[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.