7 ms·

AMD YOLO

120 points by trulyrandom 2y ago

mika6996 2y ago
AMD is finally starting to make progress with their software stack. Who would have thought?
- fabiensanglard 2y ago
  Does the post confirm anything about software besides "believe"? It seems ADB is just sending more hardware. As far as I know the drivers are still lacking.
  - WithinReason 2y ago
    tinygrad replaced the entire HW stack of AMD through reverse engineering
dlcarrier 2y ago
AMD is probably undervalued, but Nvidia is clearly way overvalued. I don't think the reckoning will come from AMD stealing Nvidia's market share, it'll come when the hype bubble collapses and businesses start treating neural networks like commodities, running whatever is cheapest instead of the absolute most powerful. AMD is in a great position, because they make both great GPU/NPU hardware and great CPU hardware.
- Jalad 2y ago
  > AMD is probably undervalued, but Nvidia is clearly way overvalued. AMD trades at a price to earnings ratio of 99, NVDA trades at a PE of ~38. PE isn't everything when looking at companies, but I don't see other reasons to think AMD is undervalued
  - ein0p 2y ago
    That's because the market believes AMD will eventually get its head of its ass on GPUs and start to grow in that segment. Once it starts to grow there, that PE will go up even higher.
  - hmm37 2y ago
    AMD's PE ratio looks high because of their Xilinx acquisition and for tax reasons. You have to look at non-GAAP numbers instead, e.g. AMD's forward PE ratio which is only ~20 or so. Nvidia's forward PE is ~30.
    - empiricus 2y ago
      just bought a little amd with zero dilligence, and now i see they aquired xilinx? why would anyone do that... remorse.
      - littlestymaar 2y ago
        The acquisition was announced 4 and a half years ago[1] and finalized 3 years ago so it's not like it's a recent thing. [1]: https://ir.amd.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/977/amd-to-acquire-xilinx-creating-the-industrys-high https://ir.amd.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/977/amd...
      - transpute 2y ago
        Isn't Xilinx the origin of "AI NPU" in AMD Ryzen?
  - deadbabe 2y ago
    Is PE even anything? If you guided your investing based on sane PE ratios for the past decade you would have been consistently unhappy with missing out on huge gains in tech companies.
    - georgeecollins 2y ago
      In the long run, I believe yes. PE also would not have been helpful in the late 1920s or late 1990s. But things tend to revert. One of the reasons why different companies have different p/e for a long time is expectation of growth. So META has had a pretty high P/E, but then E has been growing really fast. GM's earnings don't grow so past so the P/E is low. And capital efficiency also hurts P/E. Disclaimer: I believe stocks represent fractional ownership of an actual company and are ultimately (but not always) valued as such. You can make an argument that financial instruments are just driven by sentiment, supply and demand, and have no correlation to actual reality.
    - Jalad 2y ago
      Agreed, but I don't think that's a good use for PE. PE is useful for comparisons between similar companies, not as an absolute yardstick
    - smallmancontrov 2y ago
      PE is appropriate for companies going steady. It's not appropriate for companies that are growing or dying. Thought experiment: A and B have the same earnings per share, but everyone expects A to double its revenue going forward and B to go steady. Should shares of A go for the same price as shares of B? If you think so, I can front-run you. Thought experiment 2: A and B have the same earnings per share, but everyone expects A to halve its revenue going forward and B to go steady. Should they go for the same price? If you think so, I have some bags for you to hold. The easy answer is that PEG is more appropriate for growing companies and PB is more appropriate for dying companies (since this is HN, I'll also mention that "Team and TAM" is the metric for seed stage). The hard answer is that there is no substitute for modeling the finances of the company and applying a DCF, but your brokerage app can't do that for you so PE/PEG/PB still have their place.
    - 2y ago
  - light_hue_1 2y ago
    That's too shortsighted. Keep in mind that Nvidia gets to charge astronomical prices because AMD's software is crap. Nvidia charges 2-5x as much for equivalent or worse hardware compared to what AMD is selling. That PE ratio will collapse if AMD ever manages to get its act together. I'm still astounded AMD has no fired every executive from the CEO down for this obvious multi-year failure.
