5 ms·

These ppl are very loud online, but they don't make decisions for hyperscalers which are biggest spenders on AI chips. AMD is doing just fine, Oracle just anno

These ppl are very loud online, but they don't make decisions for hyperscalers which are biggest spenders on AI chips. AMD is doing just fine, Oracle just announced an AI cluster with up to 131,072 of AMD's new MI355X GPUs. AMD needs to focus on bringing rack-scale mi400 as quickly as possible to market, rather than those hobbyists always find something to complain instead of spending money.

almostgotcaught 1y ago
> These ppl are very loud online, but they don't make decisions for hyperscalers which are biggest spenders on AI chips. this guy gets it - absolutely no one cares about the hobby market because it's absolutely not how software development is done (nor is it how software is paid for).
- pstuart 1y ago
  The hobby market should be considered as a pipeline to future customers. It doesn't mean AMD should drop everything and cater specifically to them, but they'd be foolish to ignore them altogether.
- justahuman74 1y ago
  The hobby market is how you get 'market default' N years later
  - almostgotcaught 1y ago
    citation please
    - orbital-decay 1y ago
      Nvidia's success.
      - almostgotcaught 1y ago
        You think the company that supplies every hyperscalers is market leader because of the hobbyist segment? Lol
        reliabilityguy 1y ago
        So, what is the reason only Nvidia supplies the hyperscalers?
        almostgotcaught 1y ago
        they have lots of money and they use that money to pay software engineers (their employees...) to write quality software.
        orbital-decay 1y ago
        Water is wet. Please check the history of their software stack and why it always was superior to alternatives when they didn't have a lot more money than ATI/AMD. The reason they power hyperscalers is because they catered to enthusiasts and academy researchers attempting to use their GPUs for general purpose computations in early 2000s, since GeForce 3. Then they used that experience to build CUDA which simply worked, and quickly gained mindshare. People have used their software for all imaginable purposes, which was a major factor behind their improvements and eventually becoming market leaders as killer applications for GPGPU have been found (simulation and then AI). This experience is not replicable even with dogfooding, which AMD also doesn't seem to do.
        reliabilityguy 1y ago
        so, all these years AMD just failed to hire good engineers and refused to pay well?
        deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
  - wmf 1y ago
    This probably does work for the first mover. It's not clear that it can work for the underdog.
behnamoh 1y ago
> these people we're talking about the majority of open source developers (I'm one of them). if researchers don't get access to hardware X, they write their paper using hardware Y (Nvidia). AMD isn't doing fine because most low level research on AI is done purely on CUDA.
- qualifiedeephd 1y ago
  Serious researchers use HPC clusters not desktop workstations. Currently the biggest HPC cluster in North America has AMD GPUs. I think it'll be fine.
  - pjmlp 1y ago
    Before they became serious researchers they were once upon a time students learning with what their laptops were capable of.
- Certhas 1y ago
  So nVidia has a huge software lead because of open source developers like you? Or because people employed by nVidia write closed source high performance drivers and kernels? Or because the people employed by Meta and Google that wrote Torch and Tensorflow built it on nVidia? I am really sympathetic to the complaints. It would just be incredibly useful to have competition and options further down the food chain. But the argument that this is a core strategic mistake makes no sense to me.
  - imtringued 1y ago
    You don't have to beg for good software quality from Nvidia. Everything else is built on top of that foundation. That's all there is to it.
  - regularfry 1y ago
    Nit: just writing Torch/TF isn't what made the difference. Having them adopted by a huge audience outside those orgs is, and that's bottlenecked on the hardware platform choice. AMD has demonstrably not even acknowledged that they needed to play catch-up for a significant chunk of the last 20 years. The mistake isn't a recent one.
uniclaude 1y ago
Neither their revenue nor their market share in the space looks like just fine. What exactly in trailing the market for years is “just fine”? AMD is very far behind, and their earnings are so low that even with a nonsensical pe ratio they’re still less than a tenth of nvidia. No, they are not doing anywhere near fine. Are hobbyists the reason for this? I’m not sure. However, what AMD is doing is clearly failing.
- regularfry 1y ago
  A big chunk of NVidia's current price is a reflection of lacking meaningful competition. So straight comparison isn't quite fair: if AMD started to do better, the gap would shrink from both ends.
creato 1y ago
When you design software for N customers, where N is very small, and you expect to hold each customers' hand individually, the software is basically guaranteed to be hot garbage that doesn't generalize or actually work except in exactly the use cases you supported (there are exceptions to this, but it requires having exceptional software engineers and leaders that care about doing things correctly and not just closing the next ticket, and in my experience, they are extremely rare). If you design software for N00000 customers, it can't be shit, because you can't hold the hands of that many people, it's just not possible. By intending to design software for a wide variety of users, it forces you to make your software not suck, or you'll drown in support requests that you cannot possibly handle.
- wmf 1y ago
  Now imagine you don't have the resources to satisfy N00000 customers. What do you do?
  - exceptione 1y ago
    Start selling ice creams. :) Honestly, if they "don't have the resources to satisfy N00000 customers", they better get them. That will teach them in the hard way to work differently.

