11 ms·

With Nvidia controlling 90%+ of the market, this is not a viable option. They'd better lean hard into CUDA support if they want to be relevant.

cduzz 3y ago
A bit of story telling here: IBM and Microsoft made OS/2. The first version worked on 286s and was stable but useless. The second version worked only on 386s and was quite good, and even had wonderful windows 3.x compatibility. "Better windows than windows!" At that point Microsoft wanted out of the deal and they wanted to make their newer version of windows, NT, which they did. IBM now had a competitor to "new" windows and a very compatible version of "old" windows. Microsoft killed OS2 by a variety of ways (including just letting IBM be IBM) but also by making it very difficult for last month's version of OS/2 to run next month's bunch of Windows programs. To bring this back to the point -- IBM vs Microsoft is akin to AMD vs Nvidia -- where nvidia has the standard that AMD is implementing, and so no matter what if you play in the backward compatibility realm you're always going to be playing catch-up and likely always in a position where winning is exceedingly hard. As WOPR once said "interesting game; the only way to win is to not play."
- panick21_ 3y ago
  IBM also made a whole bunch of strategic mistakes beyond that. Most importantly their hardware division didn't give a flying f about OS/2. Even when they had a 'better Windows' they did not actually use it themselves and didn't push it to other vendors. Windows NT wasn't really relevant in that competition for much longer, only XP was finally for end consumers. > where nvidia has the standard that AMD is implementing, and so no matter what if you play in the backward compatibility realm you're always going to be playing catch-up That's not true. If AMD starts adding their own features and have their own advantages, that can flip. It only takes a single generation of hardware, or a single feature for things to flip. Look at Linux and Unix. Its started out with Linux implementing Unix, and now the Unix are trying to add compatibility with with Linux. Is SGI still the driving force behind OpenGL/Vulcan? Did you think it was a bad idea for other companies to use OpenGL? AMD was successful against Intel with x86_64. There are lots of example of the company making something popular, not being able to take full advantage of it in the long run.
  - chuckadams 3y ago
    Slapping a price tag of over $300 on OS/2 didn’t do IBM any favors either.
    - BizarroLand 3y ago
      That's what happens when your primary business model is selling to the military. They had to pay what IBM charged them (within a small bit of reason) and it was incredibly difficult for them to pivot away from any path they chose in the 80's once they had chosen it. However, that same logic doesn't apply to consumers, and since they continued to fail to learn that lesson now IBM doesn't even target the consumer market given that they never learned how to be competitive and could only ever effectively function when they had a monopoly or at least a vendor lock-in. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acquisition_of_the_IBM_PC_business_by_Lenovo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acquisition_of_the_IBM_PC_busi...
- incrudible 3y ago
  Windows before NT was crap, so users had an incentive to upgrade. If there had existed a Windows 7 alternative that was near fully compatible and FOSS, I would wager Microsoft would have lost to it with Windows 8 and even 10. The only reason to update for most people was Microsoft dropping support. For CUDA, it is not just AMD who would need to catch up. Developers also are not necessarily going to target the latest feature set immediately, especially if it only benefits (or requires) new hardware. I accept the final statement, but that also means AMD for compute is gonna be dead like OS/2. Their stack just will not reach critical mass.
  - BizarroLand 3y ago
    Todays linux OS's would have competed incredibly strongly against Vista and probably would have gone blow for blow against 7. Proton, Wine, and all of the compatibility fixes and drive improvements that the community has made in the last 16 years has been amazing, and every day is another day where you can say that it has never been easier to switch away from Windows. However, Microsoft has definitely been drinking the IBM koolaid a little to long and has lost the mandate of heaven. I think in the next 7-10 years we will reach a point where there is nothing Windows can do that linux cannot do better and easier without spying on you, and we may be 3-5 years from a "killer app" that is specifically built to be incompatible with Windows just as a big FU to them, possibly in the VR world, possibly in AR, and once that happens maybe, maybe, maybe it will finally actually be the year of the linux desktop.