- rapsey 2y ago
  > but Nvidia is clearly way overvalued. No it is not actually. They are making insane amounts of money and have very strong forward guidance. With the drop in the last month it is actually cheap (low peg ratio). When the market turns, nvidia is likely to soar once again.
- ein0p 2y ago
  > Nvidia is clearly way overvalued Tell me you haven't looked at Nvidia's financials (especially the margins) without telling me. It basically prints money, now and in the foreseeable future, and all of its products are permanently sold out, even at the insane prices Nvidia is charging.
  - eightysixfour 2y ago
    > foreseeable future I think this is the arguable part. The more AI compute becomes valuable, the more reason there is to divest from their software moat. Their hardware is good, but not unassailable. I think their modest (by tech hype standards) P/E is recognition of this.
    - rapsey 2y ago
      They modest P/E ratio is a consequence of growing their earnings so much.
      - eightysixfour 2y ago
        And yet, when other companies have grown their earnings like mad, their price has outgrown it, driving their P/E up further, because the market expects higher future earnings. nvidia is reaping the rewards of the things built up to now, but isn't necessarily expected to continue to hockey stick. Their P/E is approximately the same as the rest of the S&P 500 technology sector's average.
      - georgeecollins 2y ago
        And also there is some recognition that its going to get really hard to grow them as much proportionately. AMD could increase its earnings a lot pretty quickly, but its hard for NVIDIA to grow like that for the same reasons it is hard for Apple to grow. You are already getting so many of the $ available to spend in that area.
    - baal80spam 2y ago
      But they are making strides in robotics already. Jensen is super smart, business-savvy AND hard-working. These are some of many reasons I own NVDA.
- solumunus 2y ago
  NVDA is valued more appropriately than AMD. NVDA’s valuation based on forward earnings is high, but there are many more extreme examples including AMD.
- formerly_proven 2y ago
  Nvidia is imho kind of a resurgence of large scale 90s Unix systems (ala SGI) [1], and not just by pricing and looks but also if you look at the vertical integration. I think this kind of business setup is more vulnerable to competition from below than people like to think, and it really only takes 1-2 product misses for a big shakeup. [1] Co-developed proprietary software stacks running on highly proprietary and non-standard hardware targeting very specific workloads.
- xnx 2y ago
  Is it possible someone will write a CUDA to AMD/Tensor/whatever transpiler (high-level emulator? I'm not sure of the right term) I thought there were a remarkably small number of ops that GPUs perform. Seems like a very high premium to pay for not wanting to rewrite in JAX or whatever.
  - drexlspivey 2y ago
    AMD hired 1 guy to do it and then fired him
    - xnx 2y ago
      I wondered if John Carmack would take his strong knowledge of low level hardware and interest in AI and work on this, but he seems to be working on a non LLM flavor of AI.
      - newsclues 2y ago
        Or Abrash?
      - bayindirh 2y ago
        From his talks, he never liked AMD/ATI hardware. Doom 3 code was infamously NVIDIA optimized, since he liked the hardware more.
  - smallmancontrov 2y ago
    Lack of translation layer wasn't the problem, AMD's shit being completely broken (for this purpose) was the problem. Driver-level broken, possibly hardware-level broken. Black screens, restarts, wrong answers, threads full of people shouting into the void year after year about the same behavior before seeing the light and buying nvidia. Then NVDA pumped by trillions and AMD did not and even AMD's crack team of trained denial specialists could no longer stay the course, so they started to turn the ship. But that was only a year or two ago and even the tiniest changes take years in hardware land so the biggest sins are still baked in to the latest chips, but at least the software has started to suck a bit less. I no longer see 100% of the people who try to build on AMD compute run away screaming. Many do, but not all. That's a change, an important and positive one. If AMD keeps it up maybe they can save us from 80% margins on matrix multiplication after all.
- ZeroTalent 2y ago
