[llm_trw]

Not really.

AMD is constitutionally incapable of shipping anything but mid range hardware that requires no innovation.

The only reason why they are doing so well in CPUs right now is that Intel has basically destroyed itself without any outside help.

[adrian_b]

In CPUs, AMD has made many innovations that have been copied by Intel only after many years and this delay had an important contribution to Intel's downfall.

The most important has been the fact that AMD has predicted correctly that big monolithic CPUs will no longer be feasible in the future CMOS fabrication technologies, so they have designed the Zen family since the beginning with a chiplet-based architecture. Intel had attempted to ridicule them, but after losing many billions they have been forced to copy this strategy.

Also in the microarchitecture of their CPUs AMD has made the right choices since the beginning and then they have improved it constantly with each generation. The result is that now the latest Intel big core, Lion Cove, has a microarchitecture that is much more similar to AMD Zen 5 than to any of the previous Intel cores, because they had to do this to get a competitive core.

In the distant past, AMD has also introduced a lot of innovations long before they were copied by Intel, but it is true that those had not been invented by AMD, but they had been copied by AMD from more expensive CPUs, like DEC Alpha or Cray or IBM POWER, but Intel has also copied them only after being forced by the competition with AMD.

[ksec]

Everything is comparative. AMD isn't perfect. As an Ex Shareholder I have argued they did well partly because of Intel's downfall. In terms of execution it is far from perfect.

But Nvidia is a different beast. It is a bit like Apple in the late 00s where you take business, forecast, marketing, operation, software, hardware, sales etc You take any part of it and they are all industry leading. And having industry leading capability is only part of the game, having it all work together is completely another thing. And unlike Apple where they lost direction once Steve Jobs passed away and weren't sure about how to deploy capital. Jensen is still here, and they have more resources now making Nvidia even more competitive.

It is often most people underestimate the magnitude of the task required, ( I like to tell the story again about an Intel GPU engineer in 2016 arguing they could take dGPU market shares by 2020, and we are now 2025 ), over estimate the capability of an organisation, under estimate the rival's speed of innovation and execution. These three thing combined is why most people are often off the estimate by an order of magnitude.

[llm_trw]

Yeah, no.

We are in the middle of a monopoly squeeze by NVidia on the most innovative part of the economy right now. I expect the DOJ to hit them harder than they did MS in the 90s given the bullshit they are pulling and the drag on the economy they are causing.

By comparison if AMD could write a driver that didn't shit itself when it had to multiply more than two matrices in a row they'd be selling cards faster than they can make them. You don't need to sell the best shovels in a gold rush to make mountains of money, but you can't sell teaspoons as premium shovels and expect people to come back.

[ksec]

>We are in the middle of a monopoly squeeze by NVidia on the most innovative part of the economy right now.

I am not sure which part of Nvidia is monopoly. That is like suggesting TSMC has a monopoly.

[vitus]

> That is like suggesting TSMC has a monopoly.

They... do have a monopoly on foundry capacity, especially if you're looking at the most advanced nodes? Nobody's going to Intel or Samsung to build 3nm processors. Hell, there have been whispers over the past month that even Samsung might start outsourcing Exynos to TSMC; Intel already did that with Lunar Lake.

Having a monopoly doesn't mean that you are engaging in anticompetitive behavior, just that you are the only real option in town.

[brookst]

This gets at the classic problem in defining a monopoly: how hou define the market. Every company is a monopoly if you define the market narrowly enough. Ford has a monopoly on F150’s.

I would argue that defining a semiconductor market in terms of node size is too narrow. Just because TSMC is getting the newest nodes first does not mean they have a monopoly in the semiconductor market. We can play semantics, but for any meaningful discussion of monopolistic behaviors, a temporary technical advantage seems a poor way to define the term.

[vitus]

> Just because TSMC is getting the newest nodes first does not mean they have a monopoly in the semiconductor market.

Sure. Market research also places them as having somewhere around 65% of worldwide foundry sales [0], with Samsung coming in second place with about 12% (mostly first-party production). Fact is that nobody else comes close to providing real competition for TSMC, so they can charge whatever prices they want, whether you're talking about the 3nm node or the 10nm node.

[0] https://www.counterpointresearch.com/insights/global-semicon...

Rounding out the top five... SMIC (6%) is out of the question unless you're based in China due to various sanctions, UMC (5%) mainly sell decade+-old processes (22nm and larger), and Global Foundries explicitly has abandoned keeping up with the latest technologies.

If you exclude the various Chinese foundries and subtract off Samsung's first-party development, TSMC's share of available foundry capacity for third-party contracts likely grows to 70% or more. At what point do you consider this to be a monopoly? Microsoft Windows has about 72% of desktop OS share.

[Vecr]

Will they? Given the structure of global controls on GPUs, Nvidia is a de-facto self funding US government company.

Maybe the US will do something if GPU price becomes the limit instead of the supply of chips and power.

[kadoban]

What effect did the DOJ have on MS in the 90s? Didn't all of that get rolled back before they had to pay a dime, and all it amounted to was that browser choice screen that was around for a while? Hardly a crippling blow. If anything that showed the weakness of regulators in fights against big tech, just outlast them and you're fine.

[shiroiushi]

>I expect the DOJ to hit them harder than they did MS in the 90s given the bullshit they are pulling and the drag on the economy they are causing.

It sounds like you're expecting extreme competence from the DOJ. Given their history with regulating big tech companies, and even worse, the incoming administration, I think this is a very unrealistic expectation.

[perching_aix]

And I'm supposed to believe that HN is this amazing platform for technology and science discussions, totally unlike its peers...

