[notfried]

If CUDA isn't that strong of a moat/tie-in and Chinese tech companies can seemingly reasonably migrate to these chips, why hasn't AMD been able to compete more aggressively with nVidia on a US/global scale when they had a much longer head start?

[brookst]

1. AMD isn’t different enough. They’d be subject to the same export restrictions and political instability as Nvidia, so why would global companies switch to them?

2. CUDA has been a huge moat, but the incentives are incredibly strong for everybody except Nvidia to change that. The fact that it was an insurmountable moat five years ago in a $5B market does not mean it’s equally powerful in a $300B market.

3. AMD’s culture and core competencies are really not aligned to playing disruptor here. Nvidia is generally more agile and more experimental. It would have taken a serious pivot years ago for AMD to be the right company to compete.

[FuriouslyAdrift]

AMD is HIGHLY successful in the GPU compute market. They have the Instinct line which actually outperforms most nVidia chips for less money.

It's the CUDA software ecosystem they have not been able to overcome. AMD has had multiple ecosystem stalls but it does appear that ROCm is finally taking off which is open source and multi-vendor.

AMD is unifying their GPU architectures (like nVidia) for the next gen to be able to subsidize development by gaming, etc., card sales (like nVidia).

[immibis]

Why doesn't AMD just write a CUDA translation layer? Yeah, it's a bit difficult to say "just", but they're a pretty big company. It's not like one guy doing it in a basement.

Does Nvidia have patents on CUDA? They're probably invalid in China which explains why China can do this and AMD can't.

[FuriouslyAdrift]

They did...HIPIFY translates from CUDA to HIP (ROCm)

https://rocm.docs.amd.com/projects/HIPIFY/en/latest/index.ht...

[bjornsing]

> CUDA has been a huge moat

The CUDA moat is extremely exaggerated for deep learning, especially for inference. It’s simply not hard to do matrix multiplication and a few activation functions here and there.

[OkayPhysicist]

It regularly shocks me that AMD doesn't release their cards with at least enough CUDA reimplementation to run DL models. As you point out, AI applications use a tiny subset of the overall API, the courts have ruled that APIs can't be protected by copyright, and CUDA is NVIDIA's largest advantage. It seems like an easy win, so I assume there's some good reason.

[nerdsniper]

A very cynical take: AMD and Nvidia CEO’s are cousins and there’s more money to be made with one dominant monopoly than two competitive companies. And this income could be an existential difference-maker for Taiwan.

[kawaiikouhai]

bro, both are American CEOs.

What is this racialized nonsense, have you seen Jensen Huang speak Mandarin? His mandarin is actually awful for someone who left Taiwan at 8.

[tux1968]

AMD can't even figure out how to release decent drivers for Linux in a timely fashion. It might not be the largest market, but would have at least given them a competitive advantage in reaching some developers. There is either something very incompetent in their software team, or there are business reasons intentionally restraining them.

[wmf]

They did; it's called HIP.

[axoltl]

From what I've been reading the inference workload tends to ebb and flow throughout the day with much lower loads overnight than at for example 10AM PT/1PM ET. I understand companies fill that gap with training (because an idle GPU costs the most).

So for data centers, training is just as important as inference.

[bjornsing]

> So for data centers, training is just as important as inference.

Sure, and I’m not saying buying Nvidia is a bad bet. It’s the most flexible and mature hardware out there, and the huge installed base also means you know future innovations will align with this hardware. But it’s not primarily a CUDA thing or even a software thing. The Nvidia moat is much broader than just CUDA.

[sciencesama]

The drivers are the most annoying issue ! Pytorch kind of like cuda so much it just works anything with roccm just sucks !

[danesparza]

And it would be a big bet for AMD. They don't create and manufacture chips 'just in time' -- it takes man hours and MONEY to spin up a fab, not to mention marketing dollars.

[FuriouslyAdrift]

AMD has been producing GPU compute cards (and is highly sucessful at it) for nearly as long as nVidia. (https://www.amd.com/en/products/accelerators/instinct.html)

[sagarm]

AMD is fabless. They spun off GlobalFoundries years ago.

[belval]

> If CUDA isn't that strong of a moat/tie-in and Chinese tech companies can seemingly reasonably migrate to these chips, why hasn't AMD been able to compete more aggressively with nVidia on a US/global scale when they had a much longer head start?

It's all about investment. If you are a random company you don't want to sink millions in figuring out how to use AMD so you apply the tried an true "no one gets fired for buying Nvidia".

