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A big reason that Nvidia keeps winning is that AMD doesn’t bother to compete. Competition means giving customers exciting, fast, low cost GPUs. Nvidia, as #1,

A big reason that Nvidia keeps winning is that AMD doesn’t bother to compete. Competition means giving customers exciting, fast, low cost GPUs. Nvidia, as #1, no longer needs to compete and has stopped winning via low cost, high performance GPUs. This opened a giant opportunity for AMD GPUs to give those things to consumers and start winning against Nvidia. But instead AMD has just followed Nvidia into making slow, uncompetitive GPUs at high prices. So in a real way AMD is keeping Nvidia at #1.

didip 3y ago
Hard agree. AMD keep sleeping at the helm and there are no other competitors.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
mochomocha 3y ago
> But instead AMD has just followed Nvidia into making slow, uncompetitive GPUs at high prices. I'm curious: do you use GPUs? It's hard to take this claim seriously. Yes NVIDIA GPUs are expensive, but I don't think we live in the same matrix when you claim that their GPUs are slow and uncompetitive... Unless you have an alternative in mind, in which case I'm all ears.
- selectodude 3y ago
  Yeah I'm not sure how a GPU can be both slow and uncompetitive and also the best GPU available at any price. That would imply that they're extremely competitive. Some people just have an ax to grind and will contort their facts to agree with preexisting thoughts and feelings. I think it's called cognitive dissonance.
  - photonerd 3y ago
    > the best GPU available at any price That’s… very debatable. Don’t get me wrong, they’re definitely competitive at all levels but AMD absolutely is too & very arguably is better in some cases.
    - deelowe 3y ago
      Are we discussing gaming or AI? When it comes to AI solutions, AMD isn't even close.
    - Keyframe 3y ago
      Not really. Market also says otherwise.
      - photonerd 3y ago
        Market says nothing of the sort! AMD is extremely popular still. Plus while cards like the Nvidia RTX 4090 rank very highly they cost 60+% more than the extremely comparable AMD RX 7900 XTX. That’s definitely not “best at any price”.
        Keyframe 3y ago
        When you say AMD is extremely popular still, yet Nvidia has what like 82-84% market share.. what are we actually talking about here in the context of "market talks"?
        tomnipotent 3y ago
        > Nvidia has what like 82-84% market share That's the PC consumer market. Every Xbox and PlayStation shipped in the past decade has had an AMD GPU.
        Keyframe 3y ago
        Yes, and that's a great ArtX doing and legacy tracing roots to SGI and Nintendo64 cooperation which ATI bought (into). However, it's not at all relevant since consumers aren't buying those for AMD GPUs, they are specialized (to consoles), and they're buying it for the brand of consoles themselves not because they have AMD GPU in it. Same parallel could then be drawn for intel's integrated GPUs. We're talking discrete GPU cards where market directly picks and chooses and it chose Nvidia that it's not even a contest anymore it seems. Even HPC area is done for almost.
  - pxc 3y ago
    There are two senses of 'competitive' in play here: the sense in which a market can be 'competitive' or not by featuring alternatives that are comparable and whose successors leapfrog one another in various virtues over time, and the sense in which a product can be 'competitive' within a market by being more or less at least as good as whatever else is out there. NVIDIA is definitely not 'competitive' in the sense of participating in a competitive market, or in the sense of being characterized by furious striving for rapid and continuous improvement. Many of their newer cards are barely 'competitive' with their own cards from a generation or two ago. It's extremely clear to me what people mean when they say that NVIDIA or their GPUs are not meaningfully 'competitive'. I don't think it's that hard to see, actually.
    - tomnipotent 3y ago
      > Many of their newer cards are barely 'competitive' The 4060 is the only card this generation that's a flop, and I wouldn't consider one in four being "many". > I don't think it's that hard to see, actually. It is if you're not looking or trying to be disingenuous. Every generation has introduced new features and had noticeable impacts on the consumer products in its category (games). DLSS alone has been a game-changer, pun intended.
  - andrewstuart 3y ago
    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... “AMD fails again: RX 7600 review” https://youtu.be/Yhoj2kfk-x0 https://youtu.be/Yhoj2kfk-x0
  - stcroixx 3y ago
    By having no competition and no reason to aggressively innovate.
- andrewstuart 3y ago
  This is the newest Nvidia card: The brand new Nvidia RTX 4060 “can be slower than it’s predecessor in some cases”. “ Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 Ti (8GB) review: Disappointing for $400” https://www.pcworld.com/article/1925928/nvidia-geforce-rtx-4060-ti-8gb-review.html https://www.pcworld.com/article/1925928/nvidia-geforce-rtx-4... “Do not buy” “The Nvidia RTX 4060 ti is a waste of sand.” https://youtu.be/Y2b0MWGwK_U https://youtu.be/Y2b0MWGwK_U
  - paulmd 3y ago
    It's kinda amazing how year after year reviewers release the "new products are crap, buy the thing we told you was crap last year" and people don't catch on. The low-end is crawling along due to fixed cost overheads from PHY area that doesn't shrink. 4N is ~3x the price per area as Samsung, and PHY area becomes relatively much larger. The incentive is to cut every cost in PHY area - fewer memory channels to reclaim PHY area and using cache instead, cutting PCIe width to reclaim that PHY area, even cannibalizing the media engine/encoders to claw back that last little bit of space. AMD has actively been engaged in this battle with 6600XT (x8 PCIe, 128b memory bus) and 6500XT (x4 PCIe, 64b memory bus, no encoder) and RDNA2 generally shrinking memory bus and replacing it with cache in this same way (and 6600/6600XT and 5700/5700XT also regressed performance vs their predecessors in some situations just like 4060/4060 Ti). On top of that you have big fixed increases in manufacturing, shipping, etc, and the rest of the BOM is ballooning over time too (forget VRAM spot prices, ask automakers if their BOM is higher or lower than 2019... and it's not a small difference, it's probably 2x!) In this world of organically-low performance increase within the low-end product segment, the impact of clearance sales exceeds the impact of new product generations. And this means we end up in this situation where reviewers do the "the new products suck, buy the ones we told you sucked last year" rubber-chicken routine year after year after year. But if everything is constantly bad, kinda nothing is, really. That's just how this product segment is now. And