  NVIDIA is one of the most undervalued companies in the SPX looking at fundamentals, even disregarding what they are planning next (subscription services for CUDA, and humanoids, etc). Take a look at their last quarter's income statement graph: https://i.imgur.com/mQwZ5o4.png https://i.imgur.com/mQwZ5o4.png - Once in a few years I see a Sankey graph looking like that. And it's only growing over the last 10 years.
- Jlagreen 2y ago
  The way I see it is that Nvidia might reacht $1 trillion in revenue before AMD reaches $100 billion in revenue. So the upside in revenue growth is higher for Nvidia. People think that because a company has grown very large very quickly that it can't grow as much anymore. But on the other hand, there is clear evidence that Nvidia continues to dominate AMD's offerings despite the latter having a competitive product now. So the metric for Nvidia isn't Nvidia vs. AMD but the growth aspect of AI market overall.
rs186 2y ago
I have trouble distinguishing this post from those on r/wallstreetbets. To be honest, I have seen quite a few posts on wsb that are much more informative than this
- y-curious 2y ago
  Well, I generally am inclined to take DD from geohotz over anonymous wsb posts.
  - AnotherGoodName 2y ago
    It's not interesting though. He was sent an MI300X, released in 2023, to develop his AI stack with. The MI300X was lacking in a few areas vs the H100 at the time, overall perf and power efficiency were two big areas. Power efficiency is critical atm, that's seriously the biggest barrier to scaling datacenter rollout right now. AMDs next card might be better on this front, it might not. But this article doesn't talk to anything about the next card. It's referring to a card from 2023.
- qwery 2y ago
  The author is George Hotz, who most famously developed some iOS and PS3 exploits and got sued by Sony. I have litle interest in the content of this particular article and I think your evaluation of the article is fair.
LorenDB 2y ago
RDNA 4 is proving that AMD can be competitive in GPUs. Is it on par with Blackwell? No. Is is a much better improvement over previous gen than Blackwell? Yes, at least if you consider consumer pricing/marketing.
- htrp 2y ago
  It'll be competitive just in time for them to move to UDNA.... or have they walked that back too?
Cornbilly 2y ago
Do all of geohot's posts come off as manic to anyone else?
- stefan_ 2y ago
  It ain't March 8 either
  - jay-barronville 2y ago
    > It ain't March 8 either I didn’t even notice that. That obviously means George is living in the future.
    - jonatron 2y ago
      Or in Hong Kong.
      - jay-barronville 2y ago
        > Or in Hong Kong. Time zones are a conspiracy. George is living in the future.
      - littlestymaar 2y ago
        it's the same picture.jpg
  - jonas21 2y ago
    It is in Asia.
  - Havoc 2y ago
    He's in asia (Singapore I think) to ride out the chaos in the US according to his last stream.
- karolist 2y ago
  Yes, but that's just his personality. His mind seems to be racing at 200mph whilst the output device (hands, keyboard etc) can't keep up, so some context gets dropped here and there. I remember I had a hard time watching his streams because he'd type at 160wpm or so, but half of the keypresses were correcting mistakes...
waltercool 2y ago
[dead]
parsimo2010 2y ago
"I’m betting on AMD being undervalued, and that the demand for AI has barely started." I'd love to see AMD get a multiplatorm product so mature that I can pip install PyTorch on Windows or MacOS with an AMD card (https://pytorch.org/get-started/locally/ https://pytorch.org/get-started/locally/). But I don't think that their market cap will change quickly even if this happens. Many people have been bought AMD cards in the past because they are cheaper and then died waiting for AMD to have a mature CUDA equivalent. Nobody is going to be quickly buying AMD cards as soon as the software is good- they will gradually change when they replace NVDA hardware, and not everyone is going to make that choice. If I were making a bet (and I'm not), I'd bet that NVDA is overvalued right now and their growth will slow to correct this but it won't crash, and I'd bet that AMD will gradually increase in value to reward them for software investments, but it won't spike as soon as their software looks good. Neither of these things would I want to put a lot of money on, since they are long term bets, and if you're going long then you might as well just invest in the broader market. And even if I thought that NVDA was going to crash and AMD was going to spike, I still wouldn't bet because I have no idea whether it would happen in the next 6 months or 6 years.
wavemode 2y ago
