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Lisa Su saved AMD – Now she wants Nvidia's AI crown
- osti 3y agoI think attributing AMD's current success to any one person is an insult to all the other employees of the company.
- nightowl_games 3y agoIf it was a failure would you feel comfortable saying the buck stops with Lisa? The CEO has more power and responsibility. They receive blame for company wide problems and conversely deserve credit for company with success.
- osti 3y agoIf it was a failure I wouldn't attribute that to Lisa Su either. Because AMD's success kinda started around the time Lisa Su joined, the products they came out with at the time certainly didn't have much to do with Lisa, technology wise or strategy wise. There are definitely many cases where CEO should bare responsibility for the company's success or failure, but definitely not in the case of AMD.
- cmsj 3y agoDr Su became AMD CEO in 2014 when they were deep in the ruinously awful Bulldozer CPU architecture. The first Zen products didn't launch until 2017 - that is when their "success kinda started" at least in the CPU market. Here's a quote from Suzanne Plummer, senior director of the Zen project, in September 2015: "This is the first time in a very long time that we engineers have been given the total freedom to build a processor from scratch and do the best we can do." You could make a reasonable argument that supplying the GPUs for PS4 and Xbox One, both of which pre-date Dr Su's appointment, is their "success kinda start[ing]", but one could also argue that AMD was really the only vendor capable of providing the APUs needed.
- osti 3y agoCPU development cycle is definitely longer than 3 years, especially for a big change like that. Zen architecture design certainly started before 2014. So I think it's fair to say that she started around the time AMD became successful.
- rowanG077 3y agoZen started in 2012. But it might have been a total disaster if it weren't for Su. We simply don't know. At the very least Suzannes quote hints at Su having at least a very significant impact.
- burnte 3y agoIt's not, though. Zen didn't launch until 2017, she started in 2014. Early work began in 2012, yes, but it was on track for 3 years under her before launch, she deserves a lot of credit as leader to bring that project to fruition.
- cmsj 3y agoTechnically it was somewhat under her from its inception - she was a VP and general manager of AMD from like January 2012, months before Jim Keller was hired. I dug up an old interview from Anandtech that I'd forgotten about when I first wrote my comment above, which has this quote from Dr Su: "If I put credit where credit is due, Mark Papermaster had incredible vision of what he wanted to do with CPU/GPU roadmap. He hired Jim Keller and Raja Koduri, and he was very clear when he said he needed this much money to do things. We did cut a bunch of projects, but we invested in our future."
- burnte 3y agoThanks for the quote, that's a great leader.
- scrlk 3y ago"Designing microprocessors is like playing Russian roulette. You put a gun to your head, pull the trigger, and find out four years later if you blew your brains out." (attributed to former DEC CEO Robert Palmer)
- throwaway2990 3y agoNo. It’s not an insult. As CEO she has final say. She’s the one who says he’s or no. She’s made the right choices to get AMD where they are today.
- osti 3y agoNo, see my other comment as to why.
- throwaway2990 3y agoYour other comment doesn’t change my statement. You’re wrong. End of story.
- xedrac 3y agoI feel like the CEOs job is to surround themselves with great people and a vision, then get out of the way. Beyond that, it's more of a sales job than anything.
- williamDafoe 3y agoNot really. It was Lisa's decision to stop shipping CPUs with locked clock multipliers! She also made the decision that eight cores and 16 threads would become the industry standard for laptops and desktops! These are major strategic decisions which made her a hero to computer buyers!
- Sparkle-san 3y agoSaying yes or no seems a lot less impactful than actually doing the work. Engineers without a CEO can still create something, a CEO without engineers is basically worthless.
- throwaway2990 3y agoSure but engineers with no direction and a bunch of bad ideas is worse than a CEO without engineers. Prior to Lisa they were on a downward spiral and heading towards bankruptcy.
- cdibona 3y agoIt does ignore a ton of contributions from a ton of people, but that is the job of the CEO and cofounder. If anything I always want to know more about Chris Malachowsky, Nvidia's cofounder. Their relationship I thought was pretty special, esp in the beginning. Nothing like the woz/jobs relationship, imo.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- cmsj 3y agoYou could certainly make a good argument that Dr Su's direction/focus, as CEO, allowed successful projects to flourish into compelling products.