when you look at things like the 3060 Ti being $275 on clearance, or the 6700XT being $300-320... the market consensus is that the old products are Good Enough. And the new products in fact may be worse in some ways, unless you are willing to step up in price to maintain the same product segment rather than the same price segment. Because TSMC is cranking the prices 25-50% every generation and Samsung was abnormally cheap to begin with, so there is a definite price step happening. Hard to see how people don't understand that the $200-300 product segment is dying in the same way the $100-150 product segment already died. 6 months after launch you could buy a 7850 2GB for $150, or a 7750 for $100. What does $100 buy you in the new/retail GPU market these days? Does anybody actually seriously think the inability to deliver new $100-150 GPUs with enthusiast-tier performance is due to "greed" or "agreeing not to compete" as opposed to market realities? But people will defend it to the death that the privilege of selling them a $200 GPU is some massive profit opportunity that AMD and NVIDIA are just choosing to ignore and sandbag. We are in the end of silicon in some ways. Post-Moore's Law the costs have been spiraling, and now we are to the point where consumers are deciding that no, it's not worth the cost increases. And companies aren't going to cut their throats and run zero margin or sell at a loss either. They will make the products they can make, and if the demand is low enough that it's not economical to continue developing products for that segment, they'll stop and continue in the segments that are still profitable. And that eventually flows through to TSMC and ASML, and node research will slow (hyper-NA is already effectively canceled due to excessive costs) and silicon research becomes incremental and iterative and slower rather than continuing to make even N7->N5->N3 sized progress. Yes, it can get slower. And again, this doesn't mean "NVIDIA is leaving gaming", any more than they left gaming after the $100-150 market died. You can still make something in the 4070-class product very profitably at $600 and slimmer margins at $500, and the market access the gaming products provide is foundational for capturing the innovation happening in the other segments (it's why NVIDIA keeps being showered in money with stuff like AI while AMD is left out of the rain, you don't get to be in the segments like AI or OptiX without doing the work in gaming). But they can’t do the 4070 at $329 like it’s 2014 on a mature 28nm anymore. And the $200 market is as toast as the $100 market before it, if that's your budget then buy a console and benefit from the cost-reductions of integration and reduced modularity and fixed/stable hardware specs. But gamers are “”emotionally unprepared”” for living in a world where there isn’t automatic progress at each price point. People do think of it as the privilege of AMD and nvidia getting to sell you an upgrade… the vendors see it as the “”privilege”” of selling you the lowest-margin product in their lowest-margin product family (all of that 6nm wafer is 10x as profitable for AMD doing literally anything else already). If it sucks oh well, and if you don’t buy it then they’ll stop making it, and it’s not malicious or conspiratorial, it’s just not where the tech is going in that price segment. People want cost-inefficient Lego-style modular product design even in the lowest-end product segments, and then get mad when it’s expensive, and start spewing conspiracies about collusion etc. That’s easier for people emotionally than just admit they’re wrong and being irrational. Also there’s really no segment where any product here regressed. The predecessor to the 4060 isn’t the 3060 ti, a card that was a $400 MSRP / $450 street price even after mining. It’s the 3060, and the 4060 is way faster in all scenarios. The predecessor to the 7600 is the 6600, the 6700XT is a $480 MSRP card. People love to do this “it’s actually 2% slower (at a res nobody plays on those cards) than a card that’s only 20% faster” bit - and again this includes reviewers too. Nothing is actively regressing, it’s just not advancing as fast as people want, but they’re so emotionally immature they have to turn that into “2% slower than a card that’s 20% faster / 50% higher msrp” to express their frustration. It’s not slower than anything other than your expectations, but people emotionally love the framing of it somehow being a regression. After 5 years of these reviews and discourse (everything post Pascal and even Pascal itself tbh) I’m just kinda tired with it. If you apple Moores law era standard then everything is going to suck going forward, period, with rare “this one is ok” for truly great ones. If everything is awful nothing is.
- gxs 3y ago
  He might be comparing to some of their older models that held up really well for a long time vs some of the disposable crap we get now.
- mpreda 3y ago
  I use GPUs for FP64 (64-bit floating point) compute, and the best AMD GPU right now is still Radeon VII, which was released in 2019. Since then AMD split the GPU business into two lines, CDNA and RDNA, the point being to be able to charge much higher prices for the GPUs that provide good compute (i.e. CDNA). The RDNA line is targeted at gamers. The reasoning apparently being "let's be careful that these RDNA GPUs are bad enough so they can't really be used for anything else but games; if the user is into compute, they should pay the big money for CDNA GPUs". This is also reflected into the ROCm situation. ROCm has good support for CDNA GPUs, which is the hardware that is deployed in the huge national-lab GPU projects, where money is not an issue. The problem with that approach? normal people do not have access to CDNA GPUs that cost a multiple of 10000 USD apiece.
  - AstralStorm 3y ago
    Indeed, you do need kind of a loss leader weak compute GPU to get people interested and experimenting with your platform. Cloud does not fulfill that purpose being too expensive, too limited and not secret enough. Normal gaming nVidia GPUs fill that role. You need big guns, you buy a lot of their compute cards next. AMD had decent compute capabiliites in their CDNA line, but they didn't follow through with drivers. The cards were pretty bad to try to use for compute with early ROCm, and just as bad for gaming.
    - arein3 3y ago
      You don't need a loss leader, just make the full drivers open source and I'll pay a premium
- DeathArrow 3y ago
  > I'm curious: do you use GPUs? It's hard to take this claim seriously. Yes NVIDIA GPUs are expensive, but I don't think we live in the same matrix when you claim that their GPUs are slow and uncompetitive... Unless you have an alternative in mind, in which case I'm all ears. I think he meant Nvidia GPUs are more expensive than Nvidia GPUs from previous generations.
sh34r 3y ago