    - paulmd 3y ago
      > However, Microsoft has definitely been drinking the IBM koolaid a little to long and has lost the mandate of heaven. I think in the next 7-10 years we will reach a point where there is nothing Windows can do that linux cannot do better and easier without spying on you that's a fascinating statement with the clear ascendancy of neural-assisted algorithms etc. Things like DLSS are the future - small models that just quietly optimize some part of a workload that was commonly considered impossible to the extent nobody even thinks about it anymore. my prediction is that in 10 years we are looking at the rise of tag+collection based filesystems and operating system paradigms. all of us generate a huge amount of "digital garbage" constantly, and you either sort it out into the important stuff, keep temporarily, and toss, or you accumulate a giant digital garbage pile. AI systems are gonna automate that process, it's gonna start on traditional tree-based systems but eventually you don't need the tree at all, AI is what's going to make that pivot to true tag/collection systems possible. Tags mostly haven't worked because of a bunch of individual issues which are pretty much solved by AI. Tags aren't specific enough: well, AI can give you good guesses at relevance. Tagging files and maintaining collections is a pain: well, the AI can generate tags and assign collections for you. Tags really require an ontology for "fuzzy" matching (search for "food" should return the tag "hot dog") - well, LLMs understand ontologies fine. Etc etc. And if you do it right, you can basically have the AI generate "inbox/outbox" for you, deduplicate files and handle versioning, etc, all relatively seamlessly. microsoft and macos are both clearly racing for this with the "AI os" concept. It's not just better relevance searches etc. And the "generate me a whole paragraph before you even know what I'm trying to type" stuff is not how it's going to work either. That stuff is like specular highlights in video games around 2007 or whatever - once you had the tool, for a few years everything was w e t until developers learned some restraint with it. But there are very very good applications that are going to come out in the 10 year window that are going to reduce operator cognitive load by a lot - that is the "AI OS" concept. What would the OS look like if you truly had the "computer is my secretary" idea? Not just dictating memorandums, but assistance in keeping your life in order and keeping you on-task. I simply cannot see linux being able to keep up with this change, in the same way the kernel can't just switch to rust - at some point you are too calcified to ever do the big-bang rewrite if there is not a BDFL telling you that it's got to happen. the downside of being "the bazaar" is that you are standards-driven and have to deal with corralling a million whiny nerds constantly complaining about "spying on me just like microsoft" and continuing to push in their own other directions (sysvinit/upstart/systemd factions, etc) and whatever else, on top of all the other technical issues of doing a big-bang rewrite. linux is too calcified to ever pivot away from being a tree-based OS and it's going to be another 2-3 decades before they catch up with "proper support for new file-organization paradigms" etc even in the smaller sense. that's really just the tip of the iceberg on the things AI is going to change, and linux is probably going to be left out of most of those commercial applications despite being where the research is done. It's just too much of a mess and too many nerdlingers pushing back to ever get anything done. Unix will be represented in this new paradigm but not Linux - the commercial operators who have the centralization and fortitude to build a cathedral will get there much quicker, and that looks like MacOS or Solaris not linux. Or at least, unless I see some big announcement from KDE or Gnome or Canonical/Red Hat about a big AI-OS rewrite... I assume that's pretty much where the center of gravity is going to stay for linux.
- foobiekr 3y ago
  IBM was also incompetent and the os/2 team in Boca was had some exceptional engineers but was packed witg mostly mediocre-to-bad ones, which is why so many things in OS/2 were bad and why IBM got upset for Microsoft contributing negative work to the project because their lines of code contribution was negative (they were rewriting a lot of inefficient bloated IBM code). A lot went wrong with os/2. For CUDA, I think a better analogy is vhs. The standard, in the effective not open sense, is what it is. AMD sucks at software and views it as an expense rather than an advantage.
  - AYBABTME 3y ago
    You would think that by now AMD realizes that poor software is what left them behind in the dust, and would have changed that mindset.
    - hyperman1 3y ago
      Most businesses understand the pain points of their suppliers very well, as they feel that pain and gave themselves organized around it. They have a hard time to understand the pain points of their consumers, as they don't feel that pain, look trough their own organisation-coloured glases, and can't see the real pain points from the whiney-customer ones. AMD probably thinks software ecosystems are the easy part, ready to take it on whenever they feel like it and throw a token amount at it. They've built a great engine, see the carossery as beneath them, and don't understand why the lazy customer wants them to build the rest of the car too.
- neerajsi 3y ago
  I'm not in the gpu programming realm, so this observation might be inaccurate: I think the case of cuda vs an open standard is different from os2 vs Windows because the customers of cuda are programmers with access to source code while the customers of os2 were end users trying to run apps written by others. If your shrink-wrapped software didn't run on os2, you'd have no choice but to go buy Windows. Otoh if your ai model doesn't run on an AMD device and the issue is something minor, you can edit the shader code.

