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Coming up next: "We bought AMD stock on the open market and used it to compensate AMD engineers".

Lerc 2y ago
You joke, but it is almost a genuine investment opportunity here for a large player. Spend a billion on AMD shares, Spend another Billion on a out-of-house software team to solve the software solution to more than double the share price. Taking into account that there are players that already own billions in AMD shares, they could probably do that as well. On the other hand perhaps it would be better for them, as major shareholders, to have a word with AMD management.
- schmidtleonard 2y ago
  I don't have the inside baseball but I have seen those weird as hell interviews with Lisa Su where she gets asked point blank about the software problems and instead of "working on it, stay tuned" -- an answer that costs nothing to give -- she deflects into "performance is what matters," which is the kind of denial that rhymes exactly with the problems they are having. No, the horsepower of your F1 racecar doesn't matter if the engine doesn't start and there's a wheel missing! You need to fix those problems before the horsepower can matter! Please tell me you are fixing the starter and the wheel! Hopefully I am reading too much into this. Hopefully she doesn't have any weird hangups over investing in software and it all just takes time to Do It Right after GPGPU got starved in the AMD winter. But if it is a weird hangup then yeah, 100%, ownership needs to get management in line because whiffing a matmul benchmark years into a world where matmul is worth trillions just ain't it.
  - sangnoir 2y ago
    > she deflects into "performance is what matters," which is the kind of denial that rhymes exactly with the problems they are having. It's not a deflection, but a straightforward description of AMDs current top-down market strategy of partnering with big players instead of doubling down to have a great OOBE for consumers & others who don't order GPUs by the pallet. It's an honest reflection if their current core competencies, and the opportunity presented by Nvidia's margins. They are going for a bang-for-buck right now aiming at data center workloads, and the hyperscalers care a lot about perf/$ than raw performance at. Hyperscalers are also more self-sufficient at software: they have entire teams working on PyTorch, Jax, and writing kernels.
    - schmidtleonard 2y ago
      That's the excuse used by every big company shitting out software so broken that it needs intensive professional babysitting. I've been on both sides of this shitshow, I've even said those lines before! But I've also been in the trenches making the broken shit work and I know that it's fundamentally an excuse. There's a reason why people pay 80% margin to Nvidia and there's a reason why AMD is worth less than the rounding error when people call NVDA a 3 trillion dollar company. It's not because people can't read a spec sheet, it's because people want their expensive engineers training models not changing diapers on incontinent equipment. I hope AMD pulls through but denial is _not_ the move.
      - sangnoir 2y ago
        What exactly are they in denial about? They are aware that software is not a strength of theirs, so they partner with those who are great at it. Would you say AMD is "shitting the bed" by not building it's own consoles too? You know AMD could build a kick-ass console since they are doing the heavy-lifting for the Playstation, and the XBox[1] , but AMD knows as much as anybody that they don't have the skills to wrangle studio relationships or figure out which games to finance. Instead, they lean hard in their HW skills and get Sony Entertainment/the Xbox division do what they do best. 1.and the Steam Deck, plus half a dozen Deck clones.
        roenxi 2y ago
        There is probably one employee - either a direct report of Su's or maybe one of her grandchildren in the org chart - who needs to "get it". If they replaced that one manager with someone who sees graphics cards as a tool to accelerate linear algebra then AMD would be participating more effectively in a multi-trillion dollar market. They are so breathtakingly close to the minimum standards of competence on this one. We know from the specs that the cards they produce should be able to perform. This is a case-specific example of failure, it doesn't generalise very well to other markets. AMD is really well positioned for this very specific opportunity of historic proportions and the only thing holding them back is a somewhat continuous stream of unforced failures when writing a high quality compute driver. It seems to be pretty close to one single team of people holding the company back although organisational issues tend to stem from a level or two higher than the team. This could be the most visible case of value destruction by a public company we'll see in our lifetimes. Optimistically speaking maybe they've already found and sacked the individual responsible and we're just waiting for improvement. I'm buying Nvidia until that proves to be so.
- wjnc 2y ago
  I enjoy this train of thought a lot. Capturing shareholder value by just creating it yourself. The destruction of a moat I fear is worth less than the existence of a moat a competitor has successfully built. So don’t forget to buying puts Nvidia.
- isthatafact 2y ago
  It does seem like a good idea. If the obvious major Nvidia customers see it as too risky (or we could speculate about other possible reasons why it has not happened yet), maybe some hedge fund who is struggling with where to put their cash could initiate and fund the project.

