[dannyw]

Nobody else seems to be willing to invest serious funding, including market rates for SWEs, into compelling alternatives. I believe AMD's TC for senior software engineers tops out at 200k in the Bay Area.

The problems you generally experience are:

  * Inexplicably poor performance
  * Poor (and sometimes incorrect) documentation
  * Difficulties debugging
  * Crashes and hangs

[aurareturn]

Why is this? AI is going to a multi trillion market. I can't think of anything else bigger except maybe electricity, real estate, and food.

If I'm AMD, I'd spend at least $1 billion/year figuring out the software side.

I can't think of an easier way for AMD to return value to shareholders than eroding CUDA advantage.

Heck, Meta invested something like $100b on VR so far and VR is not nearly the market that AI is.

[cvadict]

No device support...

I started playing around with porting some CUDA code to ROCm/HIP on a Ryzen laptop APU I had. While an "unsupported" configuration (which was understood), it all worked until AMD suddenly and explicitly blocked the ability to run on APU's. Currently the only way to get back to work on that project on that particular computer would be to run a closed-source patched driver from some rando on the internet. Needless to say, I lost interest.

Last I checked, there were only 7 consumer SKU's that could run AMD's current compute stack, the oldest being 1 generation old. Even among the enterprise hardware they only support ~2 generations back. So you can't even grab some old cheap recycled gear on e-bay to hack on their ecosystem.

Meanwhile, I can pull anything with an NVIDIA logo on it from a junkyard it'll happily run CUDA code that I wrote for the 8800GTX 15+ years ago.

[anon291]

I'm an AI compiler engineer and AMDs hiring process was ... Non-competitive. Companies are hiring left and right at a fast clip and heres AMD wanting you to fly out in a month. I love their CPUs but... Come on. You gotta be serious to compete

[KerrAvon]

You really mean TC and not base salary? That’s shockingly bad.

[kimixa]

It's also not correct. I wouldn't consider myself a "Senior" engineer, but am at AMD and have a TC notably higher than that.