[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.