If you are an authoritarian state with some level of control over domestic companies, that calculus does not exist. You can just ban Nvidia chips and force to learn how to use the new thing. By using the new thing an ecosystem gets built around it.

It's the beauty of centralized controlled in the face of free markets and I don't doubt that it will pay-off for them.

[PunchyHamster]

I think they'd be entirely fine just using NVIDIA, and most of the push came from US itself trying to ban export (or "export", as NVIDIA cards are put together in the china factories...).

Also AMD really didn't invest enough in making their software experience as nice as NVIDIA.

[belval]

I was referring to this: https://www.reuters.com/markets/emerging/china-tells-tech-fi...

[FuriouslyAdrift]

ROCm is making serious inroads, now.

[ithkuil]

Are there precedents where an authoritarian state outperformed the free market in technological innovation?

Or would china be different because it's a mix of market and centralized rule?

[eunos]

Because Cuda moat in China is wrecked artificially by political reason rather than technical reason

[nextworddev]

This is the right answer

[buyucu]

I use AMD MI300s at work, and my experience is that for PyTorch at least there is no moat. The moat only exists in people's minds.

Until 2022 or so AMD was not really investing into their software stack. Once they did, they caught up with Nvidia.

[imtringued]

The only way the average person can access a MI300 is through the AMD developer cloud trial which gives you a mere 25 hours to test your software. Meanwhile NVidia hands out entire GPUs for free to research labs.

If AMD really wanted to play in the same league as NVidia, they should have built their own cloud service and offered a full stack experience akin to Google with their TPUs, then they would be justified in ignoring the consumer market, but alas, most people run their software on their local hardware first.

[overfeed]

> The only way the average person can access a MI300 is through the AMD developer cloud trial which gives you a mere 25 hours to test your software

HN has a blindspot where AMDs absence in the prosumer/SME space is interpreted as failing horribly. Yet AMDs instinct cards are selling very well at the top end of the market.

If you were trying to disrupt a dominant player, would you try selling a million gadgets to a million people, or a million gadgets to 3-10 large organizations?

[FuriouslyAdrift]

AMD sells 100% of the chips they can produce and at a premium. It's chicken and the egg, here. They have to compete with nVidia for pre-buying fab capacity at TSMC and they are getting out bought.

[tonyhart7]

AMD also need to share that fab wafer capacity to processor division and third party client like (sony,valve,various hpc client)

[Cheer2171]

I can rent an MI300X for $2.69/hr right now on runpod.

[chii]

AMD probably don't have chinese state backing, presumably, where profit is less of a concern and they can do it unprofitably for many years (decades even) as long as the end outcome is dominance.

[shrubble]

Sadly, AMD and its precursor graphics company, ATI, have had garbage driver software since literally the mid-1990s.

They have never had a focus on top notch software development.

[baq]

CUDA isn't a moat... in China. The culture is much more NIH there.

[sampton]

Because Chinese government can tell their companies to adopt Chinese tech and they will do it. Short term pain for long term gain.

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

It's interesting that CUDA is a moat because if AI really was as good as they claim then wouldn't the CUDA moat evaporate?

[random3]

Exactly. The whole argument that software is a moat is at best a temporary illusion. The supply chain is the moat, software is not.

[dworks]

Most chipmakers in China are making or have made their new generation of products CUDA-compatible.

[belter]

Do you know how bad AMD is at doing drivers and Software in general?

[FrustratedMonky]

People are trying to break the moat.

See, Mojo, a new language to compile to other chips. https://www.modular.com/mojo

[PunchyHamster]

I don't think "learn entirely new language" is all that appealing vs "just buy NVIDIA cards"

[FrustratedMonky]

This was in terms of breaking the Nvidia monopoly. Mojo is a variant of python. When looking at the difficulty of migrating from CUDA , learning python is pretty small barrier.

Sure, you can keep buying nvidia, but that wasn't what was discussed.

[almostgotcaught]

> Mojo is a variant of python.

Lol this is how I know no one that pushes mojo on hn has actually ever used mojo.

[FrustratedMonky]

Yes, over simplifying the concept. what is wrong with that? If I post a thesis on compilers would that really help clarify the subject? Read the link for details. Is Mojo attempting to offer a non-Cuda solution? Yes. Is it using Python as the language? Yes. Is there some complicated details there? Yes. Congratulations.

[almostgotcaught]

> Yes. Is it using Python as the language?

You're completely wrong here. That's the "what's wrong with it".

[buckle8017]

CUDA is a legal moat.

A reimplantation would run into copyright issues.

No such problem in China.