It seems to me that Nvidia has largely abandoned the consumer market in order to chase the seemingly-bottomless demand for AI hype. While AMD is more than happy to stay in their lane, continue making record profits on their same market, and not waste billions trying to catch up on 10 years of CUDA development. By the time they have anything remotely comparable, the AI grift will be over just like crypto. Tech grifts only have a 1-3 year cycle these days.
- jtriangle 3y ago
  Best kept secret in the AI boom really is that you don't need a ton of local horsepower to run a model and do something useful, you only really need the grunt once, to do the training in a reasonable amount of time. Combine that with the stuff that Mythic was working on in texas (before they ran out of burn) and we're looking at a world where, most people won't have a need for heavy GPU compute.
  - sh34r 3y ago
    It’s gonna take another decade before the suits at F500 companies figure that out, though. You wouldn’t believe the wasteful nonsense that’s in production already…
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - narism 3y ago
    Mythic is supposedly back, they raised more money in March 2023.
    - jtriangle 3y ago
      Oh hell yeah, super happy for them. They've got the right idea for edgeAI stuff, I hope they can survive, or, at least sell their IP to someone big and buy a few acres to DGAF on.
- TechnicolorByte 3y ago
chrismarlow9 3y ago
I'm not a pro in this field but I would think with AMD acquiring Xilinx they see a better way to the AI competition through FPGA. I would suspect others are in the same boat. GPU for AI is a nice hack, but still a hack. Make hardware that specifically is for that job.
- tverbeure 3y ago
  How can a notoriously area inefficient technology like FPGAs be hardware that is made specifically for the AI job? And I’m not even touching the fact that FPGAs (which I love to work with!) are a pain to program and optimize for.
  - chrismarlow9 3y ago
    I mean I'm not that well versed on it but a quick Google search kinda points to faang, Tesla, and others investing in FPGA for AI things.
    - tverbeure 3y ago
      Microsoft has historically been the biggest proponent for using FPGAs for AI. It’s not that you can’t use them, and there may be narrow cases where they have a benefit. There are always trade-offs to be made. But that doesn’t make them the best hardware for AI (there’s silicon overhead that will never be used) and it doesn’t change the fact that they’re much harder and slower than bare metal CUDA to optimize for, in a fast moving field. Look at it this way: if you have a fixed DL architecture and a fixed set of network weights, there’s no question that you could come up with an ASIC that only does that, that will be cheaper than an FPGA or GPU, faster, and use lower power too. It will be the perfect inference solution for that specific problem. It would also be obsolete in a few months, before the chip comes back from the fab.
  - scns 3y ago
    Off topic but RME uses FPGAs in their audio interfaces and delivers sub Firewire lantencies over USB2.
- 3y ago
PaulKeeble 3y ago
I was so disappointed with the 7970 and 680 era of cards because the one time AMD launched first they priced a mid size die as if it was a top end card and Nvidia followed suit renaming the x70 card to the 680 as competition. It marked the beginning of the period where cards have got more expensive and renamed over and over. The 580 in pedigree looked a lot more like a Titan card/x90 does today than any x80. An x80 today is a x60 class card of that era in terms of die size, memory bus width and power consumption targets and a host of other core big measures of GPU design. They have both been at it gradually increasing prices to the point where a mid range card of a decade ago now costs 5x as much and twice the price of an entire console. It's got pretty insane this generation with marginal gains and massive price hikes and another set of renaming cards to step the dies down again. Finally no one is buying them but these companies are big enough they will just blame the overall economy anyway.
ThatPlayer 3y ago
I'm not sure that's true when even Intel's low cost GPU offerings are not doing any better. The cheaper AMD's RX7600 is probably a better value than Intel's more expensive A770. Nvidia's newest RTX 4060 is in that price range too, also performs similarly, but will probably have more mindshare.
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  Intel from what I can tell has better hardware than AMD, but they have even worse software than AMD. It's really just Nvidia firmly winning the entire market the good old fashioned way. Those who can compete still can't hold a candle, and the market at large is content to keep buying Nvidia because their stuff is simply That Fucking Good(tm). It's Nvidia's market to lose, and they clearly aren't losing any time soon.
  - ThatPlayer 3y ago
    I'd say AMD still has worse software than Nvidia too, even before GPGPU/CUDA. About a year ago, I swapped a 1080TI with a friend's 5700XT because he was having crashing issues with games. I use it fine now with Linux drivers, so I doubt it was a hardware issue.
    - paulmd 3y ago
      AMD drivers exist in this weird state of tautological pseudo-goodness where they're good as long as you ignore all the times they aren't. And if you point it out, people dig in with the "well I've never had a problem in 15 years now" and "go look at NVIDIA's tech support forum, they have bugs too". NVIDIA has not had a sustained generational instability problem like 5700XT or Vega drivers in the modern era, and they haven't even had a more short-term shitstorm like RDNA3 launch drivers that lingered for nearly as long. And there have been multiple instances of top-5 e-sports titles being flatly broken on AMD drivers (often resolveable by going back to much older drivers) for prolonged periods of time (quarters/years) that simply don't happen on NVIDIA cards. But of course there is a low-level stew of problems on both brands constantly. Power-saving with multimonitor is a great example of one that's been perma-broken for 10 years on both brands now. But there is also a high-level stew of Radeon-specific problems that pretty constantly churns and it gets discarded out of hand because "I've never had a problem" like that means 5700XT didn't exist. And it's people who you absolutely know are aware of the 5700XT issues. Even working from a baseline assumption of intellectual honesty it's a super frustrating discourse overall, and I think in many cases the assumption may be unwarranted.
PedroBatista 3y ago
AMD was almost bankrupt ~5 years ago. Is has been the years of investing and specially the software ( CUDA ) that keeps Nvidia as the "king". Hardware wise AMD it's pretty much up there or winning in a few cases.
- myrryr 3y ago
  Right? It is CUDA, that is why they are winning. AMD has the patents for putting a SSD directly on the card, they could be killing it in the home AI market, but.... they just can't get it together.
