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> The trouble is that AMD just didn't take AI seriously. Until a couple of years ago, AMD was in survival mode, fighting Intel on one side and Nvidia on the ot

> The trouble is that AMD just didn't take AI seriously. Until a couple of years ago, AMD was in survival mode, fighting Intel on one side and Nvidia on the other. Two rivals that were making money hand over fist while AMD was bleeding money. AMD picked open standards and made investments on open source frameworks and libraries commensurate with their financials, the hope being that the community could help pick up some of the slack. The community, understandably, went with the proprietary solution that worked well at the time and had resources behind. The net results is that the Nvidia ecosystem has gained a dominant position in the industry and benefits from being perceived as a quasi-standard. On the other hand, open source efforts by AMD or others get viewed as "not serious". The financial situation of AMD has improved somewhat over the last couple years. So AMD is "taking AI more seriously now". But it might be too late and the proprietary ecosystem has probably won.

parker_mountain 3y ago
For what it's worth, AMD is also incredibly proprietary. The drivers being open source really helps with compatibility and your kernel, but you're still interacting with a massive computer running it's own OS with its own trusted code solution. And that computer also has DMA to your computer. I would consider their open efforts to be "not serious" for anyone but the consumer space - games, desktop users, maybe even professional text editors. If you're using the GPUs for "professional" applications in a one-off scenario, even AMD falls short. I'm honestly not sure what the moral of this story is.
- wmf 3y ago
  The moral is that PSP FUD has nothing to do with AMD's lack of success in AI.
- beebeepka 3y ago
  Are they "incredibly proprietary" compared to the competition? Clearly they aren't. Nvidia offers blobs in both consumer and professional markets. Even going to the extent of gimping performance hardware through drivers on more than one occasion. That said, I think AMD isn't really competing with Nvidia. Sure, their R&D budget is smallish but it feels like they're somewhat fine with the current status quo.
  - paulmd 3y ago
    > Nvidia offers blobs in both consumer and professional markets So does AMD. https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/firmware/linux-firmware.git/tree/amdgpu https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/firmware/lin... And while they have an open version of the userland, it's also missing features compared to the proprietary one, etc. Besides, in the end it truly hardly matters whether the firmware is loaded at runtime or lives in updateable flash. It's still not "your PC" in the Stallman sense either way, it's been tivoized regardless of whether firmware is injected at runtime or during assembly. You cannot load unsigned firmware on AMD anymore either, firmware signing started with Vega (iirc) and checksums now cover almost all of the card configuration similar to NVIDIA. Firmware is also the only way to get proper HDMI support... which is why AMD still does not support HDMI 2.1 on linux. HDMI Forum will not license the spec openly and implementations must contain blobs or omit those features. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/1417 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/1417
    - beebeepka 3y ago
      Hey, I am not white knighting for AMD here. For all we know, they could only have been pursuing open standards because they've been forced to, as the underdog. Can we really assign blame to them specifically for not fighting the hdmi forum on our behalf?
- amunicio 3y ago
  > I'm honestly not sure what the moral of this story is. That people will go with what is easier and works? That open source and open standards don't win by default? That it takes a lot of persistence and effort.
- delfinom 3y ago
  >own OS with its own trusted code solution AMD is working on moving to things like the open source form of AGESA. They plan to start deploying openSIL by 2026.
- throwawaymaths 3y ago
  The moral of the story is that Nvidia invested a lot more in low level software developers for their GPU solutions and AMD did not, and it shows. "Open source" by itself is not a magic dust you can sprinkle on your projfcts that will make your software work well.
  - newjersey 3y ago
