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I love this insider view into this interesting point in computing history, especially about AMD. However, I was a little put off by the glorification of nVidia'

I love this insider view into this interesting point in computing history, especially about AMD. However, I was a little put off by the glorification of nVidia's shady practices and lock-in policies as key to their current leading position. While technically true, I dislike "ends justify the means"-style thinking. All this as the OP glorifies AMD's engineering and grit-based culture to drive through all though tough missteps and missed opportunities. To expand on that, I really do feel AMD has great engineering culture but they keep falling to the same traps. They do not invest strongly enough in software support nor vendor relationships. Neither of these necessitate the more evil monopolistic practices of vendor lock-in and proprietary, non-free (as in libre) software. If they can navigate that without turning evil, they'd be a company for the ages. And I can't close with mad respect to Dr. Lisa Su for her admirable leadership, itself bookworthy. Also, quick fact, she and Jensen are cousins!

belter 2y ago
On the GPU area AMD lost, and will continue to lose to Nvidia, because they don't seem to get a grip on Software and Drivers. And that does not bode well for their long time CEO.
- diamond559 2y ago
  The more this is blindly repeated the more you know it's bs
- latchkey 2y ago
  MI300x is doing quite well. https://chipsandcheese.com/2024/06/25/testing-amds-giant-mi300x/ https://chipsandcheese.com/2024/06/25/testing-amds-giant-mi3... https://www.nscale.com/blog/nscale-benchmarks-amd-mi300x-gpus-with-gemm-tuning-improves-throughput-and-latency-by-up-to-7-2x https://www.nscale.com/blog/nscale-benchmarks-amd-mi300x-gpu...
  - belter 2y ago
    Just the first link review you posted reinforces my argument: "...But we must now talk about the elephant in the room, and that is AMD’s software stack. While it is absolutely night and day from where it was when we tested MI210, ROCm is nowhere near where it needs to be to truly compete with CUDA..."
    - latchkey 2y ago
      You're pointing at the sun and saying "see, it is bright!". Nobody is pretending that AMD does not need to fix their software stack. AMD did not really turn their attention to AI until about Oct of last year. Now that they have, it will take a bit of time to correct the course of the ship, but I know for certain that it is all hands on deck at this point. One sign of this is that we're seeing more frequent and substantial "night and day" improvements to ROCm. The lifecycle of hardware, is years. MI300x is a substantial leap. MI325x is another one. The rest of the hardware roadmap (years out), is extremely impressive. Software is a much shorter lifecycle and can be iterated on more easily. Expect to continue to see improvements here over the coming years.
- tapoxi 2y ago
  I mean for gaming workloads AMD GPUs are doing fine in the Xbox, PlayStation, and Steam Deck consoles.
  - sorenjan 2y ago
    And in PC AMD has 15.6% of the market, compared to Nvidia's 76.4% according to Steam. https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...
doix 2y ago
Yeah, I really feel like AMD is struggling with the software aspect. Even back when they were ATI and AMD bought them, the ATI drivers were garbage compared to Nvidia (from my PC gaming experience). After a few AMD and ATI cards, I just accepted the Nvidia tax, where my cards are more expensive and on paper worse, but in practice worked better. I'm really surprised AMD isn't throwing a whole bunch of money on emulating CUDA. If they could "just" make CUDA work on AMD cards, it feels like Nvidia's position would be severely weakened. Kind of like how Valve invested heavily into Proton and now gaming on Linux is pretty much fine.
- luyu_wu 2y ago
  I'm not sure emulating CUDA would be legal, you can look at ZLUDA as an example. It was originally funded by AMD, but got cut for what I presume would be legal reasons. ZLUDA does work amazingly well though from my experience!
- pjmlp 2y ago
  That is what ROMc and HIP were supposed to be somehow, but even that isn't really CUDA, as in the polyglot programming language environment, with C, C++ and Fortran first, plus others, followed by Python JIT, libraries, IDE, and a GPU graphical debugger.
- mook 2y ago
  AMD also doesn't understand that CUDA got big because they worked on cheap consumer cards; once things were working people got interested in expensive specialized cards. Their stack is still focused on the high end only, but there's no ecosystem to support it.
  - rcleveng 2y ago
    To me, this is the most important point and what AMD is missing out from their current strategy. I can take an off the shelf, easy to get 4070 or 4080 and use it with CUDA to learn. AMD's strategy for people wanting to learn, is basically no strategy. It's always been the software holding them back, still is, need to invest in the ecosystem and not just the things easy to justify as a revenue driver.
