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You'd think AMD would swing in on something like this and fund it with the money needed to succeed. I have no knowledge of it but my guess is no, AMD never mis

You'd think AMD would swing in on something like this and fund it with the money needed to succeed. I have no knowledge of it but my guess is no, AMD never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity - when it comes to GPUs and AI.

LtdJorge 1y ago
First rule of AMD stock is nobody understands AMD stock. I guess it’s also the same for AMD’s software endeavors.
elteto 1y ago
From the performance comparison table, basically AMD could be NVIDIA right now, but they aren’t because… software? That’s a complete institutional and leadership failure. Ironically, building chips is the actual _hard_ part. The software and the compilers are not trivial but the iteration speed is almost infinite by comparison. It goes to show that some companies just don’t “get” software. Not even AMD!
- wmobit 1y ago
  I'd go so far as to say it's the exact opposite. It's faster and easier to change the hardware than the software.
  - elteto 1y ago
    Counterproof: attempt to modify your graphics card. Then attempt to modify a piece of code. Which one was easier?
    - _lyxd 1y ago
      You're saying it like hardware and software are disjoint. You design hardware with software in mind (and vice versa); you need to if you want performance rivaling nvidia. This codesign, seeing their products are not only usable but actually tailored to maximize resource utilization in real workloads (not driven by w/e benchmarks), is where AMD seems to lack. Why oversimplify the premise and frame your take as some 'proof'. Just use the term counter-argument/example
- bryanlarsen 1y ago
  CUDA was started in 2004. AMD was basically broke until they hit a home run with Ryzen in 2017.
  - p_l 11mo ago
    Funnily enough AMD was actually the first with GPGPU... they just floundered and managed to start 3 or more completely new software stacks for it, while CUDA focused not just on keeping one backward compatible one, but also made it work from cheapest NVS card to high end parts.
wmf 1y ago
It is now funded and working.
AMDAnon 1y ago
AMD pays the bare minimum in software to get a product out the door. The company does not even have working performance testing and regressions routinely get shipped to customers. Benchmarks the executives see are ad hoc and not meaningful. HipKittens is an improvement but AMD does not have the ability to understand or track kernel performance so it'll be ignored. This isn't fixable overnight. Company-wide DevOps and infrastructure is outsourced to TCS in India who have no idea what they're doing. Teams with good leadership maintain their own shadow IT teams. ROCm didn't have such a team until hyperscalers lost their shit over our visibly poor development practices. Even if AMD did extend an offer to hire all the people in the article, it would be below-market since the company benchmarks against Qualcomm, Broadcom, and Walmart, instead of Google, Nvidia, or Meta. We haven't had a fully funded bonus in the past 4+ years.
- observationist 1y ago
  The MBAs are in charge, and now AMD is the new Intel? It's not only not fixable overnight, but it's not fixable at all if the leadership thinks they can coast on simply being not as bad as Intel, and Intel has a helluva lot of inertia and ability to simply sell OEM units on autopilot. Sounds like the AMD board needs to get their heads out of their asses and shake up leadership.
  - AMDAnon 1y ago
    The MBAs have always been in charge to an extent. But the real issue is we don't want to invest in beating Nvidia on quality. Otherwise we wouldn't be doing stock buybacks and instead use the money on poaching engineers. The mindset is that we maintain a comfortable second place by creating a shittier but cheaper product. That is how AMD has operated since 1959 as a second source to Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel. It's going to remain the strategy of the company indefinitely with Nvidia. Attempting to become better would cost too much. > Sounds like the AMD board needs to get their heads out of their asses and shake up leadership. Knocking out Lisa Su would be stupid, since she has the loyalty of the whole company and is generally competent. What they should do is bump TC by 60-70% and simultaneously lay off 50% of the engineers. Or phase in the same over a longer period of time. The company is full of people that do nothing because we've paid under market for so long. That's fine when competing against Intel, it's not acceptable when competing against Microsoft, Amazon, OpenAI, Google, and Nvidia. Lisa Su is the only CEO in the S&P500 who can get away with mass layoffs and still have the loyalty of the rest of the employees.
0manrho 1y ago
> AMD never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity Well said, their Instinct parts are actually, at a hardware level, very very capable pieces of kit that - ignoring software/dev ecosystem - are very competitive with NVidia. Problem is, AMD has a terrible history of supporting it's hardware (either just outright lack of support, cough Radeon VII; or constantly scrapping things and starting over and thus the ecosystem never matured) and is at a massive deficit behind the CUDA ecosystem meaning that a lot of that hardware's potential is squandered by the lack of compatibility with CUDA and/or a lack of investment in comparable alternative. Those factors has given NVidia the momentum it has because most orgs/devs will look at the support/ecosystem delta, and ask themselves why they'd expend the resources reinventing the CUDA wheel to leverage AMD hardware when they can just spend that money/time investing in CUDA and NVidia instead. To their credit, AMD it seems has learned it's lesson as they're actually trying to invest in ROCm and their Instinct ecosystem and seem to be sticking to their guns on it and we're starting to see people pick it up but they're still far behind Nvidia and CUDA. One key area that Nvidia is far ahead of AMD on in the hardware space is networking.
- AMDAnon 1y ago
  > constantly scrapping things and starting over and thus the ecosystem never matured AMD hires talented people at below-market and doesn't promote them or give raises. This causes employees to aim at resume-driven development by reinventing the wheel so they can get a job somewhere else. It's a similar problem to Google, except at Google it's because promotions are explicitly for people that ship new products.
- BNE 1y ago
  Our hardware is arguably better (spec for spec) apart from critical areas like memory bandwidth, and GPU to GPU bandwidth. You can tweak your implementations to get the same if not better performance. We do that, we see this, our customers see this. ROCM pre Rock, suffers from the ossification in the engineering organization. The Rock seeks to completely change that, and the team driving it is amazing. Try out the pre-alpha installer. It is already better than the default installer. There is hope.
  - deleted 1y ago
suprjami 1y ago
AMD have had people contribute optimised ROCm kernels in the past. They closed the PR without merge. ROCm are not interested in this. Baffling behaviour.