- laweijfmvo 3y agoJim Keller has entered the chat… /s
- phkahler 3y agoJim Keller tells people how important everyone else is to "his" success.
- jimbokun 3y agoWriting an article praising one person doesn't mean you are diminishing or insulting everyone you didn't mention in the article.
- osti 3y agoWhen your title is "someone saved the whole company", it definitely is diminishing everyone else's work, at least in the case of AMD. Like someone else mentioned here, Jim Keller always says "team work" and all when someone praises him. Microprocessor as complex as a modern consumer CPU certainly involves so many people that attributing it to any one person is just impossible. But obviously now we are getting into the topic of whether any CEO is that important to a large company. I'd like to say they aren't, but our hero worshipping culture makes it hard to break out of that mindset.
- FooBarBizBazz 3y agoBuried in the article: > [Jensen] Huang, who is a distant relative of [Lisa] Su’s [...] This is an excellent, Dickensian level of coincidence. And they both come on stage in leather motorcycle jackets. May this rivalry of -- what, cousins nth removed? -- bring us great new chips. For AMD though, the software side is going to be important. OpenCL was a total bust, Cuda is king. They need to do something about that.
- klyrs 3y agoI had to look... she's wearing short-sleeved leather jacket. Not all leather jackets are motorcycle jackets. Wearing short-sleeved anything on a motorcycle is senseless.
- angry_octet 3y agoNo-one think Jensen is getting on a motorcycle, there is an implied motorcycle-style. And you can have short sleeve/ sleeveless motorcycle jackets, I've seen idiots wearing them many times.
- klyrs 3y agoI've seen people wearing short-sleeve t-shirts on their motorcycles too. That doesn't make them motorcycle shirts.
- aidenn0 3y agoIf this comment[1] is correct, they would be first cousins, once removed. Their closest common ancestor would be Huang's grandparents, which makes them first cousins, and they are one generation different from each other, when tracing from that ancestory, which makes them once removed. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36164991 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36164991
- angry_octet 3y agoUnfortunately the black turtleneck look has baggage.
- sergiotapia 3y agoIt's pretty funny that Lisa Su is related to Jensen Huang. Like McDonalds and Burger King being owned by different brothers.
- ChuckNorris89 3y agoShe's not related to him, that was some myth that spread online but it's not true, please stop spreading it without citing concrete sources.
- sergiotapia 3y ago> Technically, it is safe to say that Lisa Su's own grandfather is actually Jen-Hsun Huang's uncle. Although they aren't really niece and uncles, they are very close relatives. https://www.techtimes.com/articles/253736/20201030/fact-check-nvidia-ceo-uncle-amds-dr-lisa-su.htm https://www.techtimes.com/articles/253736/20201030/fact-chec...
- polski-g 3y agoBarack Obama and Donald Trump are 42nd cousins. Everyone is related.
- saiya-jin 3y agoSome decade and a half ago my now ex gf who is microbiologist told me that mankind at one time in the past went through some drastic filter and that all humans alive are descendants out of just 5 mothers. And they could have been related too in the past. So yes we are all one big family, not that it helps with anything
- delfinom 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve >One common misconception surrounding Mitochondrial Eve is that since all women alive today descended in a direct unbroken female line from her, she must have been the only woman alive at the time.[45] However, nuclear DNA studies indicate that the effective population size of the ancient human never dropped below tens of thousands.[49] Other women living during Eve's time may have descendants alive today but not in a direct female line.[50]
- FloatArtifact 3y agoWell AMD really needs to work on its software stack to support AI.
- dpflan 3y agoIndeed, are you aware of the current state of AMD's equivalent to CUDA? And how far behind would be, and what would need to be done to near equivalence? It seems like the opportunity and differentiator. I wonder how Apple silicon software is doing...
