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OpenCL is only about a year younger than Cuda. Nobody stopped AMD from investing into it. But where Nvidia spent the last 16 years continuously investing into p

OpenCL is only about a year younger than Cuda. Nobody stopped AMD from investing into it. But where Nvidia spent the last 16 years continuously investing into providing the best performance and development experience, AMD rarely invested into either. Instead they focused on video games, with some projects that helped them profit from the crypto hype but lacked the necessary commitment to achieve much of anything beyond that.

samspenc 3y ago
I think this is the right answer, NVidia struck a gold mine with CUDA. It's powerful enough not only for games, graphics and creatives; but could somehow also be easily retrofitted to work in other scenarios such as data center and AI / ML (language and image processing). AMD and Intel's software solutions seem to be pretty lacking and it looks harder to get a full end-to-end AI/ML stack working efficiently on those.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  They offered what people where looking for, way to program their GPU that wasn't C. C++, Fortran, anything else with a compiler toolchain against PTX, graphical debugging and IDE integration, and a library ecosystem. Khronos was sceptical that Fortran was even meaningful, and SPIR only came up after NVIDIA was approaching the finish line. Intel and AMD only have themselves to blame.
AnthonyMouse 3y ago
16 years ago AMD was on the verge of bankruptcy and was already smaller than Nvidia despite being a company that makes GPUs and CPUs and, at the time, had their own fabs. They had no money to invest in anything, and that didn't really change until Ryzen. You may be able to identify its release date from this graph: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMD/amd/market-cap https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMD/amd/market-cap Now they have to take the money and use it to fix their software. It's pretty obvious why they didn't do that in 2008.
- latchkey 3y ago
  It runs a bit deeper than than money though. If a company doesn't have software as part of their culture, no amount of money is going to turn that around until they make a conscious decision to do so. AI has been the first technology to really kick them in the pants to get off their asses and really invest in that aspect. There are a ton of job openings around AI software now within AMD. I'm seeing new ones get posted almost daily on LI. It'll take time, but they will fix it.

samspenc 3y ago

I think this is the right answer, NVidia struck a gold mine with CUDA. It's powerful enough not only for games, graphics and creatives; but could somehow also be easily retrofitted to work in other scenarios such as data center and AI / ML (language and image processing). AMD and Intel's software solutions seem to be pretty lacking and it looks harder to get a full end-to-end AI/ML stack working efficiently on those.

pjmlp 3y ago
They offered what people where looking for, way to program their GPU that wasn't C. C++, Fortran, anything else with a compiler toolchain against PTX, graphical debugging and IDE integration, and a library ecosystem. Khronos was sceptical that Fortran was even meaningful, and SPIR only came up after NVIDIA was approaching the finish line. Intel and AMD only have themselves to blame.

AnthonyMouse 3y ago

16 years ago AMD was on the verge of bankruptcy and was already smaller than Nvidia despite being a company that makes GPUs and CPUs and, at the time, had their own fabs. They had no money to invest in anything, and that didn't really change until Ryzen. You may be able to identify its release date from this graph: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMD/amd/market-cap https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMD/amd/market-cap Now they have to take the money and use it to fix their software. It's pretty obvious why they didn't do that in 2008.

latchkey 3y ago
It runs a bit deeper than than money though. If a company doesn't have software as part of their culture, no amount of money is going to turn that around until they make a conscious decision to do so. AI has been the first technology to really kick them in the pants to get off their asses and really invest in that aspect. There are a ton of job openings around AI software now within AMD. I'm seeing new ones get posted almost daily on LI. It'll take time, but they will fix it.