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I don't really care what you believe. Everyone whose dug deep into what AMD is doing has left in disgust if they are lucky and bankruptcy if they are not. If

I don't really care what you believe. Everyone whose dug deep into what AMD is doing has left in disgust if they are lucky and bankruptcy if they are not. If I can save someone else from wasting $100,000 on hardware and six months of their life then my post has done more good than the AMD marketing department ever will.

AnthonyMouse 2y ago
> If I can save someone else from wasting $100,000 on hardware and six months of their life then my post has done more good than the AMD marketing department ever will. This seems like unuseful advice if you've already given up on them. You tried it and at some point in the past it wasn't ready. But by not being ready they're losing money, so they have a direct incentive to fix it. Which would take a certain amount of time, but once you've given up you no longer know if they've done it yet or not, at which point your advice would be stale. Meanwhile the people who attempt it apparently seem to get acquired by Nvidia, for some strange reason. Which implies it should be a worthwhile thing to do. If they've fixed it by now which you wouldn't know if you've stopped looking, or they fix it in the near future, you have a competitive advantage because you have access to lower cost GPUs than your rivals. If not, but you've demonstrated a serious attempt to fix it for everyone yourself, Nvidia comes to you with a sack full of money to make sure you don't finish, and then you get a sack full of money. That's win/win, so rather than nobody doing it, it seems like everybody should be doing it.
- llm_trw 2y ago
  I've tried it three times. I've seen people try it every six months for two decades now. At some point you just have to accept that AMD is not a serious company, but is a second rate copycat and there is no way to change that without firing everyone from middle management up. I'm deeply worried about stagnation in the CPU space now that they are top dog and Intel is dead in the water. Here's hoping China and Risk V save us. >Meanwhile the people who attempt it apparently seem to get acquired by Nvidia Everyone I've seen base jumping has gotten a sponsorship from redbull, ergo. everyone should basejump. Ignore the red smears around the parking lot.
  - Const-me 2y ago
    > I've tried it three times Have you tried compute shaders instead of that weird HPC-only stuff? Compute shaders are widely used by millions of gamers every day. GPU vendors have huge incentive to make them reliable and efficient: modern game engines are using them for lots of thing, e.g. UE5 can even render triangle meshes with GPU compute instead of graphics (the tech is called nanite virtualized geometry). In practice they work fine on all GPUs, ML included: https://github.com/Const-me/Cgml https://github.com/Const-me/Cgml
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    > At some point you just have to accept that AMD is not a serious company, but is a second rate copycat and there is no way to change that without firing everyone from middle management up. AMD has always punched above their weight. Historically their problem was that they were the much smaller company and under heavy resource constraints. Around the turn of the century the Athlon was faster than the Pentium III and then they made x86 64-bit when Intel was trying to screw everyone with Itanic. But the Pentium 4 was a marketing-optimized design that maximized clock speed at the expense of heat and performance per clock. Intel was outselling them even though the Athlon 64 was at least as good if not better. The Pentium 4 was rubbish for laptops because of the heat problems, so Intel eventually had to design a separate chip for that, but they also had the resources to do it. That was the point that AMD made their biggest mistake. When they set out to design their next chip the competition was the Pentium 4, so they made a power-hungry monster designed to hit high clock speeds at the expense of performance per clock. But the reason more people didn't buy the Athlon 64 wasn't that they couldn't figure out that a 2.4GHz CPU could be faster than a 2.8GHz CPU, it was all the anti-competitive shenanigans Intel was doing behind closed doors to e.g. keep PC OEMs from featuring systems with AMD CPUs. Meanwhile by then Intel had figured out that the Pentium 4 was, in fact, a bad design, when their own Pentium M laptops started outperforming the Pentium 4 desktops. So the Pentium 4 line got canceled and Bulldozer had to go up against the Pentium M-based Core, which nearly bankrupted AMD and compromised their ability to fund the R&D needed to sustain state of the art fabs. Since then they've been climbing back out of the hole but it wasn't until Ryzen in 2017 that you could safely conclude they weren't on the verge of bankruptcy, and even then they were saddled with a lot of debt and contracts requiring them to use the uncompetitive Global Foundries fabs for several years. It wasn't until Zen4 in 2022 that they finally got to switch the whole package to TSMC. So until quite recently the answer to the question "why didn't they do X?" was obvious. They didn't have the money. But now they do.
perching_aix 2y ago
I'd be very concerned if somebody makes a $100K decision based on a comment where the author couldn't even differentiate between the words "constitutionally" and "institutionally", while providing as much substance as any other random techbro on any random forum and being overwhelmingly oblivious to it.