  - paulmd 3y ago
    > AMD has the patents for putting a SSD directly on the card, they could be killing it in the home AI market, but.... they just can't get it together. Radeon SSG was just a PCIe switch chip on-card, with the SSD+GPU behind it, so functionally it is the same as having the SSD on the motherboard. I'm not sure if they got patents but either way the problem it solved was not the one people think it solved. It wasn't "using the SSD as memory", and in the way that it did (block storage) any other SSD+GPU can function identically in the same way without needing the SSG tech. Putting the SSD on your mobo performs as high in every way on any GPU (CUDA RDMA Direct have been around for a while, since Fermi/Kepler at least). It was just a convenience thing of getting a SSD mountpoint built into your GPU basically. They even showed up as a HBA in windows and were treated as a striped disk. https://youtu.be/-fEjoJO4lEM?t=62 https://youtu.be/-fEjoJO4lEM?t=62 More recently this idea has re-surfaced with some of the modern GPUs with x8 interfaces (6600XT, 4060 Ti, etc) getting a couple M.2 drives in the other x4x4 via bifurcation, and this functionally performs the same as SSG but without the switch chip (needs hardware support instead). And if there are patents around using a switch chip that may be how the patent is evaded. But combination cards utilizing more than one type of hardware in general is not that novel (network card/ssd combos are another popular one) and I'm not sure AMD patented it or it's defensibly novel against prior art. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/asus-demos-geforce-rtx-4060-ti-with-m2-slots https://www.tomshardware.com/news/asus-demos-geforce-rtx-406...
- gxs 3y ago
est 3y ago
> Competition means giving customers exciting, fast, low cost GPUs. You actually need to do more. The ML community chose nVidia because a decade ago, nVidia donated GPUs to universities for free. People like Hinton hacked CUDA as a poor man's HPC. For example the original AlexNet use 224x224 resolution pictures, to fit the GTX 580 3GB memory.
- woodson 3y ago
  It wasn’t the donations. I bought a GTX 580 back then to train DNNs for speech recognition. There simply were no other reasonable options around.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  And tooling that also allowed them to run their existing Fortran, C++ and whatever else they thought out, instead of plain C.
netheril96 3y ago
AMD's problems with AI lie first in software rather than hardware.
senttoschool 3y ago
>A big reason that Nvidia keeps winning is that AMD doesn’t bother to compete. AMD definitely wants to compete. Why wouldn't they want a piece of a trillion dollar market? The problem is that AMD was almost bankrupt, had poor leadership until Lisa Su, and they were just trying to survive making console chips for Sony and Microsoft until Zen2.
eek2121 3y ago
AMD actually IS competing, just not so much in gamer space (though they are actually competing there as well, just not with top end) The MI 300 and MI 250 are making huge inroads to the point where they are finally pulling folks away from CUDA.
- mpreda 3y ago
  And who has access to MI300 and MI250 GPUs? I would program for them, but I can't ever get one, or anyone I know can. How much does one MI300 cost, BTW? Is there a price published? are they available to buy anywhere?
  - scns 3y ago
    Cray has access, place one and three in the top 500.
signa11 3y ago
> So in a real way AMD is keeping Nvidia at #1. huh :o) what are your thoughts about intel on this ? it was (and still is ?) the market leader in cpu's and decided to push fpga's for machine learning ! in the hindsight, it seems like a serious misstep.
mcv 3y ago
> But instead AMD has just followed Nvidia into making slow, uncompetitive GPUs at high prices. It's true that modern GPUs are ridiculously expensive compared to where they were 10 years ago, but there still is a good sub-$200 GPU available: the RX 6600, from AMD. It's not the fastest, but from what I understand, it gives the most power for your buck of any modern GPU.
bmacho 3y ago
> Nvidia, as #1, no longer needs to compete and has stopped winning via low cost, high performance GPUs. This opened a giant opportunity for AMD GPUs to give those things to consumers and start winning against Nvidia. > But instead AMD has just followed Nvidia into making slow, uncompetitive GPUs at high prices. I am not really sure they could do that. If nvidia cards are cheaper to produce, then for AMD just ordering more cards can end in massive losses short term, and much less profit long term, as customers demand cheaper cards. Nvidia always could lower their prices as the updog, and hurting AMD really bad. But yes, in retrospective, knowing that the demand for GPUs would remain ridiculously high for years, the best move for AMD was ordering and producing much much more cards. As the best move for us customers were jumping into crypto. (Not necessarily the best strategy.)
paulmd 3y ago
> But instead AMD has just followed Nvidia into making slow, uncompetitive GPUs at high prices. This seems like a needlessly conspiratorial and complicated cope to avoid recognizing that the low end is simply suffering from fixed overhead and rising costs. The alternative/null hypothesis is that both companies are responding to the market options that TSMC and BOM costs provide them, and the technology is simply moving slower in some segments. In this null hypothesis, it's not an active conspiracy to screw anyone, and nobody is deliberately "followed anyone into noncompetitiveness", there simply isn't a big market opportunity to sell $150 enthusiast GPUs anymore (7850 HD!) and make a decent profit based on the actual costs of building the product and getting the product through design/validation and manufacturing/shipping cycles. Like, it's kinda facially absurd that gamers think that there's some golden opportunity to make low-margin $150 GPUs that everyone is just choosing to ignore because "they'd rather do AI/because they hate gamers". That's a shitty low-margin product and everyone is choosing to ignore it because it's not profitable, gamers are just kinda operating under this fallacy that $150 is a lot of money for an enthusiast-tier dGPU. And of course gamers will not touch a card with less than 8GB, and will scream a fit with 4060/6600 style 128b buses not being enough width. They don't like any of the compromises that are necessary to get down to this price point, they want a $150 card that's no-compromises quasi-midrange. Shockingly, most companies are not interested in chasing the customer who wants the corvette for $25k. And yes, you can sustainably build a car for $25k, or maybe even a bit less... but it's not gonna be a corvette either. It's gonna be a midrange that you've "cut down" with feature lockout, or it's gonna be the shitbox econo-model that was bad to start with.

