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by cyberax 601 days ago
> I love when outsiders throw around random-ass takes like this. Just curious: how'd you come up with this number? Is it backed by literally any thought/data/roadmap?

It's a multiple of what the TinyGrad ( https://tinygrad.org/#tinybox ) startup raised in capital. So $10-20m is absolutely reasonable, especially if you add an established HR with a hiring pipeline, established IT dept, offices, etc.

The multiplier is also easy to justify, given the stock price of NVidia and AMD.

> A quick reminder before you answer: whatever you think is actually involved in improving ROCm, unless you work on ROCm, you're almost certainly not considering an entire iceberg of complexity (runtime/driver/firmware).

Oh, I do. I've been following the OpenSource AMD driver development for the last 2 decades.

And I maintain that the total amount of investment that AMD needed to make to rival NVidia in the market cap, would have been around that number.

> Cutting to the chase: you're off by at least two orders of magnitude on your goofy estimate; the real numbers are probably closer to 200MM invested every year for 10 years.

For an entirely new company starting from scratch? Reasonable. But AMD is not a new company, and they already are doing most of the work needed.