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Omg. I know this is mostly marketing speaking, but this is her reply when asked about AMD's reticence to software: > Well, let me be clear, there’s no reticenc
by sigmoid10 2y ago
Omg. I know this is mostly marketing speaking, but this is her reply when asked about AMD's reticence to software:
> Well, let me be clear, there’s no reticence at all. [...] I think we’ve always believed in the importance of the hardware-software linkage and really, the key thing about software is, we’re supposed to make it easy for customers to use all of the incredible capability that we’re putting in these chips, there is complete clarity on that.
I'm baffled how clueless these CEOs sometimes seem about their own product. Like, do you even realize that this the reason why Nvidia is mopping the floor with your stuff? Have you ever talked to a developer who had to work with your drivers and stack? If you don't start massively investing on that side, Nvidia will keep dominating despite their outrageous pricing. I really want AMD to succeed here, but with management like that I'm not surprised that they can't keep up. Props to the interviewer for not letting her off the hook on this one after she almost dodged it.
- cherryteastain 2y agoWhat is she supposed to say? Perhaps "our products have bad software, don't buy them, go buy Nvidia instead"?
- sigmoid10 2y agoShe could admit that they fell behind on this one and really need to focus on closing the gap now. But instead she says it's all business as usual, which assures me that I won't give their hardware another shot for quite a while.
- dewey 2y agoI wouldn't blame that on the CEO, that's just regular media training and it's their job is to keep the stock market happy. Companies really only admit to failure if there's no other option and the pressure is too high ("Antenna gate" and others come to mind).
- sigmoid10 2y agoWell, while they desperately try to keep shareholders happy instead of developers, Nvidia racks in trillions in market cap. But I agree in the sense that thinking ahead further than the next quarter is not a great strength of most publicly traded companies.
- dewey 2y agoJust because something was said in public to some interviewer doesn't mean they are thinking exactly the same internally.
- sigmoid10 2y agoWell, technically yes. To see why that's the case you'd actually have to work with their products.
- raudette 2y agoSupporting... I remember this Freakonomics interview with Ballmer about his statements about the iPhone: "There’s two things: What would I have said differently and what would I have thought differently? They’re actually quite different." From: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/hoopers-hoopers-hoopers/ https://freakonomics.com/podcast/hoopers-hoopers-hoopers/
- BeetleB 2y ago> that's just regular media training and it's their job is to keep the stock market happy. The investors already know AMD's SW is bad. Now they know not to trust AMD's CEO.
- slowmotiony 2y agoShe could say "We are in a compute gold rush and yet AMD's stock didn't gain anything in the last 6 months, so I hereby submit my resignation". That would work.
- bee_rider 2y agoShe managed to pull them out of the garbage bin after Bulldozer but I guess she hasn’t managed to hook them up to the AI bubble yet.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- pyaamb 2y agoI'd love to know if any domain experts have a write up on what the the talent+ time+financial investment it would take for AMD to come up with with something that is a worthy rival to CUDA. Very curious to understand what the obstacles are.
- sigmoid10 2y agoFirst, they need to work with kernel devs to finally fix their drivers. Like, Nvidia used to be a "pain in the ass" here as well (that's a literal quote from Torvalds), so simply by contributing more than nothing, they could have taken the lead. But they definitely screwed this one up. Second, they need to fix their userspace stack. ROCm being open source and all is great in principle, but simply dropping your source to the masses doesn't make it magically work. They need to stop letting it linger by either working with the open source community (huge time investment) or do it themselves (huge money investment).
- JonChesterfield 2y agoThe code is all on GitHub, the ISA docs are public, the driver is in upstream Linux with the work in progress on Gitlab. You can build whatever you want on AMD's hardware with total disregard to their software if you're so inclined. One or two companies seem to be doing so. This has been true since roughly the opencl days, where the community could have chosen open standards over subservience to team green. Then again for the HSA movement, a really solid heterogeneous programming model initially supported by a bunch of companies. Also broadly ignored. Today the runtime code is shipping in Linux distributions. Decent chance your laptop has an AMD CPU in it, that'll have a built in GPU that can run ROCm with the kernel you're already using and packages your distribution ships. I'm not sure what more AMD could be doing here. What more do you want them to do?
- rangestransform 2y ago> the community could have chosen open standards over subservience to team green i think most people would rather have proprietary software that works rather than opensource that doesn't
- Nullabillity 2y ago> Like, do you even realize that this the reason why Nvidia is mopping the floor with your stuff? Are they? Generally, my experience has been that AMD products generally just work even if they're a bit buggy sometimes, while Nvidia struggles to get a video signal at all. Seems perfectly reasonable to focus on what matters, while Nvidia is distracted by the AI fad.
- sigmoid10 2y agoI'm not talking about gaming, I'm talking about general purpose computing (although even for gaming your statement is pretty bold). Since she's CEO of a publicly traded company, it seems pretty weird that she would ignore the fields where the money is at, while Nvidia becomes the most valuable company in the world. So she's not just ignoring developers' wants but also her stockholders'.
- Nullabillity 2y agoGPGPU is largely a non-presence outside of a few niche fields like video encoding (which, uh, seems to work fine enough for me?).
- wmf 2y agoAI is not exactly niche.
- Nullabillity 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter It keeps being hyped up again every once in a while years, but it has never, will never, panned out in practice.
- dontwearitout 2y agoI don't know if you're out of the loop but the AI scene has dramatically changed in the past few years. We are solidly out of the AI winter.