Unfortunately I think the current AI hype cycle will die down before AMD ever gets a chance to benefit from it in terms of stock price. AMD is not undervalued, rather it is Nvidia that is overvalued.
htrp 2y ago
> Bought in for a quarter million. Long term. It can always dip short term, but check back in 5 years. So basically he got 2 MI300s and is currently trying to pump AMD?
- littlestymaar 2y ago
  > 2 MI300s Not two cards, two boxes (with 8 cards each I'd assume).
  - ac29 2y ago
    It weighed 750 pounds so I think he got more than 16 cards. Or maybe they sent entire servers?
    - _zoltan_ 2y ago
      that's the only way for MI300X. It's not a PCI card...
    - latchkey 2y ago
      Each 8x box weighs 300lbs+
    - littlestymaar 2y ago
      > Or maybe they sent entire servers? Yeah, that's what I meant by “boxes”
georgeecollins 2y ago
I would really love it if people on Hacker News could weigh in on how much of a moat they think CUDA really is. As in: How hard is it to use something else? If you started a project today how much would you want to get paid to not use CUDA? A lot of readers on this site have a good insight into this and it is a key question financial people are asking without the knowledge many people here possess.
- ljlolel 2y ago
  So why give away the valuable knowledge away for free?
  - ofrzeta 2y ago
    It's the hacker philosophy, isn't it?
- jononor 2y ago
  One aspect that influences is how close to the bleeding edge one needs to be. And how niche the model/application is. ROCm lags by some years. And application/model/framework developers test less on it, which can be problematic in niches. For doing something very established like say image classification, that does not really matter - 3 year old CNNs will generally do the trick. But if on wants to drop in model X just put on GitHub/HuggingFace the last year, one would be buying a lot of trouble.
- czk 2y ago
  SemiAnalysis has a nice write-up on MI300X vs H100/H200 and concludes that the CUDA moat is still very real: https://semianalysis.com/2024/12/22/mi300x-vs-h100-vs-h200-benchmark-part-1-training/ https://semianalysis.com/2024/12/22/mi300x-vs-h100-vs-h200-b... "As fast as AMD tries to fill in the CUDA moat, NVIDIA engineers are working overtime to deepen said moat with new features, libraries, and performance updates."
- ChocolateGod 2y ago
  > could weigh in on how much of a moat they think CUDA really is. There's movement to implement CUDA libraries that work on non-Nvidia cards, but I guess adoption could be hindered by legal fears. https://github.com/vosen/ZLUDA https://github.com/vosen/ZLUDA
blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
I saw a video the other day that showed a new AMD laptop processor that is comparable to the Apple processors in performance and battery life. That was very surprising and also a great thing for windows or Linux laptops. But at the same time, the market for these and the potential for profit isn’t really that big. Consumers are willing to pay for a premium for Apple but not anyone else.
- panstromek 2y ago
  Do you have a link? I'd like to know which model that was.
  - voidmain0001 2y ago
    Maybe this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7HUud7IvAo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7HUud7IvAo
  - blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
    I believe it was this particular laptop: https://hothardware.com/reviews/rog-flow-z13-review https://hothardware.com/reviews/rog-flow-z13-review It’s the same processor that is in that new Framework desktop that was on HN recently, but for some reason Framework is not putting it in laptops: https://frame.work/desktop https://frame.work/desktop
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
fangpenlin 2y ago
I heard that Nvidia's graph cards are the best in the class in terms of power consumption vs TFLOP ration. I wonder what's the number of AMD vs Nvidia? I would like to see the number because power consumption is going to take a big portion of AI training. In comparsion, hardware might not be that expensive in the long run.
alecco 2y ago
I like the guy but he is wrong. Besides the CUDA ecosystem, Nvidia hardware has a lot of features and a lot of things to yet optimize. Like optimizations by DeepSeek (non-CUTLASS custom models and DualPipe). I think Nvidia's current hardware has plenty of legs and that's why they are not rushed on releasing next gen chips. The actual challenger is Cerebras. No need to load (VRAM->SRAM) all the parameters for every batch . But they have yet to prove they can scale and support the custom stack. We'll see.