    I personally don't have any insider information but just wanted to add what your saying fits with the meta on the gaming community side where commentators are frustrated that nVidia has so much hubris that they think they can just sell essentially last generation level technology without the step up (I think it was 3xxx vs 4xxx or something like that where you'd expect the 4060Ti to be at least as good as 3070Ti) and just trying to make up for it in "software". It probably takes a lot of confidence in your software developers to make this kind of decisions.
  - gary_0 3y ago
    A company that goes open source might get the icing for free, but they still have to bake the cake themselves.
  - williamDafoe 3y ago
    AMD's focus was always on pure compute power at a good price. And they always beat NVidia at that game. AMD cards always had the highest hash rate per dollar in crypto mining. AMD has 100% of the console market and the fastest iGPUs by 2x over Intel. NVidia decided to use gimmicks to sell their cards including texture compression, lighting tricks, improved antique video encoders, motion smoothing, bad proprietary variable refresh rate, ray tracing, cuda and now machine learning features. Nvidia is fortunate that machine learning has taken off. That is masking AMD winning market share from weak overpriced NVidia 3D products!
    - dotnet00 3y ago
      Calling features which are integral to all modern games and most of which also got adopted by other vendors 'gimmicks' is kind of ridiculous.
- m463 3y ago
  Isn't this sort of how specialized hardware kind of works? At some point, hardware (necessarily?) evolves to become optimized to do one thing, and then you have to just treat the driver as an API to the hardware. Even "simple" things like keyboards and mice are now small computers that run their own code, moreso more complex devices like sound cards and hard drives. And since graphics card performance seems to be the bottleneck in a lot of computing, it has become super specialized and you just hand off a high-level chunk of data and it does magic in parallel with fast memory and spits it out the hdmi cable.
  - AnotherGoodName 3y ago
    For the keyboard/mouse now being small computers that's been true since the 1970s. Almost all keyboards for a period of about 30 years had an 8048 or 8051 CPU. It's how they serialized the keystrokes. From the model M keyboard through to everything up till the USB era.
    - kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
      In the 70s it would be more common to have an MSI part that ran matrix scanning and spit out parallel bus ASCII. UCs were still spendy.
- JonChesterfield 3y ago
  What OS do you mean? The closest thing I can think of is the embedded CPU that gets called CP in the ISA docs, which mostly schedules work onto the compute units. That has firmware which is probably annoying to disassemble, but it's hard to imagine it doing anything particularly interesting.
alfalfasprout 3y ago
I'm not so sure anymore. The big reason is that now that the ML framework ecosystem has fragmented into different "layers" of the stack, very few people are directly writing CUDA kernels anymore. As a result, with things like XLA now supporting AMD GPUs using RoCM under the hood the feature gap has closed A LOT. Sure, Nvidia still has the performance crown lead with CuDNN, NCCL, and other libraries providing major boosts. But AMD is starting to catch up quite fast.
Dylan16807 3y ago
They've been getting piles of money from Ryzen for 5-6 years now. How long am I supposed to wait? According to the latest ROCm release notes, it supports Navi 21. Well, at least the pro models. It doesn't even mention the 5000 or 7000 cards. My current understanding is that 7000 support is mostly there a few months late and 5000 was abandoned partway done after years of vague promises. At least it might support windows soon. Not my sub-4-year-old GPU, of course, god forbid. But most of the rest of them.
- williamDafoe 3y ago
  AMD wasn't very profitable until 2018. The company's debt to equity ratio was terrible (due to previous CEO mistakes 2000-2012) until they paid off their huge debts with Ryzen 3 in ~2020. Be patient, grasshopper .. https://www.google.com/search?q=amd%20debt%20to%20equity%20ratio&tbm=isch&tbs=qdr:y&client=ms-android-tmus-us-revc&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CAUQpwVqFwoTCJi0npPFpf8CFQAAAAAdAAAAABAr&biw=980&bih=1786#imgrc=ELcWm_rY1l4rqM https://www.google.com/search?q=amd%20debt%20to%20equity%20r...
- BeetleB 3y ago