almostgotcaught 1y ago

> These ppl are very loud online, but they don't make decisions for hyperscalers which are biggest spenders on AI chips. this guy gets it - absolutely no one cares about the hobby market because it's absolutely not how software development is done (nor is it how software is paid for).

pstuart 1y ago
The hobby market should be considered as a pipeline to future customers. It doesn't mean AMD should drop everything and cater specifically to them, but they'd be foolish to ignore them altogether.
justahuman74 1y ago
The hobby market is how you get 'market default' N years later
- almostgotcaught 1y ago
  citation please
  - orbital-decay 1y ago
    Nvidia's success.
    - almostgotcaught 1y ago
      You think the company that supplies every hyperscalers is market leader because of the hobbyist segment? Lol
      - reliabilityguy 1y ago
        So, what is the reason only Nvidia supplies the hyperscalers?
        almostgotcaught 1y ago
        they have lots of money and they use that money to pay software engineers (their employees...) to write quality software.
        orbital-decay 1y ago
        Water is wet. Please check the history of their software stack and why it always was superior to alternatives when they didn't have a lot more money than ATI/AMD. The reason they power hyperscalers is because they catered to enthusiasts and academy researchers attempting to use their GPUs for general purpose computations in early 2000s, since GeForce 3. Then they used that experience to build CUDA which simply worked, and quickly gained mindshare. People have used their software for all imaginable purposes, which was a major factor behind their improvements and eventually becoming market leaders as killer applications for GPGPU have been found (simulation and then AI). This experience is not replicable even with dogfooding, which AMD also doesn't seem to do.
        reliabilityguy 1y ago
        so, all these years AMD just failed to hire good engineers and refused to pay well?
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
- wmf 1y ago
  This probably does work for the first mover. It's not clear that it can work for the underdog.

behnamoh 1y ago

> these people we're talking about the majority of open source developers (I'm one of them). if researchers don't get access to hardware X, they write their paper using hardware Y (Nvidia). AMD isn't doing fine because most low level research on AI is done purely on CUDA.

qualifiedeephd 1y ago
Serious researchers use HPC clusters not desktop workstations. Currently the biggest HPC cluster in North America has AMD GPUs. I think it'll be fine.
- pjmlp 1y ago
  Before they became serious researchers they were once upon a time students learning with what their laptops were capable of.
Certhas 1y ago
So nVidia has a huge software lead because of open source developers like you? Or because people employed by nVidia write closed source high performance drivers and kernels? Or because the people employed by Meta and Google that wrote Torch and Tensorflow built it on nVidia? I am really sympathetic to the complaints. It would just be incredibly useful to have competition and options further down the food chain. But the argument that this is a core strategic mistake makes no sense to me.
- imtringued 1y ago
  You don't have to beg for good software quality from Nvidia. Everything else is built on top of that foundation. That's all there is to it.
- regularfry 1y ago
  Nit: just writing Torch/TF isn't what made the difference. Having them adopted by a huge audience outside those orgs is, and that's bottlenecked on the hardware platform choice. AMD has demonstrably not even acknowledged that they needed to play catch-up for a significant chunk of the last 20 years. The mistake isn't a recent one.

uniclaude 1y ago

Neither their revenue nor their market share in the space looks like just fine. What exactly in trailing the market for years is “just fine”? AMD is very far behind, and their earnings are so low that even with a nonsensical pe ratio they’re still less than a tenth of nvidia. No, they are not doing anywhere near fine. Are hobbyists the reason for this? I’m not sure. However, what AMD is doing is clearly failing.

regularfry 1y ago
A big chunk of NVidia's current price is a reflection of lacking meaningful competition. So straight comparison isn't quite fair: if AMD started to do better, the gap would shrink from both ends.

creato 1y ago

When you design software for N customers, where N is very small, and you expect to hold each customers' hand individually, the software is basically guaranteed to be hot garbage that doesn't generalize or actually work except in exactly the use cases you supported (there are exceptions to this, but it requires having exceptional software engineers and leaders that care about doing things correctly and not just closing the next ticket, and in my experience, they are extremely rare). If you design software for N00000 customers, it can't be shit, because you can't hold the hands of that many people, it's just not possible. By intending to design software for a wide variety of users, it forces you to make your software not suck, or you'll drown in support requests that you cannot possibly handle.

wmf 1y ago
Now imagine you don't have the resources to satisfy N00000 customers. What do you do?
- exceptione 1y ago
  Start selling ice creams. :) Honestly, if they "don't have the resources to satisfy N00000 customers", they better get them. That will teach them in the hard way to work differently.