- llm_nerd 3y agoInstead of trying to integrate the whole stack of, say, pytorch, Apple's primary approach has been converting models to work with Apple's stack. https://github.com/apple/coremltools https://github.com/apple/coremltools Clearly no one is going to be doing training or even fine tuning on Apple hardware at any scale (it competes at the low end, but at scale you invariably will be using nvidia hardware), but once you have a decent model it's a robust way of using it on Apple devices.
- coredog64 3y agoI’ve tried a few models and none have worked. It’s not that they need more resources, just that it freezes and then dies with an inscrutable stack trace somewhere in the OS. If someone from AMD sees the parent comment, please don’t copy Apple!
- dpflan 3y agoMind sharing which ones and your approach? Haven't there been shared posts of success to follow? Also, yes, anyone from AMD, I think we all want more variety in the market, what do you need help with?
- llm_nerd 3y agoNot every model feature and op is supported (though it is growing with every release), but personally I've had surprising success with it. It has allowed me to leverage some models efficiently on both Intel, Apple Silicon and iPhone/iPad devices. I mean...the number of people using PyTorch models ported to CoreML is probably several magnitude greater than the number of people actually having success with AMD's initiatives in the space thus far...
- mtkhaos 3y agoI'm looking forward to seeing a Chiplet DPU similar to Nvidias offering. There is a lot room for growth especially for the professional market.
- makomk 3y agoThe trouble is that AMD just didn't take AI seriously. For a long time, their equivalent of CUDA was not only Linux only and a pain to use but was outright broken on all consumer cards - as in, they dropped official support for the only consumer cards it officially ran on, promptly broke it so that machine learning runs failed, and dismissed bug reports from the users who were left high and dry because their cards were no longer officially supported. The only way to use AMD for machine learning was to pay out much more than the price of NVidia's consumer cards for server-focused AMD cards that worked worse, were harder to use, and that AMD didn't support for long either. They just never had the small-scale desktop usage that lead to NVidia's cards being the choice for bigger machine learning once scaled up because it simply didn't work.
- ChuckNorris89 3y ago>their equivalent of CUDA Nvidia didn't pull their AI leadership out of thin air overnight, but they shipped the first CUDA capable consumer cards with the GeForce 8000 series way back in 2007 and committed to this ecosystem over the years, consistently investing in the HW, SW. By the time AMD woke up and shipped ROCm in 2016, Nvidia already had nearly 10 years head start and a cemented moat in this field. AMD now has a huge mountain to climb to catch up to Nvidia.
- mahkeiro 3y agoI always had hope that ROCm will be able to compete with CUDA but it’s nowhere here despite the time. Seems funny to see that Intel is doing a better job at that with OneAPI.
- bryanlarsen 3y agoAMD invested significantly into OpenCL prior to 2016. It seemed like a safe bet -- the open industry standard usually ends up beating the proprietary standard in the long run. Especially for something like this, with massive open source / open standard companies like Google as heavy users. It seems surprising to me that Google didn't ensure that open standards won in an area that they are so heavily dependent on.
- Decabytes 3y agoI think the work that Lisa Su has done has been great. But their graphics division has been playing catch up with Nvidia for years.
- williamDafoe 3y agoNVidia loves to cite steam surveys to mislead customers but the truth is they have 0% market share in consoles (not in steam surveys) and the new AMD M780 iGPU (7940hs APU) just wiped out NVidia's entire MX product line and is literally 2x faster than Intel's best iGPU and equal to an m1650 laptop GPU! If they are not careful NVidia could fall below 50% of the graphics market very very soon! I remember a time when ATI 9600 was the #1 card on the market. It can come again, and quicker than you think ...
- cypress66 3y agoMarket share on consoles is just a matter of business deals. On PC instead, market share is more of an indicator of how good a product is because people get to choose the GPU. In terms of technology Nvidia is quite ahead, and has been for more than a decade. > the new AMD M780 iGPU (7940hs APU) just wiped out NVidia's entire MX product line and is literally 2x faster than Intel's best iGPU and equal to an m1650 laptop GPU! Pretty sure Nvidia doesn't give a shit about such a low end market segment.
