It's insane how Twitter of late is weaponizing "doesn't exist" and "cannot display" messages as loginwall and impressions control. It won't reproduce at the side of first class citizens with industrialized means of buzzing, so posters won't notice until subhuman class gather and speak up outside of the system. Crazy stuff.
I love this insider view into this interesting point in computing history, especially about AMD. However, I was a little put off by the glorification of nVidia's shady practices and lock-in policies as key to their current leading position. While technically true, I dislike "ends justify the means"-style thinking.
All this as the OP glorifies AMD's engineering and grit-based culture to drive through all though tough missteps and missed opportunities.
To expand on that, I really do feel AMD has great engineering culture but they keep falling to the same traps. They do not invest strongly enough in software support nor vendor relationships. Neither of these necessitate the more evil monopolistic practices of vendor lock-in and proprietary, non-free (as in libre) software. If they can navigate that without turning evil, they'd be a company for the ages.
And I can't close with mad respect to Dr. Lisa Su for her admirable leadership, itself bookworthy. Also, quick fact, she and Jensen are cousins!
On the other hand, AMD was on the brink of bankruptcy and Lisa Su led them out of it and into a triple-digit share price. Most companies with that much debt and that little revenue would have gone bankrupt.
Lest we forget the Intel IPC advantages over comparable AMD CPUs was due to some shortcuts that exposed major vulnerabilities in Intel CPUs made from ~2011 to 2019. I’d be curious to see how a Spectre and Meltdown-patched Intel CPU fares against its AMD competitor NOW. Some of the performance hits were brutal- 20%+ in some workloads.
Nvidia was pushing AMD out of the GPU market back when GPUs were effectively only used for gaming and while GameWorks was predatory, you can’t really blame them for having the cooler-running, quieter, more energy-efficient GPUs going back to the Maxwell line (GTX 9x0). CUDA didn’t screw AMD until recently… but in 2014, people were picking Nvidia because the GPUs were considerably “better”. AMD had the best bang for buck back then, but you’d have more power consumption and heat output, and the drivers tended to be buggy. The bugs would be fixed, but it really sucked for people trying to play games on release day.
Nvidia was pushing CUDA forward for over a decade before it started getting serious commercial traction. It's not like they blocked anyone else from developing viable GPGPU tech, they were just the only ones pushing it.
For like 8 years their drivers on Linux were a nightmare and AMD could have come in and done better.
AMD and Apple tried to push OpenCL but the design of it, a C-like kernel compiled to the GPU with LLVM and managed by the Khronos consortium, tended to lag in absolute performance to CUDA which was able to take advantage of evolutions in GPU design more closely.
The obvious issue with both your points is that NVidia's competitors did do as such.
AMD has had workable Linux drivers for many years now and there were numerous alternatives to CUDA pushed.
On the GPU area AMD lost, and will continue to lose to Nvidia, because they don't seem to get a grip on Software and Drivers. And that does not bode well for their long time CEO.
She turned the company around and got it on the right path, but in interviews I get the feeling that she might also be responsible for the "Hardware 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th.... eh, maybe software can be 5th" culture and AMD's deep denial that it has a problem.
That was OK for the CPU turnaround, but on the GPU front it completely shut them out of the first rounds of the AI party and maybe a trillion in market cap.
Yeah, I really feel like AMD is struggling with the software aspect. Even back when they were ATI and AMD bought them, the ATI drivers were garbage compared to Nvidia (from my PC gaming experience). After a few AMD and ATI cards, I just accepted the Nvidia tax, where my cards are more expensive and on paper worse, but in practice worked better.
I'm really surprised AMD isn't throwing a whole bunch of money on emulating CUDA. If they could "just" make CUDA work on AMD cards, it feels like Nvidia's position would be severely weakened.
Kind of like how Valve invested heavily into Proton and now gaming on Linux is pretty much fine.
I'm not sure emulating CUDA would be legal, you can look at ZLUDA as an example. It was originally funded by AMD, but got cut for what I presume would be legal reasons. ZLUDA does work amazingly well though from my experience!
AMD also doesn't understand that CUDA got big because they worked on cheap consumer cards; once things were working people got interested in expensive specialized cards. Their stack is still focused on the high end only, but there's no ecosystem to support it.
That is what ROMc and HIP were supposed to be somehow, but even that isn't really CUDA, as in the polyglot programming language environment, with C, C++ and Fortran first, plus others, followed by Python JIT, libraries, IDE, and a GPU graphical debugger.
> However, I was a little put off by the glorification of nVidia's shady practices and lock-in policies as key to their current leading position. While technically true, I dislike "ends justify the means"-style thinking.