[zamadatix]

The above take is worded a bit cynical but is their general approach to GPUs lately across the board e.g. https://www.techpowerup.com/326415/amd-confirms-retreat-from...

Also I'd take HN as being being an amazing platform for the overall consistency and quality of moderation. Anything beyond that depends more on who you're talking to than where at.

[petesergeant]

Maybe be the change you want to see and tell us what the real story is?

[perching_aix]

We seem to disagree on what the change in the world I'd like to see is like, which is a real shocker I'm sure.

Personally, I think that's when somebody who has no real information to contribute doesn't try to pretend that they do.

So thanks for the offer, but I think I'm already delivering on that realm.

[shadowgovt]

Oh, there's basically no chance of getting that on the Internet.

The Internet is a machine that highly simplifies the otherwise complex technical challenge of wide-casting ignorance. It wide-casts wisdom too, but it's an exercise for the reader to distinguish them.

[llm_trw]

I don't really care what you believe.

Everyone whose dug deep into what AMD is doing has left in disgust if they are lucky and bankruptcy if they are not.

If I can save someone else from wasting $100,000 on hardware and six months of their life then my post has done more good than the AMD marketing department ever will.

[AnthonyMouse]

> If I can save someone else from wasting $100,000 on hardware and six months of their life then my post has done more good than the AMD marketing department ever will.

This seems like unuseful advice if you've already given up on them.

You tried it and at some point in the past it wasn't ready. But by not being ready they're losing money, so they have a direct incentive to fix it. Which would take a certain amount of time, but once you've given up you no longer know if they've done it yet or not, at which point your advice would be stale.

Meanwhile the people who attempt it apparently seem to get acquired by Nvidia, for some strange reason. Which implies it should be a worthwhile thing to do. If they've fixed it by now which you wouldn't know if you've stopped looking, or they fix it in the near future, you have a competitive advantage because you have access to lower cost GPUs than your rivals. If not, but you've demonstrated a serious attempt to fix it for everyone yourself, Nvidia comes to you with a sack full of money to make sure you don't finish, and then you get a sack full of money. That's win/win, so rather than nobody doing it, it seems like everybody should be doing it.

[llm_trw]

I've tried it three times.

I've seen people try it every six months for two decades now.

At some point you just have to accept that AMD is not a serious company, but is a second rate copycat and there is no way to change that without firing everyone from middle management up.

I'm deeply worried about stagnation in the CPU space now that they are top dog and Intel is dead in the water.

Here's hoping China and Risk V save us.

>Meanwhile the people who attempt it apparently seem to get acquired by Nvidia

Everyone I've seen base jumping has gotten a sponsorship from redbull, ergo. everyone should basejump.

Ignore the red smears around the parking lot.

[AnthonyMouse]

> At some point you just have to accept that AMD is not a serious company, but is a second rate copycat and there is no way to change that without firing everyone from middle management up.

AMD has always punched above their weight. Historically their problem was that they were the much smaller company and under heavy resource constraints.

Around the turn of the century the Athlon was faster than the Pentium III and then they made x86 64-bit when Intel was trying to screw everyone with Itanic. But the Pentium 4 was a marketing-optimized design that maximized clock speed at the expense of heat and performance per clock. Intel was outselling them even though the Athlon 64 was at least as good if not better. The Pentium 4 was rubbish for laptops because of the heat problems, so Intel eventually had to design a separate chip for that, but they also had the resources to do it.

That was the point that AMD made their biggest mistake. When they set out to design their next chip the competition was the Pentium 4, so they made a power-hungry monster designed to hit high clock speeds at the expense of performance per clock. But the reason more people didn't buy the Athlon 64 wasn't that they couldn't figure out that a 2.4GHz CPU could be faster than a 2.8GHz CPU, it was all the anti-competitive shenanigans Intel was doing behind closed doors to e.g. keep PC OEMs from featuring systems with AMD CPUs. Meanwhile by then Intel had figured out that the Pentium 4 was, in fact, a bad design, when their own Pentium M laptops started outperforming the Pentium 4 desktops. So the Pentium 4 line got canceled and Bulldozer had to go up against the Pentium M-based Core, which nearly bankrupted AMD and compromised their ability to fund the R&D needed to sustain state of the art fabs.

Since then they've been climbing back out of the hole but it wasn't until Ryzen in 2017 that you could safely conclude they weren't on the verge of bankruptcy, and even then they were saddled with a lot of debt and contracts requiring them to use the uncompetitive Global Foundries fabs for several years. It wasn't until Zen4 in 2022 that they finally got to switch the whole package to TSMC.

So until quite recently the answer to the question "why didn't they do X?" was obvious. They didn't have the money. But now they do.

[Dylan16807]

> So until quite recently the answer to the question "why didn't they do X?" was obvious. They didn't have the money. But now they do.

Seven and a half years.

The excuse is threadbare at best. They are not doing a reasonable job of making compute work off the shelf.

[Const-me]

> I've tried it three times

Have you tried compute shaders instead of that weird HPC-only stuff?

Compute shaders are widely used by millions of gamers every day. GPU vendors have huge incentive to make them reliable and efficient: modern game engines are using them for lots of thing, e.g. UE5 can even render triangle meshes with GPU compute instead of graphics (the tech is called nanite virtualized geometry). In practice they work fine on all GPUs, ML included: https://github.com/Const-me/Cgml

[perching_aix]

I'd be very concerned if somebody makes a $100K decision based on a comment where the author couldn't even differentiate between the words "constitutionally" and "institutionally", while providing as much substance as any other random techbro on any random forum and being overwhelmingly oblivious to it.

[lofaszvanitt]

It had to destroy itself. These companies do not act on their own...