- sagarm 3y agoJust a matter of business deals -- but Su "played a prominent role" in those deals, at least according to Wikipedia. Those deals kept AMD alive.
- shaklee3 3y agoDo you have a source on that? Consoles are usually loss leader type products and bring more recognition than money. There's a reason the systems are so cheap.
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- NayamAmarshe 3y agoI think if AMD focused on consumer cards more, it could be a game changer. Nvidia is nothing but overpriced and if AMD is able to offer something really cool for really cheap, it might spark an interest in the gaming community which eventually means a win in the overall global market.
- dpflan 3y agoIndeed, consumer/edge. There is of course model training and model execution. NVIDIA seems really poised for training, of course can be nice for execution at cloud scale, but consumer/edge is probably all about execution.
- taeric 3y agoI want to believe this, but I have been burned way too many times in the past trusting anything other than Nvidia. The list of companies that were supposedly going to be better is rather exhaustive in the space. It is frustrating. That is, what makes you think Nvidia is a) overpriced and b) not doing the best they can?
- bick_nyers 3y agoUnpopular opinion but NVIDIA is not overpriced when you consider the fact that it's the only product that actually works. I've also been burned so many times by AMD GPUs that I have more faith in Intel catching up in the ML space than AMD. Would love to be wrong though.
- dlivingston 3y agoWould you mind commenting on how you've been burned by AMD GPUs in the past?
- bick_nyers 3y agoIn DDR3 era heat, drivers, crashes (lots of crashes) during gaming. In DDR4 era heat, drivers during game dev (substance painter, UE4 etc.). Lots of finicking with the card/drivers/software. On my home NAS (Ubuntu for longest time, now Kubuntu) I've had more random issues with my RX 580 than my 3060, I know it's not the most fair comparison due to their age but still.
- adamsmith143 3y agoThis is a cute headline but let's see AMD put out some software to actually run DNN training on their hardware. Currently either impossible or too onerous to be worth the trouble.
- kamikaz1k 3y agoWell, George has an acquihire exit option. > The goal of the tiny corp is: “to commoditize the petaflop” > ... If we succeed at this project, we will be on the cutting edge of non NVIDIA AI compute. We have the ability to make the software, and that’s the hard part. [1] https://geohot.github.io//blog/jekyll/update/2023/05/24/the-tiny-corp-raised-5M.html https://geohot.github.io//blog/jekyll/update/2023/05/24/the-...
- alecco 3y agoHN thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36065175 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36065175
- kmeisthax 3y agoWouldn't being hired by AMD violate geohot's settlement agreement with Sony from a decade and change ago? AFAIK he basically agreed to never touch anything with the words "PlayStation" on it.
- klooney 3y agoMaybe he could take a golden parachute as a part of the acqui-hire.
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- paulmd 3y agoUpon seeing the absolute state of ROCm he has decided he will not be using AMD hardware after all. He is now saying that his users would probably want the installer to work and the demo apps to not crash the IOMMU on a supported OS/kernel/hardware configuration? Who knew. https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/issues/2198#issuecomment-1574383483 https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/issues/2198#issuec...
- rowanG077 3y agoWe desperately need CUDA to die. I have some hope the EU will see the light and ban CUDA if Nvidia refuses to open it.
- CamperBob2 3y agoWhat keeps AMD from clean-room reverse-engineering CUDA, a la Compaq? Patents? If so, that's a problem caused by government, so I wouldn't look to them to fix it.
- mikepavone 3y agoI'm not sure why AMD hasn't just directly implemented CUDA, but they did ship HIPify which can translate CUDA code to HIP. Doesn't work for everything, but seems to work for a lot of important ML code. ROCm stack doesn't seem very fully baked though. Only a handful of consumer GPUs are officially supported and stability seems less than great
- JonChesterfield 3y agoI'd assume it's fear of being sued by Nvidia. Probably quite well founded.
- CamperBob2 3y agoRight. A problem caused by government-sanctioned IP rights.
- JonChesterfield 3y agoNah. It'll be killed by running C++ on GPUs. No more gnarly bespoke language, just a header with intrinsics hiding in it. Doesn't need anything other than time and evolution to push it off the cliff.