didip 3y ago

Hard agree. AMD keep sleeping at the helm and there are no other competitors.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

mochomocha 3y ago

> But instead AMD has just followed Nvidia into making slow, uncompetitive GPUs at high prices. I'm curious: do you use GPUs? It's hard to take this claim seriously. Yes NVIDIA GPUs are expensive, but I don't think we live in the same matrix when you claim that their GPUs are slow and uncompetitive... Unless you have an alternative in mind, in which case I'm all ears.

selectodude 3y ago
Yeah I'm not sure how a GPU can be both slow and uncompetitive and also the best GPU available at any price. That would imply that they're extremely competitive. Some people just have an ax to grind and will contort their facts to agree with preexisting thoughts and feelings. I think it's called cognitive dissonance.
- photonerd 3y ago
  > the best GPU available at any price That’s… very debatable. Don’t get me wrong, they’re definitely competitive at all levels but AMD absolutely is too & very arguably is better in some cases.
  - deelowe 3y ago
    Are we discussing gaming or AI? When it comes to AI solutions, AMD isn't even close.
  - Keyframe 3y ago
    Not really. Market also says otherwise.
    - photonerd 3y ago
      Market says nothing of the sort! AMD is extremely popular still. Plus while cards like the Nvidia RTX 4090 rank very highly they cost 60+% more than the extremely comparable AMD RX 7900 XTX. That’s definitely not “best at any price”.
      - Keyframe 3y ago
        When you say AMD is extremely popular still, yet Nvidia has what like 82-84% market share.. what are we actually talking about here in the context of "market talks"?
        tomnipotent 3y ago
        > Nvidia has what like 82-84% market share That's the PC consumer market. Every Xbox and PlayStation shipped in the past decade has had an AMD GPU.
        Keyframe 3y ago
        Yes, and that's a great ArtX doing and legacy tracing roots to SGI and Nintendo64 cooperation which ATI bought (into). However, it's not at all relevant since consumers aren't buying those for AMD GPUs, they are specialized (to consoles), and they're buying it for the brand of consoles themselves not because they have AMD GPU in it. Same parallel could then be drawn for intel's integrated GPUs. We're talking discrete GPU cards where market directly picks and chooses and it chose Nvidia that it's not even a contest anymore it seems. Even HPC area is done for almost.
- pxc 3y ago
  There are two senses of 'competitive' in play here: the sense in which a market can be 'competitive' or not by featuring alternatives that are comparable and whose successors leapfrog one another in various virtues over time, and the sense in which a product can be 'competitive' within a market by being more or less at least as good as whatever else is out there. NVIDIA is definitely not 'competitive' in the sense of participating in a competitive market, or in the sense of being characterized by furious striving for rapid and continuous improvement. Many of their newer cards are barely 'competitive' with their own cards from a generation or two ago. It's extremely clear to me what people mean when they say that NVIDIA or their GPUs are not meaningfully 'competitive'. I don't think it's that hard to see, actually.
  - tomnipotent 3y ago
    > Many of their newer cards are barely 'competitive' The 4060 is the only card this generation that's a flop, and I wouldn't consider one in four being "many". > I don't think it's that hard to see, actually. It is if you're not looking or trying to be disingenuous. Every generation has introduced new features and had noticeable impacts on the consumer products in its category (games). DLSS alone has been a game-changer, pun intended.
- andrewstuart 3y ago
  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... “AMD fails again: RX 7600 review” https://youtu.be/Yhoj2kfk-x0 https://youtu.be/Yhoj2kfk-x0
- stcroixx 3y ago
  By having no competition and no reason to aggressively innovate.
andrewstuart 3y ago
This is the newest Nvidia card: The brand new Nvidia RTX 4060 “can be slower than it’s predecessor in some cases”. “ Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 Ti (8GB) review: Disappointing for $400” https://www.pcworld.com/article/1925928/nvidia-geforce-rtx-4060-ti-8gb-review.html https://www.pcworld.com/article/1925928/nvidia-geforce-rtx-4... “Do not buy” “The Nvidia RTX 4060 ti is a waste of sand.” https://youtu.be/Y2b0MWGwK_U https://youtu.be/Y2b0MWGwK_U
- paulmd 3y ago
  It's kinda amazing how year after year reviewers release the "new products are crap, buy the thing we told you was crap last year" and people don't catch on. The low-end is crawling along due to fixed cost overheads from PHY area that doesn't shrink. 4N is ~3x the price per area as Samsung, and PHY area becomes relatively much larger. The incentive is to cut every cost in PHY area - fewer memory channels to reclaim PHY area and using cache instead, cutting PCIe width to reclaim that PHY area, even cannibalizing the media engine/encoders to claw back that last little bit of space. AMD has actively been engaged in this battle with 6600XT (x8 PCIe, 128b memory bus) and 6500XT (x4 PCIe, 64b memory bus, no encoder) and RDNA2 generally shrinking memory bus and replacing it with cache in this same way (and 6600/6600XT and 5700/5700XT also regressed performance vs their predecessors in some situations just like 4060/4060 Ti). On top of that you have big fixed increases in manufacturing, shipping, etc, and the rest of the BOM is ballooning over time too (forget VRAM spot prices, ask automakers if their BOM is higher or lower than 2019... and it's not a small difference, it's probably 2x!) In this world of organically-low performance increase within the low-end product segment, the impact of clearance sales exceeds the impact of new product generations. And this means we end up in this situation where reviewers do the "the new products suck, buy the ones we told you sucked last year" rubber-chicken routine year after year after year. But if everything is constantly bad, kinda nothing is, really. That's just how this product segment is now. And when you look at things like the 3060 Ti being $275 on clearance, or the 6700XT being $300-320... the market consensus is that the old products are Good Enough. And the new products in fact may be worse in some ways, unless you are willing to step up in price to maintain the same product segment rather than the same