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What I find somewhat humorous: AMD originally wanted to acquire Nvidia, but walked away when Jensen apparently insisted on becoming the CEO of the merged compan

by scrlk 9mo ago

What I find somewhat humorous: AMD originally wanted to acquire Nvidia, but walked away when Jensen apparently insisted on becoming the CEO of the merged company. https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/insider-says-nvidia-almost-sold-half-of-itself-to-amd-but-jensen-huang-wanted-to-be-ceo-of-the-merged-company https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/insider-says... I wonder how AMD would have fared against Intel post-Conroe if Jensen was CEO. They were behind but still competitive until the Bulldozer flop, only recovering with Zen (and even then it took a few generations for Zen to mature).

overfeed 9mo ago
> only recovering with Zen (and even then it took a few generations for Zen to mature). Zen was a beast from day one. Zen 1 more or less matched Intel on single-core perf and outmatched it on multicore. Zen 1 blew Intel out of water on perf/$, so much so that the morning after booting up my Zen 1 computer, I bought as many AMD shares as I could afford.
- kimixa 9mo ago
  Zen1 was further behind in ST perf than Intel is today in it's desktop offerings. They really exploited their strength in MT and price, and showed that the market was already chafing under Intel's reluctance to go beyond 4 cores on their consumer line, presumably to avoid stepping on the toes of HEDT. But that just caused the competition to pretty much invalidate that entire line instead. And I don't really see the situation being that obviously different if it was Nvidia who they merged with and Jensen was CEO. The big issue was simply that AMD didn't have the cash at hand to both pay for ATI and maintain investment in R&D, at least without their next few products completely dominating the competition. I don't see a different CEO changing that. Unless Jensen was willing to value Nvidia significantly less than ATI at the time.
  - overfeed 9mo ago
    > And I don't really see the situation being that obviously different if it was Nvidia who they merged with and Jensen was CEO. Hindsight is 20/20. I suspect Zen chiplet success was a result of AMD's deliberate strategy of design partnership with other companies (XBox, PlayStation) and re-using IP[1]. Jensen might not have done the same road on partnerships, or may have chosen the Arm (Tegra) over doubling down on x86 1. There's an informative interview with Lisa Hsu from 2 years ago that lays out the strategy. It's not a big leap to imagine Infinity Fabric eas designed to increase design flexibility across disparate workloads. The impression I got from the multistage Apple-Nvida fallout is that Nvidia probably doesn't have a culture of accepting notes on it's products.

by scrlk 9mo ago

overfeed 9mo ago

> only recovering with Zen (and even then it took a few generations for Zen to mature). Zen was a beast from day one. Zen 1 more or less matched Intel on single-core perf and outmatched it on multicore. Zen 1 blew Intel out of water on perf/$, so much so that the morning after booting up my Zen 1 computer, I bought as many AMD shares as I could afford.

kimixa 9mo ago
Zen1 was further behind in ST perf than Intel is today in it's desktop offerings. They really exploited their strength in MT and price, and showed that the market was already chafing under Intel's reluctance to go beyond 4 cores on their consumer line, presumably to avoid stepping on the toes of HEDT. But that just caused the competition to pretty much invalidate that entire line instead. And I don't really see the situation being that obviously different if it was Nvidia who they merged with and Jensen was CEO. The big issue was simply that AMD didn't have the cash at hand to both pay for ATI and maintain investment in R&D, at least without their next few products completely dominating the competition. I don't see a different CEO changing that. Unless Jensen was willing to value Nvidia significantly less than ATI at the time.
- overfeed 9mo ago
  > And I don't really see the situation being that obviously different if it was Nvidia who they merged with and Jensen was CEO. Hindsight is 20/20. I suspect Zen chiplet success was a result of AMD's deliberate strategy of design partnership with other companies (XBox, PlayStation) and re-using IP[1]. Jensen might not have done the same road on partnerships, or may have chosen the Arm (Tegra) over doubling down on x86 1. There's an informative interview with Lisa Hsu from 2 years ago that lays out the strategy. It's not a big leap to imagine Infinity Fabric eas designed to increase design flexibility across disparate workloads. The impression I got from the multistage Apple-Nvida fallout is that Nvidia probably doesn't have a culture of accepting notes on it's products.