- rowanG077 3y agoI don't think that will ever happen. C++ is fundamentally a sequential language. It just doesn't match the execution model of a GPU.
- GeekyBear 3y agoAMD re-hired Jim Keller in 2012, and his team started development of AMD's Zen cores (that are the foundation of Ryzen/Epyc) before Dr. Su came on board. Credit for the decision to put Keller back in charge of AMD's CPU core design goes to AMD CTO Mark Papermaster. I would give the launch of products based on Zen as much credit for AMD's turnaround and present success as I would give Doctor Su.
- pmarcelll 3y agoDr. Su joined AMD in January 2012 as senior vice president, before Jim Keller was re-hired (in August 2012).
- viewtransform 3y agoWhen Dr Su took over - there was no coherent product roadmap at AMD. There were various headless zombie projects because of a management exodus around 2012. Dr Su made some decisive calls to stop projects and placed a prescient long term bet on high-performance computing. She shut down low-power tablet asic designs, shut down the SeaMicro acquisition, shutdown Keller's K12 ARM chip, shutdown a large monolithic CPU/GPU asic with shared memory and planned a shift from Global Foundries to TSMC. Deep Learning was not on the radar unfortunately. It fell under Raja Koduri's group and he made an unfortunate bet on Virtual Reality (way before Zuckerburg started his metaverse fantasy). It the end it helped that Intel stumbled badly allowing AMD to recover financially.
- tracker1 3y agoI think that AMD needs to really push ahead on two fronts. The first being price/performance. They need to do much more than just being a few percent ahead of NVidia on price. They need moderate cards that have 48gb vram at under $2k that are competitive to the 4090. That's only half the battle, because said cards need to compete with top NV cards for gaming, just so that people will buy them for play and stay to dev with. The other front is developer experience and tooling, NVidia is way ahead on this front and entrenched. They need cleaner integrations and abstractions for OpenCL. This should probably include clean support for Python tooling as well as for Rust targets. The former being massive for education and common use space and the latter being for those that want to eek out performance without necessarily using C. Both of which will mean more community involvement and investment that lasts longer than AMD is typically known for. If AMD targets mainly support for Linux tooling, then is should/must also support WSL for windows users. No idea where Mac is headed in terms of expansion boards on M2 or future gen. But they definitely need to expand the user base with good, relatively cheap higher end cards as well as devex. Edit: the top end mentioned at 48gb is just for top consumer comparison... I think good tooling for 16-24gb cards in the $500-1200 space that is gaming competitive and can handle AI experimentation and workstation workloads would go a long way as well.
- angm128 3y agoTotally agree on that, securing a piece of the AI market will be a huge challenge. No one will buy AMD for AI when the software isn't compatible and no one will buy AMD for AI to get wonky software for the same price as NVIDIA. Affordable cards with lots of memory and good software support is the only solution to maybe get into the market. Double the memory for some gaming cards (just like NVIDIA's 3060 12GB and the 4060 TI 16GB) Additionally data center products with enormous vram amounts and very fast interconnects will be important AMD can't even take orders that NVIDIA can't keep up with because they are producing on very similar nodes. NVIDIA can easily outspend AMD for TSMC production capacity
- FuriouslyAdrift 3y agoThe Instinct line is for AI and the current top of the line has a 128GB of HBM3 ram on die. I am assuming it way north of $2k, though. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-instinct-mi300-data-center-apu-pictured-up-close-15-chiplets-146-billion-transistors https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-instinct-mi300-data-ce...
- m3kw9 3y agoGonna take a collosal screw up by Nvidia to give that up
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- lvl102 3y agoI don’t think Nvidia competition is coming from AMD. It’s way too late for that to happen. MSFT/GOOG/META will have their hands dirty now and AMD might be left watching. Not to mention what Apple has in store for the next few years. The best thing for AMD would be to partner up with MSFT. CUDA/PyTorch is here to stay for a very long time.
