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It was particularly hard to listen to himself admit that he basically became unpaid QA for AMD. Like, dude, you’re making the same junior mistake people writin
by andrewmcwatters 3y ago
It was particularly hard to listen to himself admit that he basically became unpaid QA for AMD.
Like, dude, you’re making the same junior mistake people writing apps for the App Store make.
It’s not your platform.
- llm_trw 3y agoIf the AMD code makes it into the kernel, like their graphics drivers did, then we've won because it will just work on every kernel update. Compared to now where AMD drivers just don't work and NVidia drivers only work with the right blobs installed I'd be willing to take a paycut for 6 months to have 10 years of painless development. That said I jumped ship to NVidia since I need to work and not spend all my time trying to get servers to the point that they can work.
- threeseed 3y agoAs a developer you're always building on top of something you don't control. At least with the App Store you make pretty good money. It's worse when you have companies who have APIs you need that you know they don't care about.
- modeless 3y agoHis thesis is that owning a good software platform is a prerequisite for a successful AI hardware company. He is (or was) using AMD as a stepping stone to create and flesh out that software platform (tinygrad) before starting custom ASIC development, instead of going the other way around with a costly ASIC first and trying to develop a software platform after, or trying to push support for an ASIC into someone else's platform such as PyTorch. Not sure I agree but it's an interesting idea. It's also worth noting that tinygrad is bypassing as many layers of AMD's software platform as they can get away with (MIOpen, ROCm, and even the userspace GPU driver).
- andrewmcwatters 3y agoWell, I think he's probably right, it's just a shame that he's going through this difficulty. I hope he ends up succeeding in his goals.