Lerc 2y ago

You joke, but it is almost a genuine investment opportunity here for a large player. Spend a billion on AMD shares, Spend another Billion on a out-of-house software team to solve the software solution to more than double the share price. Taking into account that there are players that already own billions in AMD shares, they could probably do that as well. On the other hand perhaps it would be better for them, as major shareholders, to have a word with AMD management.

schmidtleonard 2y ago
I don't have the inside baseball but I have seen those weird as hell interviews with Lisa Su where she gets asked point blank about the software problems and instead of "working on it, stay tuned" -- an answer that costs nothing to give -- she deflects into "performance is what matters," which is the kind of denial that rhymes exactly with the problems they are having. No, the horsepower of your F1 racecar doesn't matter if the engine doesn't start and there's a wheel missing! You need to fix those problems before the horsepower can matter! Please tell me you are fixing the starter and the wheel! Hopefully I am reading too much into this. Hopefully she doesn't have any weird hangups over investing in software and it all just takes time to Do It Right after GPGPU got starved in the AMD winter. But if it is a weird hangup then yeah, 100%, ownership needs to get management in line because whiffing a matmul benchmark years into a world where matmul is worth trillions just ain't it.
- sangnoir 2y ago
  > she deflects into "performance is what matters," which is the kind of denial that rhymes exactly with the problems they are having. It's not a deflection, but a straightforward description of AMDs current top-down market strategy of partnering with big players instead of doubling down to have a great OOBE for consumers & others who don't order GPUs by the pallet. It's an honest reflection if their current core competencies, and the opportunity presented by Nvidia's margins. They are going for a bang-for-buck right now aiming at data center workloads, and the hyperscalers care a lot about perf/$ than raw performance at. Hyperscalers are also more self-sufficient at software: they have entire teams working on PyTorch, Jax, and writing kernels.
  - schmidtleonard 2y ago
    That's the excuse used by every big company shitting out software so broken that it needs intensive professional babysitting. I've been on both sides of this shitshow, I've even said those lines before! But I've also been in the trenches making the broken shit work and I know that it's fundamentally an excuse. There's a reason why people pay 80% margin to Nvidia and there's a reason why AMD is worth less than the rounding error when people call NVDA a 3 trillion dollar company. It's not because people can't read a spec sheet, it's because people want their expensive engineers training models not changing diapers on incontinent equipment. I hope AMD pulls through but denial is _not_ the move.
    - sangnoir 2y ago
      What exactly are they in denial about? They are aware that software is not a strength of theirs, so they partner with those who are great at it. Would you say AMD is "shitting the bed" by not building it's own consoles too? You know AMD could build a kick-ass console since they are doing the heavy-lifting for the Playstation, and the XBox[1] , but AMD knows as much as anybody that they don't have the skills to wrangle studio relationships or figure out which games to finance. Instead, they lean hard in their HW skills and get Sony Entertainment/the Xbox division do what they do best. 1.and the Steam Deck, plus half a dozen Deck clones.
      - roenxi 2y ago
        There is probably one employee - either a direct report of Su's or maybe one of her grandchildren in the org chart - who needs to "get it". If they replaced that one manager with someone who sees graphics cards as a tool to accelerate linear algebra then AMD would be participating more effectively in a multi-trillion dollar market. They are so breathtakingly close to the minimum standards of competence on this one. We know from the specs that the cards they produce should be able to perform. This is a case-specific example of failure, it doesn't generalise very well to other markets. AMD is really well positioned for this very specific opportunity of historic proportions and the only thing holding them back is a somewhat continuous stream of unforced failures when writing a high quality compute driver. It seems to be pretty close to one single team of people holding the company back although organisational issues tend to stem from a level or two higher than the team. This could be the most visible case of value destruction by a public company we'll see in our lifetimes. Optimistically speaking maybe they've already found and sacked the individual responsible and we're just waiting for improvement. I'm buying Nvidia until that proves to be so.
wjnc 2y ago
I enjoy this train of thought a lot. Capturing shareholder value by just creating it yourself. The destruction of a moat I fear is worth less than the existence of a moat a competitor has successfully built. So don’t forget to buying puts Nvidia.
isthatafact 2y ago
It does seem like a good idea. If the obvious major Nvidia customers see it as too risky (or we could speculate about other possible reasons why it has not happened yet), maybe some hedge fund who is struggling with where to put their cash could initiate and fund the project.