- UncleOxidant 3y agoNeither AMD or Intel have taken ML seriously enough. GOOG has TPUs but those are pretty much only for Google. Meta may be building their own ML accelerator chips as well, but again, those will likely stay inside of Meta. > CUDA... is here to stay for a very long time. Yes, this unfortunately seems to be the case. It would've been great to have more competition in this space. CUDA is closed source which sometimes leads to issues, but it works and is well supported by Nvidia and still has the first-mover advantage. I still have some hope for OneAPI (from Intel) but I'm not holding my breath.
- jheriko 3y ago[flagged]
- contingencies 3y ago"AI in everything". Err, yeah. AI in your breakfast cereal. What's the point? Show me the applications, IMHO most of the time it's not adding value. LLMs generating mediocre content faster than humanity is not a long-term business model. Ten thousand CS grads running ROS with standard vision algorithms who don't understand it's the least efficient way to approach most problems. We've got the west jumping up and down about how China or Russia's being denied chips, but the fact is chips from many generations ago are adequate for most deployment scenarios today. Anything hyper specialist is sold on-sensor-chip anyway, so where's the relevance for AMD going forward as desktop declines and Samsung and Apple have their own mobile solutions? Do large scale chip makers really run on such an extremely faddy, hypey, business model, or is Su just running out of steam?
- barbariangrunge 3y agoSmart light bulbs, powered by GPT-5
- ByThyGrace 3y agoHallucinating invisible light in the UV spectrum instead when asked to turn itself off.
- bee_rider 3y agoSomebody put chatGPT in my Cheerios, now they can intelligently spell ooooo.
- Fervicus 3y agoShould have gone for Alphabet Soup instead.
- tormeh 3y agoAMD's AI software efforts are so trash WebGPU will be the first API you can use to run PyTorch on consumer AMD GPUs, not because AMD put some effort in, but because people want to run PyTorch in the browser. AMD could have ported PyTorch to OpenCL. Could have ported it to Vulkan. Instead they've made their own shitty version of CUDA that works on like 3 of their professional cards and nothing else. Maybe I don't understand something. That's the only sane explanation for what I think is completely baffling behavior.
- paulmd 3y ago> Instead they've made their own shitty version of CUDA that works on like 3 of their professional cards and nothing else. Maybe I don't understand something. That's the only sane explanation for what I think is completely baffling behavior. AMD is laser-focused on surgically tapping high-margin markets. There is money in HPC, let's support that. There is money in AI, let's support that. Nothing more nothing less. The way to think about ROCm isn't a platform like CUDA, it's as an embedded processor that gets engineered into some other product. It doesn't matter if there isn't a good general-purpose OS and ecosystem etc for Zilog Z80 - we aren't making a computer, we are making a microwave, it only ever needs to run one specific piece of software (or a small handful). And that's what AMD has become, a processor that goes into someone else's platform rather than a platform in itself. We are building a HPC supercomputer, we are building an AI training platform, and for that specific product AMD might offer the best value for performance. But you're fundamentally someone else's platform. The ironic thing is that's exactly what everyone is implying that NVIDIA might be doing now with AI, and nothing could be farther from the truth. Abandoning gaming/graphics and focusing AI would be a one-way road to the same situation AMD is in. Once you've abandoned that virtuous cycle it's tremendously hard to get back. NVIDIA has always been laser-focused on making sure that innovation happens on their platform, making sure that prosumers can write CUDA on their gaming hardware and grad students can write their thesis in CUDA and so on. It's not that NVIDIA keeps accidentally falling into success, they're deliberately putting themselves there, and they're not going to stop because of AI or anything else. If they stop and chase AI to the exclusion of graphics, that spigot will dry up, and they will no longer be in the position to catch the next fountain of money when it happens. Besides, all their other products center around graphics anyway - do you sign a big multiproduct partnership with Mediatek or Nintendo if you don't have a good gaming IP, and DLSS, and wide adoption of that software? Does Blender integrate the next OptiX if none of the userbase can run it? Do you just make quadros and not do the single last step (gaming drivers) and forego that revenue because it's not enough? No, that's crazy. Platform is hugely important to NVIDIA. It's their core product. Jensen told everyone 