Personally, I have no issue with "ends justify the means"-style thinking as a blanket rule, often it's perfectly appropriate.
I would argue it is, in this case, where Nvidia was playing a game by the rules. If there is an issue with how they played, then government should change the rules.
The people in power in the US don't want that though.
> SUPERIOR PRODUCTS LOSE TO SUPERIOR DISTRIBUTION LOCK-INS & GTM.
This takeaway was a little odd to me in the context of 2008. I had been an AMD stalwart in my PCs since about 2000 (Athlon Thunderbird), but IIRC in 2008 Intel had the better processor. Better single core performance, better performance/watt, and I think AMD processors tended to have stability issues around this time. I remember I built a PC in 2009 with a Core processor for these reasons.
Obviously this is a niche market (gaming PC) perspective. But I don't think it was so clear cut.
Until the later Core 2 Quad CPUs, AMD’s stuff was “technologically” better in the multi core workloads. The problem with that is that multi core workloads were uncommon at the time. This is where the “AMD Fine Wine” meme originated. By the time people had moved on to better things, the greatness of AMD’s technologies became apparent.
Personally, I’ve always liked Intel for stability reasons. Running Intel chipsets and CPUs, I’ve just had fewer issues. I’m an enthusiast, so I do spend more than I should on both Intel and AMD rather frequently… but now, I’m hungry for an Ampere system. My wallet is crying.
Agree. It took a truly superior product at lower cost to make a dent in Intel's dominance in server, all the while Intel tried their best to flex their lock in muscle.
That happened well after 2008, with the advent of Zen and chiplet bases tech and better perf/W
Ryzen 1 was far from superior, performance-wise it was already behind Intel at around Haswell-level but it brought the first reasonably-priced octacore x64 for the masses.
> I seriously wish Nvidia and AMD could merge now – a technology cross-licensing that takes advantages of each other’s fab capabilities is going to help a lot in bringing the cost of GPU cycles down much furthe.
Given Nvidia's track record I'd sooner imagine them just slacking off and overcharging more for lack of competition. I wish AMD would actually compete with them on GPUs (for graphics, not AI). Interestingly Intel seems to be trying to work up to that now.
the reason NVIDIA has a lead right now is largely because they didn't slack off during the Maxwell era and kept iterating even after the 22nm/20nm node fell though. AMD decided that hey, we can't really afford this right now, and NVIDIA can't shrink either, right? But NVIDIA slipped in a major architectural iteration that was basically a full node worth of efficiency gains, and that really has put them in the position they are today.
Being able to take a trailing-node strategy during the Turing/Ampere years, being able to run a full node behind RDNA1/2 and use dirt-cheap Samsung crap and last-gen TSMC 16FF/14FFN while still fighting AMD to a standstill on efficiency is entirely the result of AMD slacking off.
AMD themselves have said they slacked off. Lost focus, is the quote.
Is he really trying to say that AMD had a superior product in the Core 2 Duo era and Intel was only dominating due to marketing? It's hard to take any of the rest of his opinions seriously when he starts with that take
I'm not sure if you're familiar with CPU history, but this is roughly true.
Intel's catchup to multicore offerings was trippy and severely lagged behind AMD.
I think it's often forgotten that CPU leadership has fluctuated between different companies many times in the past!
I'm quite familiar as I worked for Intel for over a decade as an engineer. It's absolutely true that leadership has fluctuated a lot but the 2003-2010 era had fairly clear cut leaders for each generation. AMD was the choice for just about everything through the Athlon 64 single core era but the Core 2 Duo run had them relegated to superiority in the very bottom end of the market only for a long time.
The OP is right. Pentium D was a single generation in which Intel offering was worse that Athlon 64 X2 . But Intel quickly shifted to Core 2 Duo architecture and it was much better than AMD.
I never worked at a large company and he was right there, but there are so many outstanding things in this thread, it’s hard not be surprised.
Not understanding the importance of GPUs in 2006, or of being first-to-market, while confusing OpenGL with OpenCL (twice), survival bias (BELIEVE IN YOUR VISION)…
> AMD (NASDAQ:AMD) today announced revenue for the first quarter of 2024 of $5.5 billion, gross margin of 47%, operating income of $36 million, net income of $123 million and diluted earnings per share of $0.07.
Readit News
All this as the OP glorifies AMD's engineering and grit-based culture to drive through all though tough missteps and missed opportunities.