  > They've been getting piles of money from Ryzen for 5-6 years now Hardware is very capital intensive. They've not been making much until much more recent. From 2012 through 2017, almost all years were a net loss. They hit $1B net profit only in 2020. I imagine quite a bit of that money went into keeping/accelerating the pace of Ryzen, and paying off debts. Only now do they have more breathing room for other endeavors. If they diverted a chunk of that change to AI, they probably would have a lower performing Ryzen right now. So no, they did not have piles of money.
cypress66 3y ago
Nah. AMD was already profitable in 2018. This is just big mismanagement. Just having 30 extra good software engineers focusing on AI would have made such a massive difference, because it's so bad that there's a lot of low hanging fruit. As someone who was pretty invested in AMD stock since 2018, it always made me pretty angry how bad they managed the AI side. Had they done it well, just from the current AI hype the stock would probably be worth 50 bucks more.
- MontyCarloHall 3y ago
  Yup. Have 15 of those software engineers contribute pull requests to PyTorch to make its OpenCL support on par with CUDA and take the other 15 engineers to do the same for TensorFlow and AMD would already be a serious contender in the AI space.
  - cma 3y ago
    Does AMD have tensor cores?
- metaphor 3y ago
  > Nah. AMD was already profitable in 2018. This is just big mismanagement. Hindsight bias much? How easily we forget in today's speculative AI bubble that AMD rolled into 2018[1] with 6.1x levered D/E and substantial business uncertainty while the Fed was actively ratcheting interest rates up, and ended the fiscal year still 3.3x levered despite turning operationally profitable[2]. > Had they done it well, just from the current AI hype the stock would probably be worth 50 bucks more. It strikes me as pretty audacious and quite unconscionable to assert "big mismanagement" while simultaneously crying about speculative short-term profit taking opportunities. [1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/2488/000000248818000042/amd-12302017x10k.htm#sCFB8F210052F739CE758BCFAEEF605C6 https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/2488/000000248818000... [2] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/2488/000000248819000011/amd-12292018x10k.htm#s2BDE5806292590FB1AF3FAE5029BA6A4 https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/2488/000000248819000...
  - xuki 3y ago
dotnet00 3y ago
>AMD picked open standards and made investments on open source frameworks and libraries commensurate with their financials, the hope being that the community could help pick up some of the slack. This has been their claim, but more often than not they haven't actually done anything to encourage the community to pick up slack. So many of their graphics tools have been released with promises of some sort of support or of working with the community yet have basically had nothing to help the community help them. Even accepting the unreasonable idea that they can't afford the full-time developers for the various tools and libraries they come up with, they often don't even really work with the community to build and maintain those. One of the bigger cases which contributed to turning me off from AMD GPUs was buying a 5700XT at launch, eager to work on stuff using AMD specific features, only to be led on for over a year about how ROCm support was coming soon, every few months they'd push back the date further until they eventually just stopped responding at all. Trying to develop on their OpenGL drivers was a similar nightmare as soon as you wandered off the old well worn paths to more modern pipeline designs. Another glaring example would be Blender's OpenCL version of Cycles, which was always marred with problems and hacks to work around driver issues. They tried to work with AMD for years before finally just dropping it and going for CUDA (and thus HIP) even though AMD's HIP support, especially on Windows, is still in a very early state.
cameronh90 3y ago
> it might be too late and the proprietary ecosystem has probably won. Compiler ecosystems can and have changed rather quickly. Especially given that most NNs run on a handful of frameworks. Not _that_ many people are writing directly on top of CUDA/cuDNN. Make an equivalent toolchain that runs on cheaper hardware and the migration would be swift. Currently AMD hardware is a bit behind and the toolchain is frustratingly buggy, but it's probably not as big of a moat as NVIDIA are trading on. Especially since NV's toolchain isn't particularly polished either.