AnthonyMouse 2y ago

> If I can save someone else from wasting $100,000 on hardware and six months of their life then my post has done more good than the AMD marketing department ever will. This seems like unuseful advice if you've already given up on them. You tried it and at some point in the past it wasn't ready. But by not being ready they're losing money, so they have a direct incentive to fix it. Which would take a certain amount of time, but once you've given up you no longer know if they've done it yet or not, at which point your advice would be stale. Meanwhile the people who attempt it apparently seem to get acquired by Nvidia, for some strange reason. Which implies it should be a worthwhile thing to do. If they've fixed it by now which you wouldn't know if you've stopped looking, or they fix it in the near future, you have a competitive advantage because you have access to lower cost GPUs than your rivals. If not, but you've demonstrated a serious attempt to fix it for everyone yourself, Nvidia comes to you with a sack full of money to make sure you don't finish, and then you get a sack full of money. That's win/win, so rather than nobody doing it, it seems like everybody should be doing it.

llm_trw 2y ago
I've tried it three times. I've seen people try it every six months for two decades now. At some point you just have to accept that AMD is not a serious company, but is a second rate copycat and there is no way to change that without firing everyone from middle management up. I'm deeply worried about stagnation in the CPU space now that they are top dog and Intel is dead in the water. Here's hoping China and Risk V save us. >Meanwhile the people who attempt it apparently seem to get acquired by Nvidia Everyone I've seen base jumping has gotten a sponsorship from redbull, ergo. everyone should basejump. Ignore the red smears around the parking lot.
- Const-me 2y ago
  > I've tried it three times Have you tried compute shaders instead of that weird HPC-only stuff? Compute shaders are widely used by millions of gamers every day. GPU vendors have huge incentive to make them reliable and efficient: modern game engines are using them for lots of thing, e.g. UE5 can even render triangle meshes with GPU compute instead of graphics (the tech is called nanite virtualized geometry). In practice they work fine on all GPUs, ML included: https://github.com/Const-me/Cgml https://github.com/Const-me/Cgml
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  > At some point you just have to accept that AMD is not a serious company, but is a second rate copycat and there is no way to change that without firing everyone from middle management up. AMD has always punched above their weight. Historically their problem was that they were the much smaller company and under heavy resource constraints. Around the turn of the century the Athlon was faster than the Pentium III and then they made x86 64-bit when Intel was trying to screw everyone with Itanic. But the Pentium 4 was a marketing-optimized design that maximized clock speed at the expense of heat and performance per clock. Intel was outselling them even though the Athlon 64 was at least as good if not better. The Pentium 4 was rubbish for laptops because of the heat problems, so Intel eventually had to design a separate chip for that, but they also had the resources to do it. That was the point that AMD made their biggest mistake. When they set out to design their next chip the competition was the Pentium 4, so they made a power-hungry monster designed to hit high clock speeds at the expense of performance per clock. But the reason more people didn't buy the Athlon 64 wasn't that they couldn't figure out that a 2.4GHz CPU could be faster than a 2.8GHz CPU, it was all the anti-competitive shenanigans Intel was doing behind closed doors to e.g. keep PC OEMs from featuring systems with AMD CPUs. Meanwhile by then Intel had figured out that the Pentium 4 was, in fact, a bad design, when their own Pentium M laptops started outperforming the Pentium 4 desktops. So the Pentium 4 line got canceled and Bulldozer had to go up against the Pentium M-based Core, which nearly bankrupted AMD and compromised their ability to fund the R&D needed to sustain state of the art fabs. Since then they've been climbing back out of the hole but it wasn't until Ryzen in 2017 that you could safely conclude they weren't on the verge of bankruptcy, and even then they were saddled with a lot of debt and contracts requiring them to use the uncompetitive Global Foundries fabs for several years. It wasn't until Zen4 in 2022 that they finally got to switch the whole package to TSMC. So until quite recently the answer to the question "why didn't they do X?" was obvious. They didn't have the money. But now they do.

perching_aix 2y ago

I'd be very concerned if somebody makes a $100K decision based on a comment where the author couldn't even differentiate between the words "constitutionally" and "institutionally", while providing as much substance as any other random techbro on any random forum and being overwhelmingly oblivious to it.