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Intel never had a software moat. AMD has a terrible reputation for software that will be hard to shake.

AnthonyMouse 3y ago
Reputation is basically meaningless here. If they fix the software, people will figure that out in short order. They just have to actually do it.
- incrudible 3y ago
  They are not fixing the software though, and they never do. You have this problem with every new generation, it launches broken and never gets fixed by the time it is obsolete. If you told me they fixed it, I would not even believe you.
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    It doesn't matter if you believe the first person who figures it out. Ten other people will try it and then there will be ten people saying they fixed it and a hundred people will try it. At some point you either believe everyone who has tried it or you lose business because your competitors have figured it out and you haven't.
    - incrudible 3y ago
      Ten people saying “it works now” is not going to lead to ten times that many risking their time and money on AMD. “Works for me” is a meme for a reason.
      - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
        The number of people who believe you is the average probability that someone believes you times number of people you tell. In the bronze age this was really bad because you had to travel on horseback and contacting people in the same industry in other cities was quite slow and burdensome. Now we have the internet and communicating with someone on the other side of the world takes 200ms, so the speed at which new information spreads is fast. Meanwhile those people then know each other, so as soon as someone credible claims it works, several other credible believe them, try it themselves, and say the same thing. It doesn't really matter if you think it's 10 or 100 or 1.2, it's exponential spread at the speed of the internet.
- cesarb 3y ago
  > Reputation is basically meaningless here. If they fix the software, people will figure that out in short order. What matters is not just "the software is working", but also "the software will keep working" (for both new releases and new hardware). Reputation is meaningful for that.
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    That's not usually a problem for software, especially this kind of software. New drivers and libraries for existing hardware are typically bug fixes because otherwise people wouldn't install them instead of using the existing code. The code for new hardware is generally based on the existing code, so if the existing code is good then it's likely to remain that way. Also, if the new hardware isn't any good then you just don't buy it. This is why anyone making long-term investments in hardware-related software is wise to write it in a vendor-agnostic way -- even if the software continues to be good you may have other reasons to want to switch hardware in the next generation.
    - nabla9 3y ago
      I don't believe this is true competitive numeric software stack, like AI applications are. 1. Code must be hand optimized, refactored for each architecture while the API stays the same. 2. New APIs, algorithms must be backported and optimized for older hardware. That's insane amount of testing and performance tuning.
      - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
        So there are two things you might want here. One is, can I just buy this thing and run the existing somebody else's code on it and it will work and be faster than the previous generation? If it isn't, you just don't buy the new hardware until that changes. The other is, you're going to buy a thousand of them or you're making software for the general public to use and you want to optimize it for each specific generation. But in that case you're redoing the work for each generation regardless and you don't have to be concerned about your current efforts carrying forward because you already know that they won't.
- latchkey 3y ago
  They are working hard on it: https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-ROCm-6.0.2-MI300 https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-ROCm-6.0.2-MI300

Reputation is basically meaningless here. If they fix the software, people will figure that out in short order. They just have to actually do it.

incrudible 3y ago
They are not fixing the software though, and they never do. You have this problem with every new generation, it launches broken and never gets fixed by the time it is obsolete. If you told me they fixed it, I would not even believe you.
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  It doesn't matter if you believe the first person who figures it out. Ten other people will try it and then there will be ten people saying they fixed it and a hundred people will try it. At some point you either believe everyone who has tried it or you lose business because your competitors have figured it out and you haven't.
  - incrudible 3y ago
    Ten people saying “it works now” is not going to lead to ten times that many risking their time and money on AMD. “Works for me” is a meme for a reason.
    - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
      The number of people who believe you is the average probability that someone believes you times number of people you tell. In the bronze age this was really bad because you had to travel on horseback and contacting people in the same industry in other cities was quite slow and burdensome. Now we have the internet and communicating with someone on the other side of the world takes 200ms, so the speed at which new information spreads is fast. Meanwhile those people then know each other, so as soon as someone credible claims it works, several other credible believe them, try it themselves, and say the same thing. It doesn't really matter if you think it's 10 or 100 or 1.2, it's exponential spread at the speed of the internet.
cesarb 3y ago
> Reputation is basically meaningless here. If they fix the software, people will figure that out in short order. What matters is not just "the software is working", but also "the software will keep working" (for both new releases and new hardware). Reputation is meaningful for that.
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  That's not usually a problem for software, especially this kind of software. New drivers and libraries for existing hardware are typically bug fixes because otherwise people wouldn't install them instead of using the existing code. The code for new hardware is generally based on the existing code, so if the existing code is good then it's likely to remain that way. Also, if the new hardware isn't any good then you just don't buy it. This is why anyone making long-term investments in hardware-related software is wise to write it in a vendor-agnostic way -- even if the software continues to be good you may have other reasons to want to switch hardware in the next generation.
  - nabla9 3y ago
    I don't believe this is true competitive numeric software stack, like AI applications are. 1. Code must be hand optimized, refactored for each architecture while the API stays the same. 2. New APIs, algorithms must be backported and optimized for older hardware. That's insane amount of testing and performance tuning.
    - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
      So there are two things you might want here. One is, can I just buy this thing and run the existing somebody else's code on it and it will work and be faster than the previous generation? If it isn't, you just don't buy the new hardware until that changes. The other is, you're going to buy a thousand of them or you're making software for the general public to use and you want to optimize it for each specific generation. But in that case you're redoing the work for each generation regardless and you don't have to be concerned about your current efforts carrying forward because you already know that they won't.
latchkey 3y ago
They are working hard on it: https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-ROCm-6.0.2-MI300 https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-ROCm-6.0.2-MI300