cduzz 3y ago

A bit of story telling here: IBM and Microsoft made OS/2. The first version worked on 286s and was stable but useless. The second version worked only on 386s and was quite good, and even had wonderful windows 3.x compatibility. "Better windows than windows!" At that point Microsoft wanted out of the deal and they wanted to make their newer version of windows, NT, which they did. IBM now had a competitor to "new" windows and a very compatible version of "old" windows. Microsoft killed OS2 by a variety of ways (including just letting IBM be IBM) but also by making it very difficult for last month's version of OS/2 to run next month's bunch of Windows programs. To bring this back to the point -- IBM vs Microsoft is akin to AMD vs Nvidia -- where nvidia has the standard that AMD is implementing, and so no matter what if you play in the backward compatibility realm you're always going to be playing catch-up and likely always in a position where winning is exceedingly hard. As WOPR once said "interesting game; the only way to win is to not play."

panick21_ 3y ago
IBM also made a whole bunch of strategic mistakes beyond that. Most importantly their hardware division didn't give a flying f about OS/2. Even when they had a 'better Windows' they did not actually use it themselves and didn't push it to other vendors. Windows NT wasn't really relevant in that competition for much longer, only XP was finally for end consumers. > where nvidia has the standard that AMD is implementing, and so no matter what if you play in the backward compatibility realm you're always going to be playing catch-up That's not true. If AMD starts adding their own features and have their own advantages, that can flip. It only takes a single generation of hardware, or a single feature for things to flip. Look at Linux and Unix. Its started out with Linux implementing Unix, and now the Unix are trying to add compatibility with with Linux. Is SGI still the driving force behind OpenGL/Vulcan? Did you think it was a bad idea for other companies to use OpenGL? AMD was successful against Intel with x86_64. There are lots of example of the company making something popular, not being able to take full advantage of it in the long run.
- chuckadams 3y ago
  Slapping a price tag of over $300 on OS/2 didn’t do IBM any favors either.
  - BizarroLand 3y ago
    That's what happens when your primary business model is selling to the military. They had to pay what IBM charged them (within a small bit of reason) and it was incredibly difficult for them to pivot away from any path they chose in the 80's once they had chosen it. However, that same logic doesn't apply to consumers, and since they continued to fail to learn that lesson now IBM doesn't even target the consumer market given that they never learned how to be competitive and could only ever effectively function when they had a monopoly or at least a vendor lock-in. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acquisition_of_the_IBM_PC_business_by_Lenovo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acquisition_of_the_IBM_PC_busi...
incrudible 3y ago
Windows before NT was crap, so users had an incentive to upgrade. If there had existed a Windows 7 alternative that was near fully compatible and FOSS, I would wager Microsoft would have lost to it with Windows 8 and even 10. The only reason to update for most people was Microsoft dropping support. For CUDA, it is not just AMD who would need to catch up. Developers also are not necessarily going to target the latest feature set immediately, especially if it only benefits (or requires) new hardware. I accept the final statement, but that also means AMD for compute is gonna be dead like OS/2. Their stack just will not reach critical mass.
- BizarroLand 3y ago
  Todays linux OS's would have competed incredibly strongly against Vista and probably would have gone blow for blow against 7. Proton, Wine, and all of the compatibility fixes and drive improvements that the community has made in the last 16 years has been amazing, and every day is another day where you can say that it has never been easier to switch away from Windows. However, Microsoft has definitely been drinking the IBM koolaid a little to long and has lost the mandate of heaven. I think in the next 7-10 years we will reach a point where there is nothing Windows can do that linux cannot do better and easier without spying on you, and we may be 3-5 years from a "killer app" that is specifically built to be incompatible with Windows just as a big FU to them, possibly in the VR world, possibly in AR, and once that happens maybe, maybe, maybe it will finally actually be the year of the linux desktop.