15 years ago that NVIDIA was a software company and people scoffed. They're not just a company that writes software, it's almost their primary product really. They write the software that sells the hardware. DLSS and AI and CUDA are their products, and they just sell you the fuel to run their product. Razor-and-blade model in action. "What if they just stopped selling razors" ok then in the long term you won't sell many blades, will you? They're just not going to do it at zero cost or a loss. And just like the Radeon 7850 has no real successor in the $150 segment, that is creeping higher and higher in the stack as fixed costs overwhelm the progress now that moore's law is dying. The true threat to NVIDIA's platform is the rising costs of low-end products. Fixed assembly/testing/shipping costs, fixed die area overhead for memory PHYs, increased VRAM needs (without drops in the per-GB cost of VRAM) - are gradually sapping the low-end segment. It is already not possible to make a $100 or $150 GPU that's very compelling, you can equivocate about whether a $200 or $300 GPU could be better for the price but nobody is making a good $100 or $150 GPU that's a worthy enthusiast-tier successor to the Radeon 7850/R7 270 or similar, because it's just not possible, and everyone agrees on that at least. The RX 6500XT and similar products are never going to compel anyone to upgrade, that segment has gone terminal. And that threshold is creeping higher every time they shrink because people want more memory and GDDR density hasn't kept up and PHYs don't shrink. There is de-facto a "minimum die size that is worth it" because of the fixed size of PHYs (to get the fixed amount of memory people want) and in a world of spiraling cost-per-mm2 that means there is a minimum cost that's worth it, and it's inching higher and higher ever time you shrink. Like try to even imagine what the $200 segment is going to look like with RDNA4 - are they going to launch a 8500XT 16GB on N5P or N3 at $200, just a tiny sliver of compute area sandwiched between PHYs? No, they can't do it either. Console-style or Apple-style APUs are the way out and that is a market that NVIDIA doesn't control, and that is the primary long-term threat to NVIDIA's platform. But for now - they are an incredibly powerful accelerator and everyone reaches for their software when they have a hard task. People get super upset when they can't upgrade the platform for NVIDIA at a compelling performance increase every 2 years. Why would you ever give that up willingly? Not even AMD wants to be where AMD is.
- 1-6 3y agoAMD can take it with FPGA's and their Xilinx purchase. GPUs are unsustainable in the long run.
- jpgvm 3y agoJim Keller saved AMD and chances are his company Tenstorrent will end up being a big dog in AI. AMD should buy his startup in an all-stock deal given the lofty AMD valuation. Bring the maestro back, win the AI generation of chips.
- silisili 3y agoI'm actually curious to see how it plays out. There's no shortage of bickering Keller vs Su here, it seems every AMD thread devolves into it. If Tenstorrent 'wins', while Intel is able to catch and beat AMD, I think that would prove the strongest case for Keller. If AMD keeps staying as far ahead and they have been, it makes a strong case for Su. The truth is likely a combination of the two.
- tpmx 3y agoHe does hardware, not software (wherein AMD's problem lies). Hardware-oriented companies often struggle to build good software stacks for the simple reason that they don't know what's good or bad in software, so they don't know who to hire.
- JonChesterfield 3y agoSome hardware guys think software is easy. You can fix it in the field and most stuff is hacks in tcl, nothing difficult there. This leads to grossly inaccurate ideas about complexity and time in software development. In the worst case, you get a model where the software guys aren't worth paying well because their stuff is easy, and somehow their stuff is always late and broken anyway so they can't be worth much. Then noone can sell the hardware because it's worthless without the code and the company fails and it's all the fault of the software engineers who couldn't do the easy thing that, uh, the hardware guys also couldn't do.
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- williamDafoe 3y ago
- andrewstuart 3y agoIf Lisa Su wants Nvidia's crown then she's going to have to actually compete. That means creating the most awesome products possible at the lowest price practical. In GPU's, AMD is doing the exact opposite. And winning GPUs is what will allow winning AI. Put another way, AMD simply does not compete with Nvidia - it trails along behind, trying to match the Nvidia products in specs, and being slightly less ridiculously expensive. AMD GPUs are overpriced and AMD's most recent GPUs - the 7600 is garbage - this is not a strategy that is going to win any crown.
