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1. AMD isn’t different enough. They’d be subject to the same export restrictions and political instability as Nvidia, so why would global companies switch to th
by brookst 1y ago
1. AMD isn’t different enough. They’d be subject to the same export restrictions and political instability as Nvidia, so why would global companies switch to them?
2. CUDA has been a huge moat, but the incentives are incredibly strong for everybody except Nvidia to change that. The fact that it was an insurmountable moat five years ago in a $5B market does not mean it’s equally powerful in a $300B market.
3. AMD’s culture and core competencies are really not aligned to playing disruptor here. Nvidia is generally more agile and more experimental. It would have taken a serious pivot years ago for AMD to be the right company to compete.
- danesparza 1y agoAnd it would be a big bet for AMD. They don't create and manufacture chips 'just in time' -- it takes man hours and MONEY to spin up a fab, not to mention marketing dollars.
- sagarm 1y agoAMD is fabless. They spun off GlobalFoundries years ago.
- FuriouslyAdrift 1y agoAMD has been producing GPU compute cards (and is highly sucessful at it) for nearly as long as nVidia. (https://www.amd.com/en/products/accelerators/instinct.html https://www.amd.com/en/products/accelerators/instinct.html)
- FuriouslyAdrift 1y agoAMD is HIGHLY successful in the GPU compute market. They have the Instinct line which actually outperforms most nVidia chips for less money. It's the CUDA software ecosystem they have not been able to overcome. AMD has had multiple ecosystem stalls but it does appear that ROCm is finally taking off which is open source and multi-vendor. AMD is unifying their GPU architectures (like nVidia) for the next gen to be able to subsidize development by gaming, etc., card sales (like nVidia).
- immibis 1y agoWhy doesn't AMD just write a CUDA translation layer? Yeah, it's a bit difficult to say "just", but they're a pretty big company. It's not like one guy doing it in a basement. Does Nvidia have patents on CUDA? They're probably invalid in China which explains why China can do this and AMD can't.
- FuriouslyAdrift 1y agoThey did...HIPIFY translates from CUDA to HIP (ROCm) https://rocm.docs.amd.com/projects/HIPIFY/en/latest/index.html https://rocm.docs.amd.com/projects/HIPIFY/en/latest/index.ht...
- bjornsing 1y ago> CUDA has been a huge moat The CUDA moat is extremely exaggerated for deep learning, especially for inference. It’s simply not hard to do matrix multiplication and a few activation functions here and there.
- OkayPhysicist 1y agoIt regularly shocks me that AMD doesn't release their cards with at least enough CUDA reimplementation to run DL models. As you point out, AI applications use a tiny subset of the overall API, the courts have ruled that APIs can't be protected by copyright, and CUDA is NVIDIA's largest advantage. It seems like an easy win, so I assume there's some good reason.
- tux1968 1y agoAMD can't even figure out how to release decent drivers for Linux in a timely fashion. It might not be the largest market, but would have at least given them a competitive advantage in reaching some developers. There is either something very incompetent in their software team, or there are business reasons intentionally restraining them.
- nerdsniper 1y agoA very cynical take: AMD and Nvidia CEO’s are cousins and there’s more money to be made with one dominant monopoly than two competitive companies. And this income could be an existential difference-maker for Taiwan.
- kawaiikouhai 1y agobro, both are American CEOs. What is this racialized nonsense, have you seen Jensen Huang speak Mandarin? His mandarin is actually awful for someone who left Taiwan at 8.
- wmf 1y agoThey did; it's called HIP.
- 1y ago