price segment. Because TSMC is cranking the prices 25-50% every generation and Samsung was abnormally cheap to begin with, so there is a definite price step happening. Hard to see how people don't understand that the $200-300 product segment is dying in the same way the $100-150 product segment already died. 6 months after launch you could buy a 7850 2GB for $150, or a 7750 for $100. What does $100 buy you in the new/retail GPU market these days? Does anybody actually seriously think the inability to deliver new $100-150 GPUs with enthusiast-tier performance is due to "greed" or "agreeing not to compete" as opposed to market realities? But people will defend it to the death that the privilege of selling them a $200 GPU is some massive profit opportunity that AMD and NVIDIA are just choosing to ignore and sandbag. We are in the end of silicon in some ways. Post-Moore's Law the costs have been spiraling, and now we are to the point where consumers are deciding that no, it's not worth the cost increases. And companies aren't going to cut their throats and run zero margin or sell at a loss either. They will make the products they can make, and if the demand is low enough that it's not economical to continue developing products for that segment, they'll stop and continue in the segments that are still profitable. And that eventually flows through to TSMC and ASML, and node research will slow (hyper-NA is already effectively canceled due to excessive costs) and silicon research becomes incremental and iterative and slower rather than continuing to make even N7->N5->N3 sized progress. Yes, it can get slower. And again, this doesn't mean "NVIDIA is leaving gaming", any more than they left gaming after the $100-150 market died. You can still make something in the 4070-class product very profitably at $600 and slimmer margins at $500, and the market access the gaming products provide is foundational for capturing the innovation happening in the other segments (it's why NVIDIA keeps being showered in money with stuff like AI while AMD is left out of the rain, you don't get to be in the segments like AI or OptiX without doing the work in gaming). But they can’t do the 4070 at $329 like it’s 2014 on a mature 28nm anymore. And the $200 market is as toast as the $100 market before it, if that's your budget then buy a console and benefit from the cost-reductions of integration and reduced modularity and fixed/stable hardware specs. But gamers are “”emotionally unprepared”” for living in a world where there isn’t automatic progress at each price point. People do think of it as the privilege of AMD and nvidia getting to sell you an upgrade… the vendors see it as the “”privilege”” of selling you the lowest-margin product in their lowest-margin product family (all of that 6nm wafer is 10x as profitable for AMD doing literally anything else already). If it sucks oh well, and if you don’t buy it then they’ll stop making it, and it’s not malicious or conspiratorial, it’s just not where the tech is going in that price segment. People want cost-inefficient Lego-style modular product design even in the lowest-end product segments, and then get mad when it’s expensive, and start spewing conspiracies about collusion etc. That’s easier for people emotionally than just admit they’re wrong and being irrational. Also there’s really no segment where any product here regressed. The predecessor to the 4060 isn’t the 3060 ti, a card that was a $400 MSRP / $450 street price even after mining. It’s the 3060, and the 4060 is way faster in all scenarios. The predecessor to the 7600 is the 6600, the 6700XT is a $480 MSRP card. People love to do this “it’s actually 2% slower (at a res nobody plays on those cards) than a card that’s only 20% faster” bit - and again this includes reviewers too. Nothing is actively regressing, it’s just not advancing as fast as people want, but they’re so emotionally immature they have to turn that into “2% slower than a card that’s 20% faster / 50% higher msrp” to express their frustration. It’s not slower than anything other than your expectations, but people emotionally love the framing of it somehow being a regression. After 5 years of these reviews and discourse (everything post Pascal and even Pascal itself tbh) I’m just kinda tired with it. If you apple Moores law era standard then everything is going to suck going forward, period, with rare “this one is ok” for truly great ones. If everything is awful nothing is.
gxs 3y ago
He might be comparing to some of their older models that held up really well for a long time vs some of the disposable crap we get now.
mpreda 3y ago
I use GPUs for FP64 (64-bit floating point) compute, and the best AMD GPU right now is still Radeon VII, which was released in 2019. Since then AMD split the GPU business into two lines, CDNA and RDNA, the point being to be able to charge much higher prices for the GPUs that provide good compute (i.e. CDNA). The RDNA line is targeted at gamers. The reasoning apparently being "let's be careful that these RDNA GPUs are bad enough so they can't really be used for anything else but games; if the user is into compute, they should pay the big money for CDNA GPUs". This is also reflected into the ROCm situation. ROCm has good support for CDNA GPUs, which is the hardware that is deployed in the huge national-lab GPU projects, where money is not an issue. The problem with that approach? normal people do not have access to CDNA GPUs that cost a multiple of 10000 USD apiece.
- AstralStorm 3y ago
  Indeed, you do need kind of a loss leader weak compute GPU to get people interested and experimenting with your platform. Cloud does not fulfill that purpose being too expensive, too limited and not secret enough. Normal gaming nVidia GPUs fill that role. You need big guns, you buy a lot of their compute cards next. AMD had decent compute capabiliites in their CDNA line, but they didn't follow through with drivers. The cards were pretty bad to try to use for compute with early ROCm, and just as bad for gaming.
  - arein3 3y ago
    You don't need a loss leader, just make the full drivers open source and I'll pay a premium
DeathArrow 3y ago
> I'm curious: do you use GPUs? It's hard to take this claim seriously. Yes NVIDIA GPUs are expensive, but I don't think we live in the same matrix when you claim that their GPUs are slow and uncompetitive... Unless you have an alternative in mind, in which case I'm all ears. I think he meant Nvidia GPUs are more expensive than Nvidia GPUs from previous generations.

