[dragontamer]

How is it extraordinary at all?

AMD was literally going bankrupt like 2 years ago. They fired 30% of their staff and then reverse-mortgaged their headquarters. They bet their entire company on "Zen" and... luckily, it paid off.

https://www.theverge.com/2012/10/12/3496006/amd-layoffs-10-p...

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/03/amd-s...

AMD finally has money to actually invest into long-term projects. But AMD just didn't have the money to do so between 2012 and 2016.

Unfortunately, it will take until 2020 before AMD puts something together. It just takes a long time to build software and hardware. But ROCm shows how AMD is beginning to accelerate, finally, into the GPGPU compute sector.

[endorphone]

Businesses "reverse mortgage" their real estate all the time, including extraordinarily profitable businesses. I also don't see what some links from 2012 have to do with "like 2 years ago", though we all know that AMD went through some down times -- the CPU side did, though the GPU side never did and kept paying the bills.

A segment of their business was promising, and they could see a hugely emergent demand growing. Instead of getting in on the projects that matter, they just ignored it turning it into an entirely nvidia market. Yes, that is irrational and self-defeating. If they were so self-sabotaging in the GPU market they should have sold that business (and it makes one wonder why they ever bought it in the first place).

Of course CUDA is a moat. AMD sat doing nothing allowing it to get dug further and deeper, becoming completely synonymous with deep learning. A small scale, inexpensive software project to keep official, supported branches of major projects wholly functional on AMD hardware (e.g. Tensorflow) would have done great things. Instead they made some completely irrational solutions that tried to move the market somewhere completely different.

This has nothing to do with how they bet on "Zen". It isn't either or.

[dragontamer]

AMD started off with massive layoffs in 2012, and continues through 2015.

https://venturebeat.com/2014/10/16/amd-misses-earnings-targe...

https://venturebeat.com/2015/10/01/amd-to-lay-off-500-people...

2016 AMD began to stabilize, as they focused on Zen. They still were losing tons of money per quarter, but they refocused their efforts. And 2017 they finally delivered. AMD didn't actually turn a profit until late 2017.

https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/02/05/amd-turns-its-firs...

Between 2011 and mid-2017, AMD was losing money every quarter. There's a reason why the stock was below $2/share for a long time.

[rdlecler1]

I think the question is how many truly great engineers would it take to build some of the necessary APIs. Why spend hundreds of millions in hardware R&D and then underinvest in software that makes the hardware valuable. While the CEO has been doing a stellar job Turing around the company it still feels like they underinvested in software.

[dragontamer]

I'm not sure if you really understand the peril or how deeply AMD cut back on their R&D Efforts.

Small Cat (Puma cores) were cancelled and that entire department was laid off. This is the core that won AMD the Xbox One and PS4. Small Cat was also their low-power architecture designed for tablets (notice that AMD literally gave up on the growing Tablet market?)

AMD cut DEEP to stay out of bankruptcy. They were cutting known, successful projects and were still losing hundreds of millions of dollars per quarter.

Lets be frank here: if AMD were today, in a position where they had better ROCm or OpenCL or Tensorflow support but say... no "Zen" or "EPYC" ?? They'd be worse off. The CEO made the right bet to focus on Zen as their comeback strategy.

Zen is successful because it demonstratively does something better than Intel. It also doesn't need much software support or tooling, and was designed to be relatively cheap to make. I don't think AMD would have done the same with the NVidia GPGPU compute world, especially since CUDA is a proprietary technology. Even if AMD were to make something better than NVidia, they wouldn't reap any rewards because CUDA is a big moat.