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> This confirms what everyone who ever touched AMD GPGPUs knows -- that the only thing holding back AMD from becoming a 2 Trillion dollar company is their absol

> This confirms what everyone who ever touched AMD GPGPUs knows -- that the only thing holding back AMD from becoming a 2 Trillion dollar company is their absolutely atrocious software. Indeed. On the flip side they are quite more friendly to open-source, in general, compared to NVidia that's actively hostile(and has been for a while(see Linus "F* you!" video). Companies that develop hardware generally suck at software. There are exceptions, but they aren't numerous (and indeed have been rewarded in their stock price). I do not know anything about AMD's company culture in their software business units, but fixing that generally requires pretty large changes. > I have no idea why their board hasn't been sacked and replaced with people who understand that you can make the best hardware out there, but if your SW to use it is -- to be very mild -- atrocious, nobody is gonna buy it or use it. You probably can't just replace the board (unless C-level mandates are the only thing dragging down the company). You need to replace many more management levels, including a sizable portion of middle management. Sometimes even ICs if software hiring hasn't been properly handled.

littlestymaar 3y ago
> Companies that develop hardware generally suck at software. There are exceptions, but they aren't numerous (and indeed have been rewarded in their stock price) True, and you can even get the highest market cap as a hardware manufacturer who suck at software.
paulmd 3y ago
> Indeed. On the flip side they are quite more friendly to open-source, in general, those are "community-friendly" segfaults I guess, and it's really only a demonstration of how user-hostile NVIDIA is, what with their working HDMI 2.1 support and compilers and runtimes that actually build and run properly... /s the "open-source so good!" stuff only really only matters when the open-source stack at least gets you across the starting line. When you are having to debug AMD's openCL runtime or compiler and submit patches because it segfaults on the demo code, that is not "engaging the community as a force-multiplier", it's shipping a defective product and fobbing it off on the community to do your job for you. It's incumbent on AMD to at least get the platform to the starting line, and their failure to do that has been a problem for over a decade at this point. Also, honestly, even if you submit a patch how long until they break something else? If demo projects don’t even run… they aren’t exactly doing their technical diligence. People seem to love love love the idea of being an ongoing, unpaid employee working on AMD’s tech stack for them, and nvidia is just sitting there with a working product that people don’t like for ideological reasons… To wit: the segfault/deadlock issues geohot ran into aren’t just a one-off, they’re a whole class of bug that AMD has been fighting for years in ROCm, and they keep coming back. Are you willing to keep fixing that bug every couple months for the rest of your projects life? After they drop support for your hardware in 6 months, are you willing to debug the next AMD platform for them too?

littlestymaar 3y ago

> Companies that develop hardware generally suck at software. There are exceptions, but they aren't numerous (and indeed have been rewarded in their stock price) True, and you can even get the highest market cap as a hardware manufacturer who suck at software.

paulmd 3y ago

> Indeed. On the flip side they are quite more friendly to open-source, in general, those are "community-friendly" segfaults I guess, and it's really only a demonstration of how user-hostile NVIDIA is, what with their working HDMI 2.1 support and compilers and runtimes that actually build and run properly... /s the "open-source so good!" stuff only really only matters when the open-source stack at least gets you across the starting line. When you are having to debug AMD's openCL runtime or compiler and submit patches because it segfaults on the demo code, that is not "engaging the community as a force-multiplier", it's shipping a defective product and fobbing it off on the community to do your job for you. It's incumbent on AMD to at least get the platform to the starting line, and their failure to do that has been a problem for over a decade at this point. Also, honestly, even if you submit a patch how long until they break something else? If demo projects don’t even run… they aren’t exactly doing their technical diligence. People seem to love love love the idea of being an ongoing, unpaid employee working on AMD’s tech stack for them, and nvidia is just sitting there with a working product that people don’t like for ideological reasons… To wit: the segfault/deadlock issues geohot ran into aren’t just a one-off, they’re a whole class of bug that AMD has been fighting for years in ROCm, and they keep coming back. Are you willing to keep fixing that bug every couple months for the rest of your projects life? After they drop support for your hardware in 6 months, are you willing to debug the next AMD platform for them too?