To expand on that, I really do feel AMD has great engineering culture but they keep falling to the same traps. They do not invest strongly enough in software support nor vendor relationships. Neither of these necessitate the more evil monopolistic practices of vendor lock-in and proprietary, non-free (as in libre) software. If they can navigate that without turning evil, they'd be a company for the ages.
And I can't close with mad respect to Dr. Lisa Su for her admirable leadership, itself bookworthy. Also, quick fact, she and Jensen are cousins!
Lest we forget the Intel IPC advantages over comparable AMD CPUs was due to some shortcuts that exposed major vulnerabilities in Intel CPUs made from ~2011 to 2019. I’d be curious to see how a Spectre and Meltdown-patched Intel CPU fares against its AMD competitor NOW. Some of the performance hits were brutal- 20%+ in some workloads.
Nvidia was pushing AMD out of the GPU market back when GPUs were effectively only used for gaming and while GameWorks was predatory, you can’t really blame them for having the cooler-running, quieter, more energy-efficient GPUs going back to the Maxwell line (GTX 9x0). CUDA didn’t screw AMD until recently… but in 2014, people were picking Nvidia because the GPUs were considerably “better”. AMD had the best bang for buck back then, but you’d have more power consumption and heat output, and the drivers tended to be buggy. The bugs would be fixed, but it really sucked for people trying to play games on release day.
For like 8 years their drivers on Linux were a nightmare and AMD could have come in and done better.
AMD eventually did while Nvidia's drivers remained a nightmare almost until these days. But sure, AMD could have done it sooner.
Nowadays almost nobody cares about OpenCL.
Dead Comment
https://chipsandcheese.com/2024/06/25/testing-amds-giant-mi3...
https://www.nscale.com/blog/nscale-benchmarks-amd-mi300x-gpu...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40790924
That was OK for the CPU turnaround, but on the GPU front it completely shut them out of the first rounds of the AI party and maybe a trillion in market cap.
I'm really surprised AMD isn't throwing a whole bunch of money on emulating CUDA. If they could "just" make CUDA work on AMD cards, it feels like Nvidia's position would be severely weakened.
Kind of like how Valve invested heavily into Proton and now gaming on Linux is pretty much fine.
What was their shady practices and lock-in policies?
Personally, I have no issue with "ends justify the means"-style thinking as a blanket rule, often it's perfectly appropriate.
I would argue it is, in this case, where Nvidia was playing a game by the rules. If there is an issue with how they played, then government should change the rules.
The people in power in the US don't want that though.
This takeaway was a little odd to me in the context of 2008. I had been an AMD stalwart in my PCs since about 2000 (Athlon Thunderbird), but IIRC in 2008 Intel had the better processor. Better single core performance, better performance/watt, and I think AMD processors tended to have stability issues around this time. I remember I built a PC in 2009 with a Core processor for these reasons.
Obviously this is a niche market (gaming PC) perspective. But I don't think it was so clear cut.
Personally, I’ve always liked Intel for stability reasons. Running Intel chipsets and CPUs, I’ve just had fewer issues. I’m an enthusiast, so I do spend more than I should on both Intel and AMD rather frequently… but now, I’m hungry for an Ampere system. My wallet is crying.
That happened well after 2008, with the advent of Zen and chiplet bases tech and better perf/W
Given Nvidia's track record I'd sooner imagine them just slacking off and overcharging more for lack of competition. I wish AMD would actually compete with them on GPUs (for graphics, not AI). Interestingly Intel seems to be trying to work up to that now.
Being able to take a trailing-node strategy during the Turing/Ampere years, being able to run a full node behind RDNA1/2 and use dirt-cheap Samsung crap and last-gen TSMC 16FF/14FFN while still fighting AMD to a standstill on efficiency is entirely the result of AMD slacking off.
AMD themselves have said they slacked off. Lost focus, is the quote.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=1956&v=590h3XIUfHg
Practicality beats purity 100% of the time. This echoes "Worse is better".
https://www.anandtech.com/print/2045/
Not understanding the importance of GPUs in 2006, or of being first-to-market, while confusing OpenGL with OpenCL (twice), survival bias (BELIEVE IN YOUR VISION)…
Deleted Comment
> AMD (NASDAQ:AMD) today announced revenue for the first quarter of 2024 of $5.5 billion, gross margin of 47%, operating income of $36 million, net income of $123 million and diluted earnings per share of $0.07.
https://ir.amd.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1192/am...
And Nvidia had a revenue $22.1 billion in Q4 2024, gross margin of 76%, operating income of $13.6B, net income of $12.2B, and diluted earnings per share $4.93. https://investor.nvidia.com/news/press-release-details/2024/...