[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.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Seven and a half years.

Seven and a half years was the 2017 Ryzen release date. Zen 1 took them from being completely hopeless to having something competitive but only just, because they were still having the whole thing fabbed by GF. Their revenue didn't exceed what it was in 2011 until 2019 and didn't exceed Intel's until 2022. It's still less than Nvidia, even though AMD is fielding CPUs competitive with Intel and GPUs competitive with Nvidia at the same time.

They had a pretty good revenue jump in 2021 but much of that was used to pay down debt, because debt taken on when you're almost bankrupt tends to have unfavorable terms. So it wasn't until somewhere in 2022 that they finally got free of GF and the old debt and could start doing something about this. But then it takes some amount of time to actually do it, and you would expect to be seeing the results of that approximately right now. Which seems like a silly time to stop looking.

Also, somewhat counterintuitively, George Hotz et al seem to be employing a strategy in the nature of "say bad things about them in public to shame them into improving", which has the dual result of actually working (they fix a lot of the things he's complaining about) but also making people think that things are worse than they are because there is now a large public archive of rants about things they've already fixed. It's not clear if this is the company not providing a good mechanism for people to complain about things like that in private and have them fixed promptly so it doesn't have take media attention to make it happen, or it's George Hotz seeking publicity as is his custom, or some combination of both.

[Dylan16807]

It has also been quite a while since Zen+ and Zen 2. Those poured in money, and they absolutely did not need to wait until they had more revenue than some chunk of Intel or until their debt was gone. If you think they got properly started on this in 2022, that's pretty damning.

I'm not basing anything on geohotz, just general discussions from people that have tried, and my own experience of trying to get some popular compute code bases to run. It has been so lacking compared to AMD's own support for games. I'm not going to be "silly" and "stop looking" going forward, but I'm not going to forget how long my card was largely abandoned. It went directly from "not ready yet, working on it" to "obsolete, maybe dregs will be added later".

[AnthonyMouse]

> It has also been quite a while since Zen+ and Zen 2. Those poured in money

Zen+ and Zen 2 were released in 2019. Their revenue in 2019 was only 2.5% higher than it was in 2011; adjusted for inflation it was still down more than 10%.

> they absolutely did not need to wait until they had more revenue than some chunk of Intel or until their debt was gone.

The premise of the comparison is that it shows the resources they have available. To make the same level of investment as a bigger company you either have to take it out of profit (not possible when your net profit has a minus sign in front of it or is only a single digit) or you have to make more money first.

And carrying high interest debt when you're now at much lower risk of default is pretty foolish. You'd be paying interest that could be going to R&D. Even if you want to borrow money in order to invest it, the thing to do is to pay back the high interest debt and then borrow the money again now that you can get better terms, which seems to be just what they did.

[Dylan16807]

I never said anything about wanting them to invest the same amount as nvidia or Intel. I think a handful of extra people could have made a big difference, in particular if some of them had the sole task of bringing their consumer cards into the support list.

It is so bad that they had major cards that were never on the support list for compute.

> You'd be paying interest that could be going to R&D.

Getting people to actually consider your datacenter cards, because they know how to use your cards, will get you more R&D money.

[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