AMD YOLO

120 points by trulyrandom 2y ago

mika6996 2y ago

AMD is finally starting to make progress with their software stack. Who would have thought?

fabiensanglard 2y ago
Does the post confirm anything about software besides "believe"? It seems ADB is just sending more hardware. As far as I know the drivers are still lacking.
- WithinReason 2y ago
  tinygrad replaced the entire HW stack of AMD through reverse engineering

dlcarrier 2y ago

AMD is probably undervalued, but Nvidia is clearly way overvalued. I don't think the reckoning will come from AMD stealing Nvidia's market share, it'll come when the hype bubble collapses and businesses start treating neural networks like commodities, running whatever is cheapest instead of the absolute most powerful. AMD is in a great position, because they make both great GPU/NPU hardware and great CPU hardware.

Jalad 2y ago
> AMD is probably undervalued, but Nvidia is clearly way overvalued. AMD trades at a price to earnings ratio of 99, NVDA trades at a PE of ~38. PE isn't everything when looking at companies, but I don't see other reasons to think AMD is undervalued
- ein0p 2y ago
  That's because the market believes AMD will eventually get its head of its ass on GPUs and start to grow in that segment. Once it starts to grow there, that PE will go up even higher.
- hmm37 2y ago
  AMD's PE ratio looks high because of their Xilinx acquisition and for tax reasons. You have to look at non-GAAP numbers instead, e.g. AMD's forward PE ratio which is only ~20 or so. Nvidia's forward PE is ~30.
  - empiricus 2y ago
    just bought a little amd with zero dilligence, and now i see they aquired xilinx? why would anyone do that... remorse.
    - littlestymaar 2y ago
      The acquisition was announced 4 and a half years ago[1] and finalized 3 years ago so it's not like it's a recent thing. [1]: https://ir.amd.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/977/amd-to-acquire-xilinx-creating-the-industrys-high https://ir.amd.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/977/amd...
    - transpute 2y ago
      Isn't Xilinx the origin of "AI NPU" in AMD Ryzen?
- deadbabe 2y ago
  Is PE even anything? If you guided your investing based on sane PE ratios for the past decade you would have been consistently unhappy with missing out on huge gains in tech companies.
  - georgeecollins 2y ago
    In the long run, I believe yes. PE also would not have been helpful in the late 1920s or late 1990s. But things tend to revert. One of the reasons why different companies have different p/e for a long time is expectation of growth. So META has had a pretty high P/E, but then E has been growing really fast. GM's earnings don't grow so past so the P/E is low. And capital efficiency also hurts P/E. Disclaimer: I believe stocks represent fractional ownership of an actual company and are ultimately (but not always) valued as such. You can make an argument that financial instruments are just driven by sentiment, supply and demand, and have no correlation to actual reality.
  - Jalad 2y ago
    Agreed, but I don't think that's a good use for PE. PE is useful for comparisons between similar companies, not as an absolute yardstick
  - smallmancontrov 2y ago
    PE is appropriate for companies going steady. It's not appropriate for companies that are growing or dying. Thought experiment: A and B have the same earnings per share, but everyone expects A to double its revenue going forward and B to go steady. Should shares of A go for the same price as shares of B? If you think so, I can front-run you. Thought experiment 2: A and B have the same earnings per share, but everyone expects A to halve its revenue going forward and B to go steady. Should they go for the same price? If you think so, I have some bags for you to hold. The easy answer is that PEG is more appropriate for growing companies and PB is more appropriate for dying companies (since this is HN, I'll also mention that "Team and TAM" is the metric for seed stage). The hard answer is that there is no substitute for modeling the finances of the company and applying a DCF, but your brokerage app can't do that for you so PE/PEG/PB still have their place.
  - 2y ago
- light_hue_1 2y ago
  That's too shortsighted. Keep in mind that Nvidia gets to charge astronomical prices because AMD's software is crap. Nvidia charges 2-5x as much for equivalent or worse hardware compared to what AMD is selling. That PE ratio will collapse if AMD ever manages to get its act together. I'm still astounded AMD has no fired every executive from the CEO down for this obvious multi-year failure.
rapsey 2y ago
> but Nvidia is clearly way overvalued. No it is not actually. They are making insane amounts of money and have very strong forward guidance. With the drop in the last month it is actually cheap (low peg ratio). When the market turns, nvidia is likely to soar once again.
ein0p 2y ago