LtdJorge 1y ago

First rule of AMD stock is nobody understands AMD stock. I guess it’s also the same for AMD’s software endeavors.

elteto 1y ago

From the performance comparison table, basically AMD could be NVIDIA right now, but they aren’t because… software? That’s a complete institutional and leadership failure. Ironically, building chips is the actual _hard_ part. The software and the compilers are not trivial but the iteration speed is almost infinite by comparison. It goes to show that some companies just don’t “get” software. Not even AMD!

wmobit 1y ago
I'd go so far as to say it's the exact opposite. It's faster and easier to change the hardware than the software.
- elteto 1y ago
  Counterproof: attempt to modify your graphics card. Then attempt to modify a piece of code. Which one was easier?
  - _lyxd 1y ago
    You're saying it like hardware and software are disjoint. You design hardware with software in mind (and vice versa); you need to if you want performance rivaling nvidia. This codesign, seeing their products are not only usable but actually tailored to maximize resource utilization in real workloads (not driven by w/e benchmarks), is where AMD seems to lack. Why oversimplify the premise and frame your take as some 'proof'. Just use the term counter-argument/example
bryanlarsen 1y ago
CUDA was started in 2004. AMD was basically broke until they hit a home run with Ryzen in 2017.
- p_l 11mo ago
  Funnily enough AMD was actually the first with GPGPU... they just floundered and managed to start 3 or more completely new software stacks for it, while CUDA focused not just on keeping one backward compatible one, but also made it work from cheapest NVS card to high end parts.

wmf 1y ago

It is now funded and working.

