. Crippling AMD processors with their C compiler wasn't dishonest, it was DRM to protect their """intellectual property"""[0]. Gelsinger was the head designer on the 486, so he was around during the time when Intel was obsessed with keeping competition out of their ISA and probably has a case of auteur mentality, too. [0] In case you couldn't tell, I really hate this word. The underlying concepts are, at best, necessary evils.
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  > In Intel's view, AMD was a second-source vendor that went rogue, and gets to free-ride In Russia's view Ukraine is a breakaway province that was getting a free ride from all the transit gas fees and must be brought to heel. In medieval mentality women are property What i mean is, its really a tool to justify why your dishonest behaviour is okay

bri3d 5y ago

I think it's more nuanced than that: In the past, AMD just straight up had horrible software. More recently, AMD have been investing more in open software, probably with the goal that indeed, a community form and they get "leverage" / ROI for their investment. On the flip side, Intel invest heavily in high-quality but jealously guarded and closed source software. With this nuance, I'm not so sure it's clear cut which one is "acceptable," and it's an interesting ethical question about Open Source and open-ness in general.

midjji 5y ago
AMD still has horrible software, compare cuda to whatever crap AMD thinks you should use. Truth is its even hard to say what their alternative is, not to mention how horribly poorly they support what is, or at least should be their second if not most important/lucrative target.