> Nvidia is clearly way overvalued Tell me you haven't looked at Nvidia's financials (especially the margins) without telling me. It basically prints money, now and in the foreseeable future, and all of its products are permanently sold out, even at the insane prices Nvidia is charging.
- eightysixfour 2y ago
  > foreseeable future I think this is the arguable part. The more AI compute becomes valuable, the more reason there is to divest from their software moat. Their hardware is good, but not unassailable. I think their modest (by tech hype standards) P/E is recognition of this.
  - rapsey 2y ago
    They modest P/E ratio is a consequence of growing their earnings so much.
    - eightysixfour 2y ago
      And yet, when other companies have grown their earnings like mad, their price has outgrown it, driving their P/E up further, because the market expects higher future earnings. nvidia is reaping the rewards of the things built up to now, but isn't necessarily expected to continue to hockey stick. Their P/E is approximately the same as the rest of the S&P 500 technology sector's average.
    - georgeecollins 2y ago
      And also there is some recognition that its going to get really hard to grow them as much proportionately. AMD could increase its earnings a lot pretty quickly, but its hard for NVIDIA to grow like that for the same reasons it is hard for Apple to grow. You are already getting so many of the $ available to spend in that area.
  - baal80spam 2y ago
    But they are making strides in robotics already. Jensen is super smart, business-savvy AND hard-working. These are some of many reasons I own NVDA.
solumunus 2y ago
NVDA is valued more appropriately than AMD. NVDA’s valuation based on forward earnings is high, but there are many more extreme examples including AMD.
formerly_proven 2y ago
Nvidia is imho kind of a resurgence of large scale 90s Unix systems (ala SGI) [1], and not just by pricing and looks but also if you look at the vertical integration. I think this kind of business setup is more vulnerable to competition from below than people like to think, and it really only takes 1-2 product misses for a big shakeup. [1] Co-developed proprietary software stacks running on highly proprietary and non-standard hardware targeting very specific workloads.
xnx 2y ago
Is it possible someone will write a CUDA to AMD/Tensor/whatever transpiler (high-level emulator? I'm not sure of the right term) I thought there were a remarkably small number of ops that GPUs perform. Seems like a very high premium to pay for not wanting to rewrite in JAX or whatever.
- drexlspivey 2y ago
  AMD hired 1 guy to do it and then fired him
  - xnx 2y ago
    I wondered if John Carmack would take his strong knowledge of low level hardware and interest in AI and work on this, but he seems to be working on a non LLM flavor of AI.
    - newsclues 2y ago
      Or Abrash?
    - bayindirh 2y ago
      From his talks, he never liked AMD/ATI hardware. Doom 3 code was infamously NVIDIA optimized, since he liked the hardware more.
- smallmancontrov 2y ago
  Lack of translation layer wasn't the problem, AMD's shit being completely broken (for this purpose) was the problem. Driver-level broken, possibly hardware-level broken. Black screens, restarts, wrong answers, threads full of people shouting into the void year after year about the same behavior before seeing the light and buying nvidia. Then NVDA pumped by trillions and AMD did not and even AMD's crack team of trained denial specialists could no longer stay the course, so they started to turn the ship. But that was only a year or two ago and even the tiniest changes take years in hardware land so the biggest sins are still baked in to the latest chips, but at least the software has started to suck a bit less. I no longer see 100% of the people who try to build on AMD compute run away screaming. Many do, but not all. That's a change, an important and positive one. If AMD keeps it up maybe they can save us from 80% margins on matrix multiplication after all.
ZeroTalent 2y ago
NVIDIA is one of the most undervalued companies in the SPX looking at fundamentals, even disregarding what they are planning next (subscription services for CUDA, and humanoids, etc). Take a look at their last quarter's income statement graph: https://i.imgur.com/mQwZ5o4.png https://i.imgur.com/mQwZ5o4.png - Once in a few years I see a Sankey graph looking like that. And it's only growing over the last 10 years.
Jlagreen 2y ago
The way I see it is that Nvidia might reacht $1 trillion in revenue before AMD reaches $100 billion in revenue. So the upside in revenue growth is higher for Nvidia. People think that because a company has grown very large very quickly that it can't grow as much anymore. But on the other hand, there is clear evidence that Nvidia continues to dominate AMD's offerings despite the latter having a competitive product now. So the metric for Nvidia isn't Nvidia vs. AMD but the growth aspect of AI market overall.

