[sharpneli]

AMD has a really weird view on how the programming world works internally. Some years ago they had some ARM server chips. Did they allow people access? No. They only allowed it for "Serious customers" and the whole thing failed as no software was available for it.

Same applies to their compute stuff. They really really want you to purchase their Pro cards and whatnot, and if you have a consumer card well too bad. Go back to playing games. Whereas with my Nvidia card CUDA runs flawlessly which leads me to doing test projects at home and fixing a bug here and there.

AMD doesn't understand how much of development happens on either home computers or university labs with small budgets which means consumer cards. They seem to think that everything happens using big teams and big money. Even though in reality it's the small developers doing stuff that then drives the purchase of the very lucrative large clusters.

For all of it's downsides NVidia actually understand the grassroots approach. Which is why their stuff just works on consumer stuff too.

[aseipp]

My impression is that they largely seem to focus on Big Money HPC contracts and other very large deals where bespoke engineering on the software stack is worth their time and can be paid off. So if you're paying them a shitload of money in a massive supercomputing-style deal, they'll get you software for their otherwise-unobtainium accelerators. But normal "day to day" stuff is literally not on their radar. At best it's an afterthought.

I think the timing of when they entered into the field is also relevant. When Nvidia first came on the scene swinging, they really needed to see what would stick; so you have to try fishing in every available pond. You don't know what will necessarily pan out or catch on. So you need the tech to be available to all your consumers at every level, consumer, enterprise, HPC, everything. And it turns out, they found that there are customers at every single one of those levels, and providing for all of them provides both a good on-ramp, and a path to bigger things.

In contrast AMD is so late to the game, and there's so much money sloshing around in the field right now, and the trajectories of what big buyers want is so much more clear -- that they can just afford to mostly ignore the lower end. They know where the money is. The field and buyers and use cases are just much more well understood from the business "make money in the easiest way" POV.

As for Intel, they seem to actually be dedicating tons of money to the software stack for oneAPI, to work everywhere, which is not surprising IMO. They have the money to dump into this (the most money intensive) task and know it's critical for their products to reach anything other than pork-belly HPC contracts.

[samus]

It's still peanuts compared to what semiconductor research&engineering costs. They can afford it to make the most out of their market share. AMD must be rational and prioritize to repay investors for their trust. Time will tell whether that strategy works out.

[ChuckNorris89]

I feel there's a large disconnect at AMD between the CPU division and the RTG (Radeon Technologies Group) which feels more insular than the rest of the company. I feel Lisa Su had her hand deeper in propping up the wailing CPU division and kind of forgot about RTG that's been loosing market share to Nvidia for the last 10 years not just in gaming but in ML. Maybe she should take a break from Ryzen and look into leading the RTG.

[7speter]

Also AMD seems to underestimate how many people may just be curious to use compute functionality with their consumer based card. I was ultra excited to get a rdna2 card to make a dedicated linux system with a friendly gpu. Gaming works, but davinci resolve doesn’t, can’t use AMF for screen recording or streaming. I have a 3060ti back in a box abd parts for a “work computer,” and I thought I would work a bit with my system with the 6700xt but can only really game, screen record, and edit video with kaden live using my intel cpu.

I watched a video over the weekend about how a new amd apu using rdna3 will make entry level/cheap graphics cards useless, but thats not really going to be the case if you want to dip your feet into utilizing an entry level card for workloads. Gamers turn their nose up at dinky gtx 1650s but at least you can use it to edit video. Theres no wonder intel doesnt see AMD as real competition in the space.