parker_mountain 3y ago

For what it's worth, AMD is also incredibly proprietary. The drivers being open source really helps with compatibility and your kernel, but you're still interacting with a massive computer running it's own OS with its own trusted code solution. And that computer also has DMA to your computer. I would consider their open efforts to be "not serious" for anyone but the consumer space - games, desktop users, maybe even professional text editors. If you're using the GPUs for "professional" applications in a one-off scenario, even AMD falls short. I'm honestly not sure what the moral of this story is.

wmf 3y ago
The moral is that PSP FUD has nothing to do with AMD's lack of success in AI.
beebeepka 3y ago
Are they "incredibly proprietary" compared to the competition? Clearly they aren't. Nvidia offers blobs in both consumer and professional markets. Even going to the extent of gimping performance hardware through drivers on more than one occasion. That said, I think AMD isn't really competing with Nvidia. Sure, their R&D budget is smallish but it feels like they're somewhat fine with the current status quo.
- paulmd 3y ago
  > Nvidia offers blobs in both consumer and professional markets So does AMD. https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/firmware/linux-firmware.git/tree/amdgpu https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/firmware/lin... And while they have an open version of the userland, it's also missing features compared to the proprietary one, etc. Besides, in the end it truly hardly matters whether the firmware is loaded at runtime or lives in updateable flash. It's still not "your PC" in the Stallman sense either way, it's been tivoized regardless of whether firmware is injected at runtime or during assembly. You cannot load unsigned firmware on AMD anymore either, firmware signing started with Vega (iirc) and checksums now cover almost all of the card configuration similar to NVIDIA. Firmware is also the only way to get proper HDMI support... which is why AMD still does not support HDMI 2.1 on linux. HDMI Forum will not license the spec openly and implementations must contain blobs or omit those features. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/1417 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/1417
  - beebeepka 3y ago
    Hey, I am not white knighting for AMD here. For all we know, they could only have been pursuing open standards because they've been forced to, as the underdog. Can we really assign blame to them specifically for not fighting the hdmi forum on our behalf?
amunicio 3y ago
> I'm honestly not sure what the moral of this story is. That people will go with what is easier and works? That open source and open standards don't win by default? That it takes a lot of persistence and effort.
delfinom 3y ago
>own OS with its own trusted code solution AMD is working on moving to things like the open source form of AGESA. They plan to start deploying openSIL by 2026.
throwawaymaths 3y ago
The moral of the story is that Nvidia invested a lot more in low level software developers for their GPU solutions and AMD did not, and it shows. "Open source" by itself is not a magic dust you can sprinkle on your projfcts that will make your software work well.
- newjersey 3y ago
  I personally don't have any insider information but just wanted to add what your saying fits with the meta on the gaming community side where commentators are frustrated that nVidia has so much hubris that they think they can just sell essentially last generation level technology without the step up (I think it was 3xxx vs 4xxx or something like that where you'd expect the 4060Ti to be at least as good as 3070Ti) and just trying to make up for it in "software". It probably takes a lot of confidence in your software developers to make this kind of decisions.
- gary_0 3y ago
  A company that goes open source might get the icing for free, but they still have to bake the cake themselves.
- williamDafoe 3y ago
  AMD's focus was always on pure compute power at a good price. And they always beat NVidia at that game. AMD cards always had the highest hash rate per dollar in crypto mining. AMD has 100% of the console market and the fastest iGPUs by 2x over Intel. NVidia decided to use gimmicks to sell their cards including texture compression, lighting tricks, improved antique video encoders, motion smoothing, bad proprietary variable refresh rate, ray tracing, cuda and now machine learning features. Nvidia is fortunate that machine learning has taken off. That is masking AMD winning market share from weak overpriced NVidia 3D products!
  - dotnet00 3y ago
    Calling features which are integral to all modern games and most of which also got adopted by other vendors 'gimmicks' is kind of ridiculous.
m463 3y ago
Isn't this sort of how specialized hardware kind of works? At some point, hardware (necessarily?) evolves to become optimized to do one thing, and then you have to just treat the driver as an API to the hardware. Even "simple" things like keyboards and mice are now small computers that run their own code, moreso more complex devices like sound cards and hard drives. And since graphics card performance seems to be the bottleneck in a lot of computing, it has become super specialized and you just hand off a high-level chunk of data and it does magic in parallel with fast memory and spits it out the hdmi cable.
- AnotherGoodName 3y ago
  For the keyboard/mouse now being small computers that's been true since the 1970s. Almost all keyboards for a period of about 30 years had an 8048 or 8051 CPU. It's how they serialized the keystrokes. From the model M keyboard through to everything up till the USB era.
  - kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
    In the 70s it would be more common to have an MSI part that ran matrix scanning and spit out parallel bus ASCII. UCs were still spendy.
JonChesterfield 3y ago
What OS do you mean? The closest thing I can think of is the embedded CPU that gets called CP in the ISA docs, which mostly schedules work onto the compute units. That has firmware which is probably annoying to disassemble, but it's hard to imagine it doing anything particularly interesting.

alfalfasprout 3y ago

I'm not so sure anymore. The big reason is that now that the ML framework ecosystem has fragmented into different "layers" of the stack, very few people are directly writing CUDA kernels anymore. As a result, with things like XLA now supporting AMD GPUs using RoCM under the hood the feature gap has closed A LOT. Sure, Nvidia still has the performance crown lead with CuDNN, NCCL, and other libraries providing major boosts. But AMD is starting to catch up quite fast.

