3 ms·

It's amazing how NVidia became worth $3T simply because they have better drivers and CUDA. AMD has great hardware, but they never could be assed to do anything

It's amazing how NVidia became worth $3T simply because they have better drivers and CUDA. AMD has great hardware, but they never could be assed to do anything about their software.

nmstoker 2y ago
"utilizing the AMD Ryzen™ AI Software* sounds really unappealing! Like when companies don't realise you think their software to leverage hardware is bad and you'd prefer being able to use features via something generic
teleforce 2y ago
Never underestimate development eco-system. Ballmer was famously repeatedly shouting developers many times in one of the Microsoft Windows conferences and now he's one of the richest persons. Microsoft also got out of their ways by introducing WSL for running Linux alongside Windows when they realized the majority of OS running their Azure cloud are Linux.
anon291 2y ago
It's not really. Anyone who's ever done any low-level assembly coding on modern chips knows that it is already a herculean engineering effort. The idea that your customers, who are experts in machine learning models (like transformers, activation functions, etc) are going to feel comfortable with memory hierarchies, synchronization, floating point precision, etc is just crazy.
- cyberax 2y ago
  Yes, that's what I mean. NVidia provided easy to use tooling (CUDA), and made sure it JustWorks everywhere. AMD did approximately nothing with ROCm. Investing $10-20m of developer time into making ROCm work reliably easily would have paid for itself 100x.
  - anon291 2y ago
    Oh I guess I was responding to the "It's amazing part". AMD sells a car without a steering wheel. NVIDIA does, and it's not really amazing that people prefer that one (in my opinion at least)
  - almostgotcaught 2y ago
    > Investing $10-20m of developer time into making ROCm work reliably easily would have paid for itself 100x. I love when outsiders throw around random-ass takes like this. Just curious: how'd you come up with this number? Is it backed by literally any thought/data/roadmap? Let's do some rough back of the envelope calculations: 20MM is 100 engineers working for 1 year. Or maybe it's 5 years of work for 20 engineers? Which one of those perspectives (if any!) sounds to you like a reasonable assessment of the gap between AMD and NVIDIA? A quick reminder before you answer: whatever you think is actually involved in improving ROCm, unless you work on ROCm, you're almost certainly not considering an entire iceberg of complexity (runtime/driver/firmware). Let's put it another way: forget AMD investing, I'll invest in you since you're so confident. I'll give you 20MM as a high-interest, non-dischargeable loan (say 8%) and all the runtime/driver/firmware source for AMDGPU. Up for it? All you have to do is improve ROCm such that it's competitive with CUDA and you can take home a huge slice of the TAM and you'll be rich. Easy right? Cutting to the chase: you're off by at least two orders of magnitude on your goofy estimate; the real numbers are probably closer to 200MM invested every year for 10 years. And you still wouldn't be caught up because in those 10 years NVIDIA wasn't sitting on its laurels just waiting for you to catch up!
    - xtreme 2y ago
      200 mm/year gets you roughly 1000 engineers at 200k salary. Is that not enough to make rocm experience equal to cuda?
      - binary132 2y ago
        1000 engineers don’t automatically crank out 50x more code than 20 engineers. But GP is just saying there are a lot of subcomponents involved that each need major engineering effort dedicated to them. I see it less as an engineering problem and more as a market problem. AMD stuff has existed, it’s the market that doesn’t see a point in it, and at this point, even feature parity or CUDA compatibility for that matter won’t make a huge dent. People will just keep using what they know and are recommended. It’s more amazing to me that NVDA is so intensely inflated by this LLM hype wave. I find it genuinely scary to think about what’s going to happen when 95+% of AI slopware startups fold. Nvidia won’t be the only company financially impacted. Our entire economy runs on fads.

It's amazing how NVidia became worth $3T simply because they have better drivers and CUDA. AMD has great hardware, but they never could be assed to do anything about their software.

nmstoker 2y ago

"utilizing the AMD Ryzen™ AI Software* sounds really unappealing! Like when companies don't realise you think their software to leverage hardware is bad and you'd prefer being able to use features via something generic

teleforce 2y ago

Never underestimate development eco-system. Ballmer was famously repeatedly shouting developers many times in one of the Microsoft Windows conferences and now he's one of the richest persons. Microsoft also got out of their ways by introducing WSL for running Linux alongside Windows when they realized the majority of OS running their Azure cloud are Linux.

anon291 2y ago

It's not really. Anyone who's ever done any low-level assembly coding on modern chips knows that it is already a herculean engineering effort. The idea that your customers, who are experts in machine learning models (like transformers, activation functions, etc) are going to feel comfortable with memory hierarchies, synchronization, floating point precision, etc is just crazy.

cyberax 2y ago
Yes, that's what I mean. NVidia provided easy to use tooling (CUDA), and made sure it JustWorks everywhere. AMD did approximately nothing with ROCm. Investing $10-20m of developer time into making ROCm work reliably easily would have paid for itself 100x.
- anon291 2y ago
  Oh I guess I was responding to the "It's amazing part". AMD sells a car without a steering wheel. NVIDIA does, and it's not really amazing that people prefer that one (in my opinion at least)
- almostgotcaught 2y ago
  > Investing $10-20m of developer time into making ROCm work reliably easily would have paid for itself 100x. I love when outsiders throw around random-ass takes like this. Just curious: how'd you come up with this number? Is it backed by literally any thought/data/roadmap? Let's do some rough back of the envelope calculations: 20MM is 100 engineers working for 1 year. Or maybe it's 5 years of work for 20 engineers? Which one of those perspectives (if any!) sounds to you like a reasonable assessment of the gap between AMD and NVIDIA? A quick reminder before you answer: whatever you think is actually involved in improving ROCm, unless you work on ROCm, you're almost certainly not considering an entire iceberg of complexity (runtime/driver/firmware). Let's put it another way: forget AMD investing, I'll invest in you since you're so confident. I'll give you 20MM as a high-interest, non-dischargeable loan (say 8%) and all the runtime/driver/firmware source for AMDGPU. Up for it? All you have to do is improve ROCm such that it's competitive with CUDA and you can take home a huge slice of the TAM and you'll be rich. Easy right? Cutting to the chase: you're off by at least two orders of magnitude on your goofy estimate; the real numbers are probably closer to 200MM invested every year for 10 years. And you still wouldn't be caught up because in those 10 years NVIDIA wasn't sitting on its laurels just waiting for you to catch up!
  - xtreme 2y ago
    200 mm/year gets you roughly 1000 engineers at 200k salary. Is that not enough to make rocm experience equal to cuda?
    - binary132 2y ago
      1000 engineers don’t automatically crank out 50x more code than 20 engineers. But GP is just saying there are a lot of subcomponents involved that each need major engineering effort dedicated to them. I see it less as an engineering problem and more as a market problem. AMD stuff has existed, it’s the market that doesn’t see a point in it, and at this point, even feature parity or CUDA compatibility for that matter won’t make a huge dent. People will just keep using what they know and are recommended. It’s more amazing to me that NVDA is so intensely inflated by this LLM hype wave. I find it genuinely scary to think about what’s going to happen when 95+% of AI slopware startups fold. Nvidia won’t be the only company financially impacted. Our entire economy runs on fads.