DEADMINCE 2y ago
> However, I was a little put off by the glorification of nVidia's shady practices and lock-in policies as key to their current leading position. While technically true, I dislike "ends justify the means"-style thinking. Personally, I have no issue with "ends justify the means"-style thinking as a blanket rule, often it's perfectly appropriate. I would argue it is, in this case, where Nvidia was playing a game by the rules. If there is an issue with how they played, then government should change the rules. The people in power in the US don't want that though.
jjoonathan 2y ago
She turned the company around and got it on the right path, but in interviews I get the feeling that she might also be responsible for the "Hardware 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th.... eh, maybe software can be 5th" culture and AMD's deep denial that it has a problem. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40790924 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40790924 That was OK for the CPU turnaround, but on the GPU front it completely shut them out of the first rounds of the AI party and maybe a trillion in market cap.
- bavell 2y ago
  I'm hopeful and optimistic for AMD but if anything were to make me bearish on their prospects, it'd be this.
woooooo 2y ago
Nvidia was pushing CUDA forward for over a decade before it started getting serious commercial traction. It's not like they blocked anyone else from developing viable GPGPU tech, they were just the only ones pushing it. For like 8 years their drivers on Linux were a nightmare and AMD could have come in and done better.
- luyu_wu 2y ago
  The obvious issue with both your points is that NVidia's competitors did do as such. AMD has had workable Linux drivers for many years now and there were numerous alternatives to CUDA pushed.
  - AlexandrB 2y ago
    A common talking point is that CUDA is a formidable moat for Nvidia, but - as someone who has never done AI dev - I'm curious to understand what makes CUDA so sticky. From an outsider perspective it looks like a re-run of DirectX vs. everything else but AI is not like gaming and end users often don't have to run the model themselves. So it seems like the network effects should be less than that for a graphics APIs.
    - disgruntledphd2 2y ago
      Nvidia have invested a lot in CUDA, and they have C & Fortran bindings for a lot of scientific stuff, apart from all the DL/Gen AI stuff that's super hot right now. Like, I started using CUDA (through frameworks) over ten years ago, and basically nobody has come up with anything competitive since then.
      - kkielhofner 2y ago
        > Nvidia have invested a lot in CUDA, This is a significant understatement. For quite some time Jensen has been saying repeatedly that 30% of their R&D spend is on software. With the money-printing machine that is Nvidia if that holds they're going to continue to rocket ahead of competitors in terms of delivering actual solutions. The "What are you talking about? AMD/Intel runs torch just fine!" crowd clearly haven't seen things like RIVA, Deepstream, Nemo, Triton Inference Server/NIM, etc. Meanwhile AMD (ROCm) still struggles with flash attention... What these hardware-first (only?) companies like AMD don't seem to understand is that people buy solutions, not GPUs. It just so happens that GPUs are the best way to run these kinds of workloads but if you don't have a wholistic and exhaustive overall ecosystem you end up in single digit market share vs Nvidia at ~90%.
gymbeaux 2y ago
On the other hand, AMD was on the brink of bankruptcy and Lisa Su led them out of it and into a triple-digit share price. Most companies with that much debt and that little revenue would have gone bankrupt. Lest we forget the Intel IPC advantages over comparable AMD CPUs was due to some shortcuts that exposed major vulnerabilities in Intel CPUs made from ~2011 to 2019. I’d be curious to see how a Spectre and Meltdown-patched Intel CPU fares against its AMD competitor NOW. Some of the performance hits were brutal- 20%+ in some workloads. Nvidia was pushing AMD out of the GPU market back when GPUs were effectively only used for gaming and while GameWorks was predatory, you can’t really blame them for having the cooler-running, quieter, more energy-efficient GPUs going back to the Maxwell line (GTX 9x0). CUDA didn’t screw AMD until recently… but in 2014, people were picking Nvidia because the GPUs were considerably “better”. AMD had the best bang for buck back then, but you’d have more power consumption and heat output, and the drivers tended to be buggy. The bugs would be fixed, but it really sucked for people trying to play games on release day.
ksec 2y ago
>However, I was a little put off by the glorification of nVidia's shady practices and lock-in policies as key to their current leading position. What was their shady practices and lock-in policies?

