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> ...he'd be much more worried about whether AMD management have any interest in companies like his succeeding. This reads as incredibly entitled. AMD owes him

> ...he'd be much more worried about whether AMD management have any interest in companies like his succeeding. This reads as incredibly entitled. AMD owes him nothing, especially if he's opposed to the leadership's vision[1] and being belligerent about it. There is maybe 1 or 2 companies with enough cachet to demand management changes at a supplier like AMD - and they have market caps in the trillions. 1. Lisa Su hasn't been shy about AMD being all about partnering with large partners who can move volume. My interpretation of this is AMD prefers dealing with Sony, Microsoft, hyperscalers, and HPC builders, then possibly tier II OEMs. Small startups are probably much further down the line, close to consumers at the tail end of AMD's attention queue. I don't like it as a consumer, but it seems like a sound strategy since the partners will shoulder most of the software effort, which is a weakness AMD has against Nvidia. They can focus on cranking out ok-to-great hardware at more-than-ok prices and build up a warchest for future investments, and who knows when this hype bubble will burst and take VC dollars with it, or someone invents an architecture that's less demanding on compute (if you're more optimistic)

roenxi 2y ago
Sure. But we hear a lot about Hotz because all the unentitled people rolled their eyes and went over to buy Nvidia cards. He's one of the major voices who are unreasonable enough to pipe up on Twitter and air dirty laundry. I doubt AMD are going to listen to him. They're in a great spot and are probably going to tap into the market in a big way. But Hotz isn't crazy to test them in an odd way - although he'd probably be better off dropping AMD cards like most other people in his price range would.
- sangnoir 2y ago
  > But Hotz isn't crazy to test them in an odd way.. He should have just read the Lisa Su interview from Q1 2024 where ahe laid out AMDs strategy without equivocating > ... although he'd probably be better off dropping AMD cards I think this is what's best for everyone. Looking at his recent track record[1], he seems like a person who's gets really excited by kicking things off and experiencing the exponentially growth phase, and then when it flattens out into a sigmoid curve, he dusts his hands and declares his work done, and moves to the next thing. . 1. Hired by Elon to "fix" Twitter, CommaAI, and soon, Tiny
  - lhl 2y ago
    > Looking at his recent track record[1] One might argue he's had a pattern for even longer. While he did do some early hypervisor glitching, even his PS3 root key release was basically just applying fail0verflow's ECDSA exploit (fail0verflow didn't release the keys specifically because they didn't want to get sued ... so that was a pretty dick move [1]). For his projects, I think it's important to look at what he's done that's cool (eg, reversing 7900XTX [2], creating a user-space driver that completely bypasses AMD drivers for compute [3]) and separating it from his (super cringe) social media postings/self-hype. Still, at the end of the day, here's hoping that someone at AMD realizes that having terrible consumer and workstation support will basically continue to be a huge albatross/handicap - it cuts them off basically all academic/research development (almost every single ML library and technique you can name/used in production is CUDA first because of this) and the non-hyperscaler enterprise market as well. Any dev can get a PO for a $500 Nvidia GPU (or has one on their workstation laptop already). What's the pathway for ROCm? (honestly, if I were in charge, my #1 priority would be to make sure ROCm is installed and works w/ every single APU installed, even the 2CU ones). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Computer_Entertainment_America,_Inc._v._Hotz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Computer_Entertainment_Am... [2] https://github.com/tinygrad/7900xtx https://github.com/tinygrad/7900xtx [3] https://github.com/tinygrad/tinygrad/blob/master/docs/developer/am.md https://github.com/tinygrad/tinygrad/blob/master/docs/develo...
  - KeplerBoy 2y ago
    Isn't he still actively leading and promoting Comma?
    - sangnoir 2y ago
      No. https://geohot.github.io//blog/jekyll/update/2022/10/29/the-heroes-journey.html https://geohot.github.io//blog/jekyll/update/2022/10/29/the-...
      - wolrah 2y ago
        That post is from 2022 saying he's "taking some time away" and it's been "some time" since then. He was just at CES promoting Comma: https://youtu.be/GLGuA2qF3Kk https://youtu.be/GLGuA2qF3Kk
Paradigma11 2y ago
AMD owes us (its customers) a lot for all the empty and broken promises on this over the many many years and hardware generations.
noch 2y ago
> This reads as incredibly entitled. AMD owes him nothing, especially if he's opposed to the leadership's vision[1] and being belligerent about it. A generation ago, everyone in sales and developer relations understood that "the customer is always right". Remember a sweaty dude on stage jumping about screaming "developers! developers! developers"? It was exhausting dealing with all the free software and hardware sent to developers, not to mention the endless free conferences for even the most backwater developer community. But that's an ethos for boomers, I guess. On the one hand "incredibly entitled" and on the other you talk about AMD's leadership vision. Your long closing paragraph shows that entitlement of a developer has nothing to do with anything and isn't relevant in the conversation (I can show you guys at OEMs who are incredibly arrogant and entitled or outright a$$holes but so what?). It's just an opinion based on your personal bias. In reality, AMD simply doesn't care about small AI startups or developers as you've noted. They don't care about me wanting to run all my AI locally so that I can manage my dairy farm with a modest fleet of robots. If they cared, and they sent him MI300s immediately (or sent them to the other 8 startups that asked for them), you wouldn't be chastising him about being "incredibly entitled".
imtringued 2y ago
I don't really see why those companies would prefer AMD over Nvidia, they are not hurting for money and therefore able to spend that money on Nvidia or build their own hardware, like Google did. Meta and Microsoft are big enough they could just build their own TPUs with a stable software stack and cut off Nvidia and AMD at the same time. From this perspective, AMD only ever makes sense as an "also ran company" for a few niche use cases.