rs186 2y ago

I have trouble distinguishing this post from those on r/wallstreetbets. To be honest, I have seen quite a few posts on wsb that are much more informative than this

y-curious 2y ago
Well, I generally am inclined to take DD from geohotz over anonymous wsb posts.
- AnotherGoodName 2y ago
  It's not interesting though. He was sent an MI300X, released in 2023, to develop his AI stack with. The MI300X was lacking in a few areas vs the H100 at the time, overall perf and power efficiency were two big areas. Power efficiency is critical atm, that's seriously the biggest barrier to scaling datacenter rollout right now. AMDs next card might be better on this front, it might not. But this article doesn't talk to anything about the next card. It's referring to a card from 2023.
qwery 2y ago
The author is George Hotz, who most famously developed some iOS and PS3 exploits and got sued by Sony. I have litle interest in the content of this particular article and I think your evaluation of the article is fair.

LorenDB 2y ago

RDNA 4 is proving that AMD can be competitive in GPUs. Is it on par with Blackwell? No. Is is a much better improvement over previous gen than Blackwell? Yes, at least if you consider consumer pricing/marketing.

htrp 2y ago
It'll be competitive just in time for them to move to UDNA.... or have they walked that back too?

Cornbilly 2y ago

Do all of geohot's posts come off as manic to anyone else?

stefan_ 2y ago
It ain't March 8 either
- jay-barronville 2y ago
  > It ain't March 8 either I didn’t even notice that. That obviously means George is living in the future.
  - jonatron 2y ago
    Or in Hong Kong.
    - jay-barronville 2y ago
      > Or in Hong Kong. Time zones are a conspiracy. George is living in the future.
    - littlestymaar 2y ago
      it's the same picture.jpg
- jonas21 2y ago
  It is in Asia.
- Havoc 2y ago
  He's in asia (Singapore I think) to ride out the chaos in the US according to his last stream.
karolist 2y ago
Yes, but that's just his personality. His mind seems to be racing at 200mph whilst the output device (hands, keyboard etc) can't keep up, so some context gets dropped here and there. I remember I had a hard time watching his streams because he'd type at 160wpm or so, but half of the keypresses were correcting mistakes...

waltercool 2y ago

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parsimo2010 2y ago

"I’m betting on AMD being undervalued, and that the demand for AI has barely started." I'd love to see AMD get a multiplatorm product so mature that I can pip install PyTorch on Windows or MacOS with an AMD card (https://pytorch.org/get-started/locally/ https://pytorch.org/get-started/locally/). But I don't think that their market cap will change quickly even if this happens. Many people have been bought AMD cards in the past because they are cheaper and then died waiting for AMD to have a mature CUDA equivalent. Nobody is going to be quickly buying AMD cards as soon as the software is good- they will gradually change when they replace NVDA hardware, and not everyone is going to make that choice. If I were making a bet (and I'm not), I'd bet that NVDA is overvalued right now and their growth will slow to correct this but it won't crash, and I'd bet that AMD will gradually increase in value to reward them for software investments, but it won't spike as soon as their software looks good. Neither of these things would I want to put a lot of money on, since they are long term bets, and if you're going long then you might as well just invest in the broader market. And even if I thought that NVDA was going to crash and AMD was going to spike, I still wouldn't bet because I have no idea whether it would happen in the next 6 months or 6 years.

