[HN Gopher] Lisa Su saved AMD - Now she wants Nvidia's AI crown
___________________________________________________________________
Lisa Su saved AMD - Now she wants Nvidia's AI crown
Author : tim_sw
Score : 146 points
Date : 2023-06-02 12:10 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.forbes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.forbes.com)
| mtkhaos wrote:
| I'm looking forward to seeing a Chiplet DPU similar to Nvidias
| offering. There is a lot room for growth especially for the
| professional market.
| [deleted]
| makomk wrote:
| The trouble is that AMD just didn't take AI seriously. For a long
| time, their equivalent of CUDA was not only Linux only and a pain
| to use but was outright broken on all consumer cards - as in,
| they dropped official support for the only consumer cards it
| officially ran on, promptly broke it so that machine learning
| runs failed, and dismissed bug reports from the users who were
| left high and dry because their cards were no longer officially
| supported. The only way to use AMD for machine learning was to
| pay out much more than the price of NVidia's consumer cards for
| server-focused AMD cards that worked worse, were harder to use,
| and that AMD didn't support for long either. They just never had
| the small-scale desktop usage that lead to NVidia's cards being
| the choice for bigger machine learning once scaled up because it
| simply didn't work.
| osti wrote:
| This is my thought as well. Their devs who work on the graphics
| drivers are heavily underpaid in Canada. As an ex-AMD, I took
| AMD's offer for 20k less than another software company because
| I like low level stuff and have always been an AMD fan since
| the Athlon days. But when Amazon offered me double, I easily
| took Amazon's offer and left AMD after less than a year.
|
| I think a lot of companies are overpaying their software
| people, but if there is any one that should pay their devs much
| more it would be AMD, because they are in a position to compete
| against Nvidia if their software integrated well with the AI
| training stuff.
| jrockway wrote:
| Why do you think that people are being overpaid if you
| literally left a job you liked to make more money? Being
| underpaid is just being underpaid; just because the numbers
| are high at the big tech companies doesn't mean that those
| companies are overpaying. They're probably underpaying! The
| dollar just isn't worth what it used to be.
|
| (Canada does chronically underpay its software engineers,
| though.)
| osti wrote:
| Not going to argue whether we are being overpaid or not (I
| certainly hope we aren't because now I'm getting even
| crazier compensation than my Amazon days lol). But I think
| the current layoffs which are putting downward pressures on
| salaries will prove that we were getting overpaid.
|
| My main point was still that AMD should really pay a lot
| more than what they currently are paying, they actually
| already increased it quite a bit compared to 3 years ago,
| but not nearly enough! In a way, I think this reflects
| poorly on Lisa Su because she didn't invest enough into AI
| while it should have been obvious from the start.
| superkuh wrote:
| The AMD RX 580 was released in April 2018. AMD had already
| dropped ROCm/HIP support for it by 2021. They only supported
| the card for _3_ years. 3 years. It 's so lame it's bordering
| on fraudulent, even if not legally fraud.
|
| I know CUDA via their HIP is a moving target they don't control
| making it hard and expensive for them to prevent bit rot but
| this is still an AMD caused problem due to opencl not getting
| any love by anyone anymore. AMD included.
| JonChesterfield wrote:
| You dont have to change to a new toolchain. If the 2021
| version was working with your card, keep using it.
| sangnoir wrote:
| Sticking to an old kernel and libraries is a pain id your
| hardware is not purpose-specific. Newer downstream
| dependencies change and become incompatible: e.g.
| Tensorflow 2 (IIRC) was incompatible with the ROCm versions
| that work with the 580. New models on places like
| HuggingFace tend to work with recent libraries, so not
| changing to a new toolchain locks you in to SoTA a few
| years in the past. In my case, thr benchmarking I did for
| my workloads showed comparable perf between my RX580 and
| Google Colab. So I chose to upgrade my kerbel and break
| ROCm
| JonChesterfield wrote:
| Yeah, that's fair. Staying in the past doesn't work
| forever.
|
| There are scars in the implementation which suggest the
| HSA model was really difficult to implement on the
| hardware at the time.
|
| It doesn't look like old hardware gets explicitly
| disabled, the code that runs them is still there. However
| writing new things that only work on newer hardware seems
| likely, as does prioritising testing on the current gen.