sh34r 3y ago

It seems to me that Nvidia has largely abandoned the consumer market in order to chase the seemingly-bottomless demand for AI hype. While AMD is more than happy to stay in their lane, continue making record profits on their same market, and not waste billions trying to catch up on 10 years of CUDA development. By the time they have anything remotely comparable, the AI grift will be over just like crypto. Tech grifts only have a 1-3 year cycle these days.

jtriangle 3y ago
Best kept secret in the AI boom really is that you don't need a ton of local horsepower to run a model and do something useful, you only really need the grunt once, to do the training in a reasonable amount of time. Combine that with the stuff that Mythic was working on in texas (before they ran out of burn) and we're looking at a world where, most people won't have a need for heavy GPU compute.
- sh34r 3y ago
  It’s gonna take another decade before the suits at F500 companies figure that out, though. You wouldn’t believe the wasteful nonsense that’s in production already…
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- narism 3y ago
  Mythic is supposedly back, they raised more money in March 2023.
  - jtriangle 3y ago
    Oh hell yeah, super happy for them. They've got the right idea for edgeAI stuff, I hope they can survive, or, at least sell their IP to someone big and buy a few acres to DGAF on.
TechnicolorByte 3y ago

chrismarlow9 3y ago

I'm not a pro in this field but I would think with AMD acquiring Xilinx they see a better way to the AI competition through FPGA. I would suspect others are in the same boat. GPU for AI is a nice hack, but still a hack. Make hardware that specifically is for that job.

tverbeure 3y ago
How can a notoriously area inefficient technology like FPGAs be hardware that is made specifically for the AI job? And I’m not even touching the fact that FPGAs (which I love to work with!) are a pain to program and optimize for.
- chrismarlow9 3y ago
  I mean I'm not that well versed on it but a quick Google search kinda points to faang, Tesla, and others investing in FPGA for AI things.
  - tverbeure 3y ago
    Microsoft has historically been the biggest proponent for using FPGAs for AI. It’s not that you can’t use them, and there may be narrow cases where they have a benefit. There are always trade-offs to be made. But that doesn’t make them the best hardware for AI (there’s silicon overhead that will never be used) and it doesn’t change the fact that they’re much harder and slower than bare metal CUDA to optimize for, in a fast moving field. Look at it this way: if you have a fixed DL architecture and a fixed set of network weights, there’s no question that you could come up with an ASIC that only does that, that will be cheaper than an FPGA or GPU, faster, and use lower power too. It will be the perfect inference solution for that specific problem. It would also be obsolete in a few months, before the chip comes back from the fab.
- scns 3y ago
  Off topic but RME uses FPGAs in their audio interfaces and delivers sub Firewire lantencies over USB2.
3y ago

PaulKeeble 3y ago

I was so disappointed with the 7970 and 680 era of cards because the one time AMD launched first they priced a mid size die as if it was a top end card and Nvidia followed suit renaming the x70 card to the 680 as competition. It marked the beginning of the period where cards have got more expensive and renamed over and over. The 580 in pedigree looked a lot more like a Titan card/x90 does today than any x80. An x80 today is a x60 class card of that era in terms of die size, memory bus width and power consumption targets and a host of other core big measures of GPU design. They have both been at it gradually increasing prices to the point where a mid range card of a decade ago now costs 5x as much and twice the price of an entire console. It's got pretty insane this generation with marginal gains and massive price hikes and another set of renaming cards to step the dies down again. Finally no one is buying them but these companies are big enough they will just blame the overall economy anyway.

ThatPlayer 3y ago

I'm not sure that's true when even Intel's low cost GPU offerings are not doing any better. The cheaper AMD's RX7600 is probably a better value than Intel's more expensive A770. Nvidia's newest RTX 4060 is in that price range too, also performs similarly, but will probably have more mindshare.

Dalewyn 3y ago
Intel from what I can tell has better hardware than AMD, but they have even worse software than AMD. It's really just Nvidia firmly winning the entire market the good old fashioned way. Those who can compete still can't hold a candle, and the market at large is content to keep buying Nvidia because their stuff is simply That Fucking Good(tm). It's Nvidia's market to lose, and they clearly aren't losing any time soon.
- ThatPlayer 3y ago
  I'd say AMD still has worse software than Nvidia too, even before GPGPU/CUDA. About a year ago, I swapped a 1080TI with a friend's 5700XT because he was having crashing issues with games. I use it fine now with Linux drivers, so I doubt it was a hardware issue.
  - paulmd 3y ago
    AMD drivers exist in this weird state of tautological pseudo-goodness where they're good as long as you ignore all the times they aren't. And if you point it out, people dig in with the "well I've never had a problem in 15 years now" and "go look at NVIDIA's tech support forum, they have bugs too". NVIDIA has not had a sustained generational instability problem like 5700XT or Vega drivers in the modern era, and they haven't even had a more short-term shitstorm like RDNA3 launch drivers that lingered for nearly as long. And there have been multiple instances of top-5 e-sports titles being flatly broken on AMD drivers (often resolveable by going back to much older drivers) for prolonged periods of time (quarters/years) that simply don't happen on NVIDIA cards. But of course there is a low-level stew of problems on both brands constantly. Power-saving with multimonitor is a great example of one that's been perma-broken for 10 years on both brands now. But there is also a high-level stew of Radeon-specific problems that pretty constantly churns and it gets discarded out of hand because "I've never had a problem" like that means 5700XT didn't exist. And it's people who you absolutely know are aware of the 5700XT issues. Even working from a baseline assumption of intellectual honesty it's a super frustrating discourse overall, and I think in many cases the assumption may be unwarranted.