belter 2y ago

On the GPU area AMD lost, and will continue to lose to Nvidia, because they don't seem to get a grip on Software and Drivers. And that does not bode well for their long time CEO.

diamond559 2y ago
The more this is blindly repeated the more you know it's bs
latchkey 2y ago
MI300x is doing quite well. https://chipsandcheese.com/2024/06/25/testing-amds-giant-mi300x/ https://chipsandcheese.com/2024/06/25/testing-amds-giant-mi3... https://www.nscale.com/blog/nscale-benchmarks-amd-mi300x-gpus-with-gemm-tuning-improves-throughput-and-latency-by-up-to-7-2x https://www.nscale.com/blog/nscale-benchmarks-amd-mi300x-gpu...
- belter 2y ago
  Just the first link review you posted reinforces my argument: "...But we must now talk about the elephant in the room, and that is AMD’s software stack. While it is absolutely night and day from where it was when we tested MI210, ROCm is nowhere near where it needs to be to truly compete with CUDA..."
  - latchkey 2y ago
    You're pointing at the sun and saying "see, it is bright!". Nobody is pretending that AMD does not need to fix their software stack. AMD did not really turn their attention to AI until about Oct of last year. Now that they have, it will take a bit of time to correct the course of the ship, but I know for certain that it is all hands on deck at this point. One sign of this is that we're seeing more frequent and substantial "night and day" improvements to ROCm. The lifecycle of hardware, is years. MI300x is a substantial leap. MI325x is another one. The rest of the hardware roadmap (years out), is extremely impressive. Software is a much shorter lifecycle and can be iterated on more easily. Expect to continue to see improvements here over the coming years.
tapoxi 2y ago
I mean for gaming workloads AMD GPUs are doing fine in the Xbox, PlayStation, and Steam Deck consoles.
- sorenjan 2y ago
  And in PC AMD has 15.6% of the market, compared to Nvidia's 76.4% according to Steam. https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...

doix 2y ago

Yeah, I really feel like AMD is struggling with the software aspect. Even back when they were ATI and AMD bought them, the ATI drivers were garbage compared to Nvidia (from my PC gaming experience). After a few AMD and ATI cards, I just accepted the Nvidia tax, where my cards are more expensive and on paper worse, but in practice worked better. I'm really surprised AMD isn't throwing a whole bunch of money on emulating CUDA. If they could "just" make CUDA work on AMD cards, it feels like Nvidia's position would be severely weakened. Kind of like how Valve invested heavily into Proton and now gaming on Linux is pretty much fine.

luyu_wu 2y ago
I'm not sure emulating CUDA would be legal, you can look at ZLUDA as an example. It was originally funded by AMD, but got cut for what I presume would be legal reasons. ZLUDA does work amazingly well though from my experience!
pjmlp 2y ago
That is what ROMc and HIP were supposed to be somehow, but even that isn't really CUDA, as in the polyglot programming language environment, with C, C++ and Fortran first, plus others, followed by Python JIT, libraries, IDE, and a GPU graphical debugger.
mook 2y ago
AMD also doesn't understand that CUDA got big because they worked on cheap consumer cards; once things were working people got interested in expensive specialized cards. Their stack is still focused on the high end only, but there's no ecosystem to support it.
- rcleveng 2y ago
  To me, this is the most important point and what AMD is missing out from their current strategy. I can take an off the shelf, easy to get 4070 or 4080 and use it with CUDA to learn. AMD's strategy for people wanting to learn, is basically no strategy. It's always been the software holding them back, still is, need to invest in the ecosystem and not just the things easy to justify as a revenue driver.