| So in practice the older stuff is likely to rot unless
| someone takes an interest in fixing it.
| paulmd wrote:
| Also, while AMD's OpenCL implementation has more features on
| paper, the runtime is frequently broken where NVIDIA's
| claimed features actually all work. Everything I've heard
| from people who've used it is that they ended up with so much
| vendor-specific code to patch around AMD's bugs and
| deficiencies that they might as well have just written CUDA
| in the first place.
|
| This is an old article but the old "vendor B" stuff still
| rings incredibly true with at least AMD's OpenCL stack as
| well.
|
| https://richg42.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-truth-on-opengl-
| dri...
|
| Thus NVIDIA actually has even less of a lock-in than people
| think. If you want to write a better OneAPI ecosystem and run
| it on OpenCL runtime... go hog wild! NVIDIA is best at that
| too! You just don't get the benefit of NVIDIA's engineers
| writing libraries for you.
| JonChesterfield wrote:
| I think Intel is still pushing opencl on GPUs. Maybe with
| other layers on top. Sycl or oneapi or similar. AMD mostly
| shares one implementation between hip and opencl so the base
| plumbing should work about as well on either, though I can
| believe the user experience is challenging.
|
| I wrote some code that compiles as opencl and found it an
| intensely annoying experience. There's some C++ extension
| model to it now which might help but it was still missing
| function pointers last time I looked. My lasting impression
| was that I didn't want to write opencl code again.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> their equivalent of CUDA _
|
| Nvidia didn't pull their AI leadership out of thin air
| overnight, but they shipped the first CUDA capable consumer
| cards with the GeForce 8000 series way back in 2007 and
| committed to this ecosystem over the years, consistently
| investing in the HW, SW.
|
| By the time AMD woke up and shipped ROCm in 2016, Nvidia
| already had nearly 10 years head start and a cemented moat in
| this field. AMD now has a huge mountain to climb to catch up to
| Nvidia.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| AMD invested significantly into OpenCL prior to 2016. It
| seemed like a safe bet -- the open industry standard usually
| ends up beating the proprietary standard in the long run.
|
| Especially for something like this, with massive open source
| / open standard companies like Google as heavy users. It
| seems surprising to me that Google didn't ensure that open
| standards won in an area that they are so heavily dependent
| on.
| belval wrote:
| If you ever get the chance to write something in OpenCL and
| then in CUDA I promise you will understand immediately why
| Google didn't push for it.
|
| There is a lot more boilerplate to it, read/write to the
| buffer, queueing being handled explicitly. Here's an
| example that illustrate what I mean:
| https://github.com/rsnemmen/OpenCL-
| examples/blob/master/mand...
|
| For comparison here is an implementation in CUDA: http://se
| lkie.macalester.edu/csinparallel/modules/CUDAArchit...
|
| Notice how the CUDA code is more readable.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Google is part of the Khronos group. They were well
| positioned to steer the standard towards one that doesn't
| suck. Or they could have championed a different standard.
| Google has the scale that only Google is to blame that
| they are still heavily dependent on a closed standard.
|
| Open Standards almost always beat closed ones. IMO AMD
| was right to bet on open standards. They lost the bet but
| I think it was the right bet.
| barbariangrunge wrote:
| > the Khronos group
|
| I still wake up at night, sweating, thinking about my
| time learning OpenGL in university. The docs were a
| nightmare back then
| SuchAnonMuchWow wrote:
| In the link provided, the CUDA example only show the
| compute kernel itself and not the boilerplate required to
| run it. On the other hand, your OpenCL example _only_
| show the boilerplate.
|
| This is the OpenCL kernel from the same repo, for a more
| fair comparison: https://github.com/rsnemmen/OpenCL-
| examples/blob/master/mand...
|
| This is much more readable. OpenCL-C the language is
| fine: it's how you deploy the program on the cards that
| is complicated with opencl.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| Because all the researchers that used GPUs for CV and ML
| used what they had at their disposal, which was Nvidia GPUs
| and CUDA.
|
| OpenCL brought no advantage here considering it only worked
| on AMD GPUs which were lackluster in performance and
| switching from CUDA to OpenCL meant extra work that
| researches already iterating on CUDA weren't willing to do.
| cibyr wrote:
| OpenCL works fine on Nvidia GPUs. It's more annoying to
| code for, and harder to get good performance out of than
| CUDA, but it works.