roenxi 2y ago

Sure. But we hear a lot about Hotz because all the unentitled people rolled their eyes and went over to buy Nvidia cards. He's one of the major voices who are unreasonable enough to pipe up on Twitter and air dirty laundry. I doubt AMD are going to listen to him. They're in a great spot and are probably going to tap into the market in a big way. But Hotz isn't crazy to test them in an odd way - although he'd probably be better off dropping AMD cards like most other people in his price range would.

sangnoir 2y ago
> But Hotz isn't crazy to test them in an odd way.. He should have just read the Lisa Su interview from Q1 2024 where ahe laid out AMDs strategy without equivocating > ... although he'd probably be better off dropping AMD cards I think this is what's best for everyone. Looking at his recent track record[1], he seems like a person who's gets really excited by kicking things off and experiencing the exponentially growth phase, and then when it flattens out into a sigmoid curve, he dusts his hands and declares his work done, and moves to the next thing. . 1. Hired by Elon to "fix" Twitter, CommaAI, and soon, Tiny
- lhl 2y ago
  > Looking at his recent track record[1] One might argue he's had a pattern for even longer. While he did do some early hypervisor glitching, even his PS3 root key release was basically just applying fail0verflow's ECDSA exploit (fail0verflow didn't release the keys specifically because they didn't want to get sued ... so that was a pretty dick move [1]). For his projects, I think it's important to look at what he's done that's cool (eg, reversing 7900XTX [2], creating a user-space driver that completely bypasses AMD drivers for compute [3]) and separating it from his (super cringe) social media postings/self-hype. Still, at the end of the day, here's hoping that someone at AMD realizes that having terrible consumer and workstation support will basically continue to be a huge albatross/handicap - it cuts them off basically all academic/research development (almost every single ML library and technique you can name/used in production is CUDA first because of this) and the non-hyperscaler enterprise market as well. Any dev can get a PO for a $500 Nvidia GPU (or has one on their workstation laptop already). What's the pathway for ROCm? (honestly, if I were in charge, my #1 priority would be to make sure ROCm is installed and works w/ every single APU installed, even the 2CU ones). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Computer_Entertainment_America,_Inc._v._Hotz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Computer_Entertainment_Am... [2] https://github.com/tinygrad/7900xtx https://github.com/tinygrad/7900xtx [3] https://github.com/tinygrad/tinygrad/blob/master/docs/developer/am.md https://github.com/tinygrad/tinygrad/blob/master/docs/develo...
- KeplerBoy 2y ago
  Isn't he still actively leading and promoting Comma?
  - sangnoir 2y ago
    No. https://geohot.github.io//blog/jekyll/update/2022/10/29/the-heroes-journey.html https://geohot.github.io//blog/jekyll/update/2022/10/29/the-...
    - wolrah 2y ago
      That post is from 2022 saying he's "taking some time away" and it's been "some time" since then. He was just at CES promoting Comma: https://youtu.be/GLGuA2qF3Kk https://youtu.be/GLGuA2qF3Kk

Paradigma11 2y ago

AMD owes us (its customers) a lot for all the empty and broken promises on this over the many many years and hardware generations.

noch 2y ago

> This reads as incredibly entitled. AMD owes him nothing, especially if he's opposed to the leadership's vision[1] and being belligerent about it. A generation ago, everyone in sales and developer relations understood that "the customer is always right". Remember a sweaty dude on stage jumping about screaming "developers! developers! developers"? It was exhausting dealing with all the free software and hardware sent to developers, not to mention the endless free conferences for even the most backwater developer community. But that's an ethos for boomers, I guess. On the one hand "incredibly entitled" and on the other you talk about AMD's leadership vision. Your long closing paragraph shows that entitlement of a developer has nothing to do with anything and isn't relevant in the conversation (I can show you guys at OEMs who are incredibly arrogant and entitled or outright a$$holes but so what?). It's just an opinion based on your personal bias. In reality, AMD simply doesn't care about small AI startups or developers as you've noted. They don't care about me wanting to run all my AI locally so that I can manage my dairy farm with a modest fleet of robots. If they cared, and they sent him MI300s immediately (or sent them to the other 8 startups that asked for them), you wouldn't be chastising him about being "incredibly entitled".

imtringued 2y ago

I don't really see why those companies would prefer AMD over Nvidia, they are not hurting for money and therefore able to spend that money on Nvidia or build their own hardware, like Google did. Meta and Microsoft are big enough they could just build their own TPUs with a stable software stack and cut off Nvidia and AMD at the same time. From this perspective, AMD only ever makes sense as an "also ran company" for a few niche use cases.