wavemode 2y ago

Unfortunately I think the current AI hype cycle will die down before AMD ever gets a chance to benefit from it in terms of stock price. AMD is not undervalued, rather it is Nvidia that is overvalued.

htrp 2y ago

> Bought in for a quarter million. Long term. It can always dip short term, but check back in 5 years. So basically he got 2 MI300s and is currently trying to pump AMD?

littlestymaar 2y ago
> 2 MI300s Not two cards, two boxes (with 8 cards each I'd assume).
- ac29 2y ago
  It weighed 750 pounds so I think he got more than 16 cards. Or maybe they sent entire servers?
  - _zoltan_ 2y ago
    that's the only way for MI300X. It's not a PCI card...
  - latchkey 2y ago
    Each 8x box weighs 300lbs+
  - littlestymaar 2y ago
    > Or maybe they sent entire servers? Yeah, that's what I meant by “boxes”

georgeecollins 2y ago

I would really love it if people on Hacker News could weigh in on how much of a moat they think CUDA really is. As in: How hard is it to use something else? If you started a project today how much would you want to get paid to not use CUDA? A lot of readers on this site have a good insight into this and it is a key question financial people are asking without the knowledge many people here possess.

ljlolel 2y ago
So why give away the valuable knowledge away for free?
- ofrzeta 2y ago
  It's the hacker philosophy, isn't it?
jononor 2y ago
One aspect that influences is how close to the bleeding edge one needs to be. And how niche the model/application is. ROCm lags by some years. And application/model/framework developers test less on it, which can be problematic in niches. For doing something very established like say image classification, that does not really matter - 3 year old CNNs will generally do the trick. But if on wants to drop in model X just put on GitHub/HuggingFace the last year, one would be buying a lot of trouble.
czk 2y ago
SemiAnalysis has a nice write-up on MI300X vs H100/H200 and concludes that the CUDA moat is still very real: https://semianalysis.com/2024/12/22/mi300x-vs-h100-vs-h200-benchmark-part-1-training/ https://semianalysis.com/2024/12/22/mi300x-vs-h100-vs-h200-b... "As fast as AMD tries to fill in the CUDA moat, NVIDIA engineers are working overtime to deepen said moat with new features, libraries, and performance updates."
ChocolateGod 2y ago
> could weigh in on how much of a moat they think CUDA really is. There's movement to implement CUDA libraries that work on non-Nvidia cards, but I guess adoption could be hindered by legal fears. https://github.com/vosen/ZLUDA https://github.com/vosen/ZLUDA

blackeyeblitzar 2y ago

I saw a video the other day that showed a new AMD laptop processor that is comparable to the Apple processors in performance and battery life. That was very surprising and also a great thing for windows or Linux laptops. But at the same time, the market for these and the potential for profit isn’t really that big. Consumers are willing to pay for a premium for Apple but not anyone else.

panstromek 2y ago
Do you have a link? I'd like to know which model that was.
- voidmain0001 2y ago
  Maybe this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7HUud7IvAo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7HUud7IvAo
- blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
  I believe it was this particular laptop: https://hothardware.com/reviews/rog-flow-z13-review https://hothardware.com/reviews/rog-flow-z13-review It’s the same processor that is in that new Framework desktop that was on HN recently, but for some reason Framework is not putting it in laptops: https://frame.work/desktop https://frame.work/desktop

deleted 2y ago

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fangpenlin 2y ago

I heard that Nvidia's graph cards are the best in the class in terms of power consumption vs TFLOP ration. I wonder what's the number of AMD vs Nvidia? I would like to see the number because power consumption is going to take a big portion of AI training. In comparsion, hardware might not be that expensive in the long run.

alecco 2y ago

I like the guy but he is wrong. Besides the CUDA ecosystem, Nvidia hardware has a lot of features and a lot of things to yet optimize. Like optimizations by DeepSeek (non-CUTLASS custom models and DualPipe). I think Nvidia's current hardware has plenty of legs and that's why they are not rushed on releasing next gen chips. The actual challenger is Cerebras. No need to load (VRAM->SRAM) all the parameters for every batch . But they have yet to prove they can scale and support the custom stack. We'll see.