AMDAnon 1y ago

AMD pays the bare minimum in software to get a product out the door. The company does not even have working performance testing and regressions routinely get shipped to customers. Benchmarks the executives see are ad hoc and not meaningful. HipKittens is an improvement but AMD does not have the ability to understand or track kernel performance so it'll be ignored. This isn't fixable overnight. Company-wide DevOps and infrastructure is outsourced to TCS in India who have no idea what they're doing. Teams with good leadership maintain their own shadow IT teams. ROCm didn't have such a team until hyperscalers lost their shit over our visibly poor development practices. Even if AMD did extend an offer to hire all the people in the article, it would be below-market since the company benchmarks against Qualcomm, Broadcom, and Walmart, instead of Google, Nvidia, or Meta. We haven't had a fully funded bonus in the past 4+ years.

observationist 1y ago
The MBAs are in charge, and now AMD is the new Intel? It's not only not fixable overnight, but it's not fixable at all if the leadership thinks they can coast on simply being not as bad as Intel, and Intel has a helluva lot of inertia and ability to simply sell OEM units on autopilot. Sounds like the AMD board needs to get their heads out of their asses and shake up leadership.
- AMDAnon 1y ago
  The MBAs have always been in charge to an extent. But the real issue is we don't want to invest in beating Nvidia on quality. Otherwise we wouldn't be doing stock buybacks and instead use the money on poaching engineers. The mindset is that we maintain a comfortable second place by creating a shittier but cheaper product. That is how AMD has operated since 1959 as a second source to Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel. It's going to remain the strategy of the company indefinitely with Nvidia. Attempting to become better would cost too much. > Sounds like the AMD board needs to get their heads out of their asses and shake up leadership. Knocking out Lisa Su would be stupid, since she has the loyalty of the whole company and is generally competent. What they should do is bump TC by 60-70% and simultaneously lay off 50% of the engineers. Or phase in the same over a longer period of time. The company is full of people that do nothing because we've paid under market for so long. That's fine when competing against Intel, it's not acceptable when competing against Microsoft, Amazon, OpenAI, Google, and Nvidia. Lisa Su is the only CEO in the S&P500 who can get away with mass layoffs and still have the loyalty of the rest of the employees.

0manrho 1y ago

> AMD never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity Well said, their Instinct parts are actually, at a hardware level, very very capable pieces of kit that - ignoring software/dev ecosystem - are very competitive with NVidia. Problem is, AMD has a terrible history of supporting it's hardware (either just outright lack of support, cough Radeon VII; or constantly scrapping things and starting over and thus the ecosystem never matured) and is at a massive deficit behind the CUDA ecosystem meaning that a lot of that hardware's potential is squandered by the lack of compatibility with CUDA and/or a lack of investment in comparable alternative. Those factors has given NVidia the momentum it has because most orgs/devs will look at the support/ecosystem delta, and ask themselves why they'd expend the resources reinventing the CUDA wheel to leverage AMD hardware when they can just spend that money/time investing in CUDA and NVidia instead. To their credit, AMD it seems has learned it's lesson as they're actually trying to invest in ROCm and their Instinct ecosystem and seem to be sticking to their guns on it and we're starting to see people pick it up but they're still far behind Nvidia and CUDA. One key area that Nvidia is far ahead of AMD on in the hardware space is networking.

AMDAnon 1y ago
> constantly scrapping things and starting over and thus the ecosystem never matured AMD hires talented people at below-market and doesn't promote them or give raises. This causes employees to aim at resume-driven development by reinventing the wheel so they can get a job somewhere else. It's a similar problem to Google, except at Google it's because promotions are explicitly for people that ship new products.
BNE 1y ago
Our hardware is arguably better (spec for spec) apart from critical areas like memory bandwidth, and GPU to GPU bandwidth. You can tweak your implementations to get the same if not better performance. We do that, we see this, our customers see this. ROCM pre Rock, suffers from the ossification in the engineering organization. The Rock seeks to completely change that, and the team driving it is amazing. Try out the pre-alpha installer. It is already better than the default installer. There is hope.
- deleted 1y ago

suprjami 1y ago

AMD have had people contribute optimised ROCm kernels in the past. They closed the PR without merge. ROCm are not interested in this. Baffling behaviour.