PedroBatista 3y ago

AMD was almost bankrupt ~5 years ago. Is has been the years of investing and specially the software ( CUDA ) that keeps Nvidia as the "king". Hardware wise AMD it's pretty much up there or winning in a few cases.

myrryr 3y ago
Right? It is CUDA, that is why they are winning. AMD has the patents for putting a SSD directly on the card, they could be killing it in the home AI market, but.... they just can't get it together.
- paulmd 3y ago
  > AMD has the patents for putting a SSD directly on the card, they could be killing it in the home AI market, but.... they just can't get it together. Radeon SSG was just a PCIe switch chip on-card, with the SSD+GPU behind it, so functionally it is the same as having the SSD on the motherboard. I'm not sure if they got patents but either way the problem it solved was not the one people think it solved. It wasn't "using the SSD as memory", and in the way that it did (block storage) any other SSD+GPU can function identically in the same way without needing the SSG tech. Putting the SSD on your mobo performs as high in every way on any GPU (CUDA RDMA Direct have been around for a while, since Fermi/Kepler at least). It was just a convenience thing of getting a SSD mountpoint built into your GPU basically. They even showed up as a HBA in windows and were treated as a striped disk. https://youtu.be/-fEjoJO4lEM?t=62 https://youtu.be/-fEjoJO4lEM?t=62 More recently this idea has re-surfaced with some of the modern GPUs with x8 interfaces (6600XT, 4060 Ti, etc) getting a couple M.2 drives in the other x4x4 via bifurcation, and this functionally performs the same as SSG but without the switch chip (needs hardware support instead). And if there are patents around using a switch chip that may be how the patent is evaded. But combination cards utilizing more than one type of hardware in general is not that novel (network card/ssd combos are another popular one) and I'm not sure AMD patented it or it's defensibly novel against prior art. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/asus-demos-geforce-rtx-4060-ti-with-m2-slots https://www.tomshardware.com/news/asus-demos-geforce-rtx-406...
gxs 3y ago

est 3y ago

> Competition means giving customers exciting, fast, low cost GPUs. You actually need to do more. The ML community chose nVidia because a decade ago, nVidia donated GPUs to universities for free. People like Hinton hacked CUDA as a poor man's HPC. For example the original AlexNet use 224x224 resolution pictures, to fit the GTX 580 3GB memory.

woodson 3y ago
It wasn’t the donations. I bought a GTX 580 back then to train DNNs for speech recognition. There simply were no other reasonable options around.
pjmlp 3y ago
And tooling that also allowed them to run their existing Fortran, C++ and whatever else they thought out, instead of plain C.

netheril96 3y ago

AMD's problems with AI lie first in software rather than hardware.

senttoschool 3y ago

>A big reason that Nvidia keeps winning is that AMD doesn’t bother to compete. AMD definitely wants to compete. Why wouldn't they want a piece of a trillion dollar market? The problem is that AMD was almost bankrupt, had poor leadership until Lisa Su, and they were just trying to survive making console chips for Sony and Microsoft until Zen2.

eek2121 3y ago

AMD actually IS competing, just not so much in gamer space (though they are actually competing there as well, just not with top end) The MI 300 and MI 250 are making huge inroads to the point where they are finally pulling folks away from CUDA.

mpreda 3y ago
And who has access to MI300 and MI250 GPUs? I would program for them, but I can't ever get one, or anyone I know can. How much does one MI300 cost, BTW? Is there a price published? are they available to buy anywhere?
- scns 3y ago
  Cray has access, place one and three in the top 500.

signa11 3y ago

> So in a real way AMD is keeping Nvidia at #1. huh :o) what are your thoughts about intel on this ? it was (and still is ?) the market leader in cpu's and decided to push fpga's for machine learning ! in the hindsight, it seems like a serious misstep.

mcv 3y ago

> But instead AMD has just followed Nvidia into making slow, uncompetitive GPUs at high prices. It's true that modern GPUs are ridiculously expensive compared to where they were 10 years ago, but there still is a good sub-$200 GPU available: the RX 6600, from AMD. It's not the fastest, but from what I understand, it gives the most power for your buck of any modern GPU.

bmacho 3y ago

> Nvidia, as #1, no longer needs to compete and has stopped winning via low cost, high performance GPUs. This opened a giant opportunity for AMD GPUs to give those things to consumers and start winning against Nvidia. > But instead AMD has just followed Nvidia into making slow, uncompetitive GPUs at high prices. I am not really sure they could do that. If nvidia cards are cheaper to produce, then for AMD just ordering more cards can end in massive losses short term, and much less profit long term, as customers demand cheaper cards. Nvidia always could lower their prices as the updog, and hurting AMD really bad. But yes, in retrospective, knowing that the demand for GPUs would remain ridiculously high for years, the best move for AMD was ordering and producing much much more cards. As the best move for us customers were jumping into crypto. (Not necessarily the best strategy.)

paulmd 3y ago

> But instead AMD has just followed Nvidia into making slow, uncompetitive GPUs at high prices. This seems like a needlessly conspiratorial and complicated cope to avoid recognizing that the low end is simply suffering from fixed overhead and rising costs. The alternative/null hypothesis is that both companies are responding to the market options that TSMC and BOM costs provide them, and the technology is simply moving slower in some segments. In this null hypothesis, it's not an active conspiracy to screw anyone, and nobody is deliberately "followed anyone into noncompetitiveness", there simply isn't a big market opportunity to sell $150 enthusiast GPUs anymore (7850 HD!) and make a decent profit based on the actual costs of building the product and getting the product through design/validation and manufacturing/shipping cycles. Like, it's kinda facially absurd that gamers think that there's some golden opportunity to make low-margin $150 GPUs that everyone is just choosing to ignore because "they'd rather do AI/because they hate gamers". That's a shitty low-margin product and everyone is choosing to ignore it because it's not profitable, gamers are just kinda operating under this fallacy that $150 is a lot of money for an enthusiast-tier dGPU. And of course gamers will not touch a card with less than 8GB, and will scream a fit with 4060/6600 style 128b buses not being enough width. They don't like any of the compromises that are necessary to get down to this price point, they want a $150 card that's no-compromises quasi-midrange. Shockingly, most companies are not interested in chasing the customer who wants the corvette for $25k. And yes, you can sustainably build a car for $25k, or maybe even a bit less... but it's not gonna be a corvette either. It's gonna be a midrange that you've "cut down" with feature lockout, or it's gonna be the shitbox econo-model that was bad to start with.