Dylan16807 3y ago

They've been getting piles of money from Ryzen for 5-6 years now. How long am I supposed to wait? According to the latest ROCm release notes, it supports Navi 21. Well, at least the pro models. It doesn't even mention the 5000 or 7000 cards. My current understanding is that 7000 support is mostly there a few months late and 5000 was abandoned partway done after years of vague promises. At least it might support windows soon. Not my sub-4-year-old GPU, of course, god forbid. But most of the rest of them.

williamDafoe 3y ago
AMD wasn't very profitable until 2018. The company's debt to equity ratio was terrible (due to previous CEO mistakes 2000-2012) until they paid off their huge debts with Ryzen 3 in ~2020. Be patient, grasshopper .. https://www.google.com/search?q=amd%20debt%20to%20equity%20ratio&tbm=isch&tbs=qdr:y&client=ms-android-tmus-us-revc&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CAUQpwVqFwoTCJi0npPFpf8CFQAAAAAdAAAAABAr&biw=980&bih=1786#imgrc=ELcWm_rY1l4rqM https://www.google.com/search?q=amd%20debt%20to%20equity%20r...
BeetleB 3y ago
> They've been getting piles of money from Ryzen for 5-6 years now Hardware is very capital intensive. They've not been making much until much more recent. From 2012 through 2017, almost all years were a net loss. They hit $1B net profit only in 2020. I imagine quite a bit of that money went into keeping/accelerating the pace of Ryzen, and paying off debts. Only now do they have more breathing room for other endeavors. If they diverted a chunk of that change to AI, they probably would have a lower performing Ryzen right now. So no, they did not have piles of money.

cypress66 3y ago

Nah. AMD was already profitable in 2018. This is just big mismanagement. Just having 30 extra good software engineers focusing on AI would have made such a massive difference, because it's so bad that there's a lot of low hanging fruit. As someone who was pretty invested in AMD stock since 2018, it always made me pretty angry how bad they managed the AI side. Had they done it well, just from the current AI hype the stock would probably be worth 50 bucks more.

MontyCarloHall 3y ago
Yup. Have 15 of those software engineers contribute pull requests to PyTorch to make its OpenCL support on par with CUDA and take the other 15 engineers to do the same for TensorFlow and AMD would already be a serious contender in the AI space.
- cma 3y ago
  Does AMD have tensor cores?
metaphor 3y ago
> Nah. AMD was already profitable in 2018. This is just big mismanagement. Hindsight bias much? How easily we forget in today's speculative AI bubble that AMD rolled into 2018[1] with 6.1x levered D/E and substantial business uncertainty while the Fed was actively ratcheting interest rates up, and ended the fiscal year still 3.3x levered despite turning operationally profitable[2]. > Had they done it well, just from the current AI hype the stock would probably be worth 50 bucks more. It strikes me as pretty audacious and quite unconscionable to assert "big mismanagement" while simultaneously crying about speculative short-term profit taking opportunities. [1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/2488/000000248818000042/amd-12302017x10k.htm#sCFB8F210052F739CE758BCFAEEF605C6 https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/2488/000000248818000... [2] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/2488/000000248819000011/amd-12292018x10k.htm#s2BDE5806292590FB1AF3FAE5029BA6A4 https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/2488/000000248819000...
- xuki 3y ago

dotnet00 3y ago

>AMD picked open standards and made investments on open source frameworks and libraries commensurate with their financials, the hope being that the community could help pick up some of the slack. This has been their claim, but more often than not they haven't actually done anything to encourage the community to pick up slack. So many of their graphics tools have been released with promises of some sort of support or of working with the community yet have basically had nothing to help the community help them. Even accepting the unreasonable idea that they can't afford the full-time developers for the various tools and libraries they come up with, they often don't even really work with the community to build and maintain those. One of the bigger cases which contributed to turning me off from AMD GPUs was buying a 5700XT at launch, eager to work on stuff using AMD specific features, only to be led on for over a year about how ROCm support was coming soon, every few months they'd push back the date further until they eventually just stopped responding at all. Trying to develop on their OpenGL drivers was a similar nightmare as soon as you wandered off the old well worn paths to more modern pipeline designs. Another glaring example would be Blender's OpenCL version of Cycles, which was always marred with problems and hacks to work around driver issues. They tried to work with AMD for years before finally just dropping it and going for CUDA (and thus HIP) even though AMD's HIP support, especially on Windows, is still in a very early state.

cameronh90 3y ago

> it might be too late and the proprietary ecosystem has probably won. Compiler ecosystems can and have changed rather quickly. Especially given that most NNs run on a handful of frameworks. Not _that_ many people are writing directly on top of CUDA/cuDNN. Make an equivalent toolchain that runs on cheaper hardware and the migration would be swift. Currently AMD hardware is a bit behind and the toolchain is frustratingly buggy, but it's probably not as big of a moat as NVIDIA are trading on. Especially since NV's toolchain isn't particularly polished either.