- JonChesterfield 3y agoIt's a capability war. You don't need to be cheaper, you need to better.
- andrewstuart 3y agoAMDs GPU tech is close enough to Nvidia. AMDs latest card the 7600 did not need to be garbage - this is a low end card so Nvidia can easily make it faster. But it very closely matches Nvidias card at the same level, the 7060, which is also garbage. AMD is simply copying Nvidia. And you’re wrong…. People buy cheaper. It’s not the only factor but it’s a major factor.
- JonChesterfield 3y agoNope. If you can run a language model on Nvidia that lets you fire a load of people, and you can't run it on amdgpu, AMD aren't going to sell you any hardware. Even if it was cheaper. Even when you can run on both, electricity costs can dominate capital. I remember reading something that amounted to xeons cost so much more to run than epyc chips that even if the xeon chips are given away free it's cheaper to buy the epyc ones, assuming they'll be running for more than some smallish number of months.
- melbourne_mat 3y agoShe's a competent leader there's no doubt. But to say she saved AMD is just more mindless leader worship. TSMC saved AMD, because they gave AMD the ability to produce CPUs that could finally compete with Intel.
- renewiltord 3y agoMore RAM and CUDA-equivalent quality. Otherwise worthless.
- andrewstuart 3y agoI’m not seeing the crown winning AMD strategy: “AMD fails again: Radeon RX 7600 Review” https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Yhoj2kfk-x0 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Yhoj2kfk-x0 “AMD is a Mess: Radeon RX 7600 GPU Review & Benchmarks” https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MCxYfXe1DAA https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MCxYfXe1DAA “AMD Radeon RX 7600 review: Another water-treading midrange GPU for $269” https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/05/review-amds-269-rx-7600-is-a-good-1080p-card-but-the-rtx-4060-looms/amp/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/05/review-amds-269-rx-7... “Equally Disappointing - $269 AMD Radeon RX 7600 Review” https://youtu.be/1JFSwWanIPw https://youtu.be/1JFSwWanIPw
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- bee_rider 3y agoThese all seem to be reviews for the RX 7600? I don’t think their whole plan will unravel because of one (based on the headlines) miss, but if it does, then it was a bad plan.
- andrewstuart 3y agoThe 7600 perfectly illustrates the heart of AMDs problem. AMD now simply copies Nvidia and makes their price a little lower but still way too high. Even when Nvidias product is garbage - that's what AMD does too. The 7600 is a microcosm of AMD and its strategy - don't built awesome cards at highly competitive prices - build whatever Nvidia is building and make it a little bit cheaper. AMD and Nvidia's new GPUs are barely faster than the previous generation from years ago, and in many cases, slower. It's not a winning strategy because its not giving customers what they want.
- foota 3y agoThis is somewhat off topic, but does anyone know why they haven't tried putting SSD in a GPU like chip for inference? My understanding is that SSDs have a different access pattern for reading that adds latency vs RAM, but I don't otherwise know why it couldn't serve as a high bandwidth source for reads (ignoring write latencies and durability concerns).
- anoother 3y agoIt has been tried once -- Radeon Pro SSG
- foota 3y agoMaybe. I'm not sure how it was implemented and I didn't see much in depth discussion about it, but it seems to me like that's more just a normal SSD sitting on the card, I was thinking something closer to an SSD with a vastly different (and likely more expensive) interface allowing for much higher bandwidth than an SSD typically offers, since there's not much advantage to having the SSD if you can't read it into cache quickly.
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- DarthNebo 3y agoThey should undercut Nvidia at both pricing for datacenter cards & increase CUDA like framework adoption with developer accessible cards & boatloads of VRAM. Dev's wont buy cards unless they demonstrate perf/$ over nvidia for standard models
- fennecfoxy 3y agoI guess this has basically been put out bc Nvidia hit 1T (or were close to when the article was being written).