  - paulmd 3y ago
    > However, Microsoft has definitely been drinking the IBM koolaid a little to long and has lost the mandate of heaven. I think in the next 7-10 years we will reach a point where there is nothing Windows can do that linux cannot do better and easier without spying on you that's a fascinating statement with the clear ascendancy of neural-assisted algorithms etc. Things like DLSS are the future - small models that just quietly optimize some part of a workload that was commonly considered impossible to the extent nobody even thinks about it anymore. my prediction is that in 10 years we are looking at the rise of tag+collection based filesystems and operating system paradigms. all of us generate a huge amount of "digital garbage" constantly, and you either sort it out into the important stuff, keep temporarily, and toss, or you accumulate a giant digital garbage pile. AI systems are gonna automate that process, it's gonna start on traditional tree-based systems but eventually you don't need the tree at all, AI is what's going to make that pivot to true tag/collection systems possible. Tags mostly haven't worked because of a bunch of individual issues which are pretty much solved by AI. Tags aren't specific enough: well, AI can give you good guesses at relevance. Tagging files and maintaining collections is a pain: well, the AI can generate tags and assign collections for you. Tags really require an ontology for "fuzzy" matching (search for "food" should return the tag "hot dog") - well, LLMs understand ontologies fine. Etc etc. And if you do it right, you can basically have the AI generate "inbox/outbox" for you, deduplicate files and handle versioning, etc, all relatively seamlessly. microsoft and macos are both clearly racing for this with the "AI os" concept. It's not just better relevance searches etc. And the "generate me a whole paragraph before you even know what I'm trying to type" stuff is not how it's going to work either. That stuff is like specular highlights in video games around 2007 or whatever - once you had the tool, for a few years everything was w e t until developers learned some restraint with it. But there are very very good applications that are going to come out in the 10 year window that are going to reduce operator cognitive load by a lot - that is the "AI OS" concept. What would the OS look like if you truly had the "computer is my secretary" idea? Not just dictating memorandums, but assistance in keeping your life in order and keeping you on-task. I simply cannot see linux being able to keep up with this change, in the same way the kernel can't just switch to rust - at some point you are too calcified to ever do the big-bang rewrite if there is not a BDFL telling you that it's got to happen. the downside of being "the bazaar" is that you are standards-driven and have to deal with corralling a million whiny nerds constantly complaining about "spying on me just like microsoft" and continuing to push in their own other directions (sysvinit/upstart/systemd factions, etc) and whatever else, on top of all the other technical issues of doing a big-bang rewrite. linux is too calcified to ever pivot away from being a tree-based OS and it's going to be another 2-3 decades before they catch up with "proper support for new file-organization paradigms" etc even in the smaller sense. that's really just the tip of the iceberg on the things AI is going to change, and linux is probably going to be left out of most of those commercial applications despite being where the research is done. It's just too much of a mess and too many nerdlingers pushing back to ever get anything done. Unix will be represented in this new paradigm but not Linux - the commercial operators who have the centralization and fortitude to build a cathedral will get there much quicker, and that looks like MacOS or Solaris not linux. Or at least, unless I see some big announcement from KDE or Gnome or Canonical/Red Hat about a big AI-OS rewrite... I assume that's pretty much where the center of gravity is going to stay for linux.
foobiekr 3y ago
IBM was also incompetent and the os/2 team in Boca was had some exceptional engineers but was packed witg mostly mediocre-to-bad ones, which is why so many things in OS/2 were bad and why IBM got upset for Microsoft contributing negative work to the project because their lines of code contribution was negative (they were rewriting a lot of inefficient bloated IBM code). A lot went wrong with os/2. For CUDA, I think a better analogy is vhs. The standard, in the effective not open sense, is what it is. AMD sucks at software and views it as an expense rather than an advantage.
- AYBABTME 3y ago
  You would think that by now AMD realizes that poor software is what left them behind in the dust, and would have changed that mindset.
  - hyperman1 3y ago
    Most businesses understand the pain points of their suppliers very well, as they feel that pain and gave themselves organized around it. They have a hard time to understand the pain points of their consumers, as they don't feel that pain, look trough their own organisation-coloured glases, and can't see the real pain points from the whiney-customer ones. AMD probably thinks software ecosystems are the easy part, ready to take it on whenever they feel like it and throw a token amount at it. They've built a great engine, see the carossery as beneath them, and don't understand why the lazy customer wants them to build the rest of the car too.
neerajsi 3y ago
I'm not in the gpu programming realm, so this observation might be inaccurate: I think the case of cuda vs an open standard is different from os2 vs Windows because the customers of cuda are programmers with access to source code while the customers of os2 were end users trying to run apps written by others. If your shrink-wrapped software didn't run on os2, you'd have no choice but to go buy Windows. Otoh if your ai model doesn't run on an AMD device and the issue is something minor, you can edit the shader code.