DEADMINCE 2y ago

> However, I was a little put off by the glorification of nVidia's shady practices and lock-in policies as key to their current leading position. While technically true, I dislike "ends justify the means"-style thinking. Personally, I have no issue with "ends justify the means"-style thinking as a blanket rule, often it's perfectly appropriate. I would argue it is, in this case, where Nvidia was playing a game by the rules. If there is an issue with how they played, then government should change the rules. The people in power in the US don't want that though.

jjoonathan 2y ago

She turned the company around and got it on the right path, but in interviews I get the feeling that she might also be responsible for the "Hardware 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th.... eh, maybe software can be 5th" culture and AMD's deep denial that it has a problem. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40790924 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40790924 That was OK for the CPU turnaround, but on the GPU front it completely shut them out of the first rounds of the AI party and maybe a trillion in market cap.

bavell 2y ago
I'm hopeful and optimistic for AMD but if anything were to make me bearish on their prospects, it'd be this.

woooooo 2y ago

Nvidia was pushing CUDA forward for over a decade before it started getting serious commercial traction. It's not like they blocked anyone else from developing viable GPGPU tech, they were just the only ones pushing it. For like 8 years their drivers on Linux were a nightmare and AMD could have come in and done better.

luyu_wu 2y ago
The obvious issue with both your points is that NVidia's competitors did do as such. AMD has had workable Linux drivers for many years now and there were numerous alternatives to CUDA pushed.
- AlexandrB 2y ago
  A common talking point is that CUDA is a formidable moat for Nvidia, but - as someone who has never done AI dev - I'm curious to understand what makes CUDA so sticky. From an outsider perspective it looks like a re-run of DirectX vs. everything else but AI is not like gaming and end users often don't have to run the model themselves. So it seems like the network effects should be less than that for a graphics APIs.
  - disgruntledphd2 2y ago
    Nvidia have invested a lot in CUDA, and they have C & Fortran bindings for a lot of scientific stuff, apart from all the DL/Gen AI stuff that's super hot right now. Like, I started using CUDA (through frameworks) over ten years ago, and basically nobody has come up with anything competitive since then.
    - kkielhofner 2y ago
      > Nvidia have invested a lot in CUDA, This is a significant understatement. For quite some time Jensen has been saying repeatedly that 30% of their R&D spend is on software. With the money-printing machine that is Nvidia if that holds they're going to continue to rocket ahead of competitors in terms of delivering actual solutions. The "What are you talking about? AMD/Intel runs torch just fine!" crowd clearly haven't seen things like RIVA, Deepstream, Nemo, Triton Inference Server/NIM, etc. Meanwhile AMD (ROCm) still struggles with flash attention... What these hardware-first (only?) companies like AMD don't seem to understand is that people buy solutions, not GPUs. It just so happens that GPUs are the best way to run these kinds of workloads but if you don't have a wholistic and exhaustive overall ecosystem you end up in single digit market share vs Nvidia at ~90%.

gymbeaux 2y ago

On the other hand, AMD was on the brink of bankruptcy and Lisa Su led them out of it and into a triple-digit share price. Most companies with that much debt and that little revenue would have gone bankrupt. Lest we forget the Intel IPC advantages over comparable AMD CPUs was due to some shortcuts that exposed major vulnerabilities in Intel CPUs made from ~2011 to 2019. I’d be curious to see how a Spectre and Meltdown-patched Intel CPU fares against its AMD competitor NOW. Some of the performance hits were brutal- 20%+ in some workloads. Nvidia was pushing AMD out of the GPU market back when GPUs were effectively only used for gaming and while GameWorks was predatory, you can’t really blame them for having the cooler-running, quieter, more energy-efficient GPUs going back to the Maxwell line (GTX 9x0). CUDA didn’t screw AMD until recently… but in 2014, people were picking Nvidia because the GPUs were considerably “better”. AMD had the best bang for buck back then, but you’d have more power consumption and heat output, and the drivers tended to be buggy. The bugs would be fixed, but it really sucked for people trying to play games on release day.

ksec 2y ago

>However, I was a little put off by the glorification of nVidia's shady practices and lock-in policies as key to their current leading position. What was their shady practices and lock-in policies?