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I appreciate that there are people in academia working on this problem, but it seems like something AMD would have to fix internally if they were serious.

aabhay 11mo ago
Except that this same team built a similarly named software package for Nvidia GPUs as well. It’s bright researchers doing what they do best if you ask me.
- sigmoid10 11mo ago
  Except that this other package also only came out last year and has contributed zero to Nvidia's current status. If AMD ever wants to be taken seriously in this market, they will need to start making their own software good instead of relying on "open source" in the mistaken belief that someone else will fix their bad code for free. Nvidia spent more than a decade hiring top talent and getting their proprietary software environment right before they really took off. And some of the older ML researchers here will certainly remember it wasn't pain-free either. But they didn't just turn the ship around, they turned it into a nuclear aircraft carrier that dominates the entire world.
  - stingraycharles 11mo ago
    Yeah honestly I’m dumbfounded why all these years AMD still doesn’t have an internal “code red” and get their developer experience up to par with CUDA.
    - jstummbillig 11mo ago
      Yes. Why is that? Somebody here must have an informed opinion. It seems ludicrous, but also too obvious. What's up?
      - stingraycharles 11mo ago
        I found their acquisition of Xilinx (the FPGA company) to predict that they were going all in on a uniform FPGA / GPU / AI ecosystem, but… that didn’t seem to have yielded any integration benefits? I’m genuinely dumbfounded by what’s up at AMD at this point.
    - elteto 11mo ago
      It seems that AMD, like many other companies, doesn’t “get” software. It’s a cost-center, a nuisance, not really hard engineering, the community will take care of that, etc. It’s pretty ironic.
    - martinpw 11mo ago
      Check out several interesting comments here from AMDAnon for insider insights on this question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45923188 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45923188
      - stingraycharles 11mo ago
        Man if that is anything close to the truth, it would explain a lot and be pretty depressing. It would imply leadership doesn’t understand software at all, and considers it a liability rather than an asset.
- _zoltan_ 11mo ago
  Honestly they should be hired by NVIDIA or AMD.
Ecko123 11mo ago
AFAIK, they are already doing it at various levels including working with tinycorp
amelius 11mo ago
I personally prefer the hardware companies making just hardware. Keeps the incentives pure. I'm even willing to accept a 20% performance hit for this requirement, should someone bring that up.
- jack_tripper 11mo ago
  >I personally prefer the hardware companies making just hardware. Keeps the incentives pure. That's self contradictory. Their incentive is to sell more HW and at higher prices using whatever shady practices they can get away with, software or no software. There's nothing pure about that, it's just business. High end chips aren't commodity HW like lawnmowers, they can't function without the right SW. And this isn't the 90's anymore when Hercules or S3 would only make the silicon, and then system integrators would write the drivers for it which was basically MS-DOS calls to read/write to registers via the PCI bus, by the devs reading a 300 page manual, those days are long gone. Modern silicone is orders of magnitude more complex that nobody else besides the manufacturer could write the drivers for it to extract the most performance out of it. >I'm even willing to accept a 20% performance hit for this requirement, should someone bring that up. I'm also willing to accept arbitrary numbers I make up, as a tradeoff, but the market does not work like that.
  - amelius 11mo ago
    > Their incentive is to sell more HW and at higher prices using whatever shady practices they can get away with, software or no software. And you don't think these shady practices will leak into the software? > Modern silicone is orders of magnitude more complex that nobody else besides the manufacturer could write the drivers for it... The hardware people at the manufacturer are not the software people. So there __must__ be documentation.
    - jack_tripper 11mo ago
      >So there __must__ be documentation. YES, internal documentation, full of proprietary IP.
reactordev 11mo ago
Fully agree. They punted 10 years ago and are now playing catchup. They have the hardware but can’t manage to unlock its full potential due to them not knowing how to write firmware that does.

aabhay 11mo ago

Except that this same team built a similarly named software package for Nvidia GPUs as well. It’s bright researchers doing what they do best if you ask me.

sigmoid10 11mo ago
Except that this other package also only came out last year and has contributed zero to Nvidia's current status. If AMD ever wants to be taken seriously in this market, they will need to start making their own software good instead of relying on "open source" in the mistaken belief that someone else will fix their bad code for free. Nvidia spent more than a decade hiring top talent and getting their proprietary software environment right before they really took off. And some of the older ML researchers here will certainly remember it wasn't pain-free either. But they didn't just turn the ship around, they turned it into a nuclear aircraft carrier that dominates the entire world.
- stingraycharles 11mo ago
  Yeah honestly I’m dumbfounded why all these years AMD still doesn’t have an internal “code red” and get their developer experience up to par with CUDA.
  - jstummbillig 11mo ago
    Yes. Why is that? Somebody here must have an informed opinion. It seems ludicrous, but also too obvious. What's up?
    - stingraycharles 11mo ago
      I found their acquisition of Xilinx (the FPGA company) to predict that they were going all in on a uniform FPGA / GPU / AI ecosystem, but… that didn’t seem to have yielded any integration benefits? I’m genuinely dumbfounded by what’s up at AMD at this point.
  - elteto 11mo ago
    It seems that AMD, like many other companies, doesn’t “get” software. It’s a cost-center, a nuisance, not really hard engineering, the community will take care of that, etc. It’s pretty ironic.
  - martinpw 11mo ago
    Check out several interesting comments here from AMDAnon for insider insights on this question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45923188 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45923188
    - stingraycharles 11mo ago
      Man if that is anything close to the truth, it would explain a lot and be pretty depressing. It would imply leadership doesn’t understand software at all, and considers it a liability rather than an asset.
_zoltan_ 11mo ago
Honestly they should be hired by NVIDIA or AMD.

Ecko123 11mo ago

AFAIK, they are already doing it at various levels including working with tinycorp

amelius 11mo ago

I personally prefer the hardware companies making just hardware. Keeps the incentives pure. I'm even willing to accept a 20% performance hit for this requirement, should someone bring that up.

jack_tripper 11mo ago
>I personally prefer the hardware companies making just hardware. Keeps the incentives pure. That's self contradictory. Their incentive is to sell more HW and at higher prices using whatever shady practices they can get away with, software or no software. There's nothing pure about that, it's just business. High end chips aren't commodity HW like lawnmowers, they can't function without the right SW. And this isn't the 90's anymore when Hercules or S3 would only make the silicon, and then system integrators would write the drivers for it which was basically MS-DOS calls to read/write to registers via the PCI bus, by the devs reading a 300 page manual, those days are long gone. Modern silicone is orders of magnitude more complex that nobody else besides the manufacturer could write the drivers for it to extract the most performance out of it. >I'm even willing to accept a 20% performance hit for this requirement, should someone bring that up. I'm also willing to accept arbitrary numbers I make up, as a tradeoff, but the market does not work like that.
- amelius 11mo ago
  > Their incentive is to sell more HW and at higher prices using whatever shady practices they can get away with, software or no software. And you don't think these shady practices will leak into the software? > Modern silicone is orders of magnitude more complex that nobody else besides the manufacturer could write the drivers for it... The hardware people at the manufacturer are not the software people. So there __must__ be documentation.
  - jack_tripper 11mo ago
    >So there __must__ be documentation. YES, internal documentation, full of proprietary IP.

reactordev 11mo ago

Fully agree. They punted 10 years ago and are now playing catchup. They have the hardware but can’t manage to unlock its full potential due to them not knowing how to write firmware that does.