| dragontamer wrote:
| Poorly, in my experience.
|
| CUDA is compiled into PTX, an intermediate language. PTX
| is then compiled into a specific NVidia assembly language
| (often called SASS, though each SASS for each generation
| of cards is different). This way, NVidia can make huge
| changes to the underlying assembly code from generation-
| to-generation, but still have portability.
|
| OpenCL, especially OpenCL 1.2, (which is the version of
| OpenCL that works on the widest set of cards), does not
| have an intermediate language. SPIR is an OpenCL2.+
| concept.
|
| This means that OpenCL 1.2 code is distributed in source
| and recompiled in practice. But that means that compiler
| errors can kill your code before it even runs. This is
| especially annoying because the OpenCL 1.2 compiler is
| part of a device-driver. Meaning if the end-user updates
| the device driver, the compiler may have a new bug (or
| old bug), that changes the behavior of your code.
|
| -------------
|
| This doesn't matter for DirectX, because like CUDA,
| Microsoft compiles DirectX into DXIR / DirectX
| intermediate language. And then has device drivers
| compile the intermediate-language into the final assembly
| code on a per-device basis.
|
| -------------
|
| It is this intermediate layer that AMD is missing, and
| IMO is the key to their problems in practice.
|
| SPIR (OpenCL's standard intermediate layer) has spotty
| support across cards. I'm guessing NVidia knows that PTX
| intermediate language is their golden goose and doesn't
| want to offer good SPIR support. Microsoft probably
| prefers people to use DirectX / DXIR as well. So that
| leaves AMD and Intel as the only groups who could
| possibly push SPIR and align together. SPIR is a good
| idea, but I'm not sure if the politics will allow it to
| happen.
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| OpenCL also gets compiled to PTX on Nvidia GPUs.
| dragontamer wrote:
| But as an OpenCL programmer, you don't distribute PTX
| intermediate code. You distribute OpenCL kernels around
| and recompile every time. That's more or less the
| practice.
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| True.
|
| And the resulting PTX is worse when it's generated from
| OpenCL C instead of CUDA C. I tested that recently with a
| toy FFT kernel and the CUDA pipeline produced a lot more
| efficient FMA instructions.
| JonChesterfield wrote:
| It's really difficult to tell whether the PTX layer
| approach is something AMD _should_ adopt. That's roughly
| what the (I think now abandoned) HSAIL thing was.
|
| It's one where packaging concerns and compiler dev
| concerns are probably in tension. Compiling for N
| different GPUs is really annoying for library
| distribution and probably a factor in the shortish list
| of officially supported ROCm cards.
|
| However translating between IRs is usually lossy so LLVM
| to PTX to SASS makes me nervous as a pipeline. Intel are
| doing LLVM to SPIRV to LLVM to machine code which can't
| be ideal. Maybe that's a workaround for LLVM's IR being
| unstable, but equally stability in IR comes at a
| development cost.
|
| I think amdgpu should use a single llvm IR representation
| for multiple hardware revisions and specialise in the
| backend. That doesn't solve binary stability hazards but
| would take the edge off the packaging challenge. That
| seems to be most of the win spirv markets at much lower
| engineering cost.
| DeepYogurt wrote:
| OpenCL did (and still does I think) work on nvidia cards.
| People I talked to back in the day complained more about
| OpenCL being "C but on GPUs" while cuda was more akin to
| C++. They could move faster and do more in cuda and the
| nvidia lock in didn't matter as the fastest cards of the
| day were nvidia. I think vega cards were faster (or
| faster per dollar maybe) for some of the code that was
| relevant, but not by much and by that point legacy code
| lock in had taken over.
| Keyframe wrote:
| Nvidia took a big gamble with CUDA and it took years and ton
| of investment to get there. Jensen Huang talks about it on
| commencement speech he did in Taiwan recently here
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oi89u6q0_AY It's a big moat
| to cross.
| mahkeiro wrote:
| I always had hope that ROCm will be able to compete with CUDA
| but it's nowhere here despite the time. Seems funny to see
| that Intel is doing a better job at that with OneAPI.
| amunicio wrote:
| > The trouble is that AMD just didn't take AI seriously.
|
| Until a couple of years ago, AMD was in survival mode, fighting
| Intel on one side and Nvidia on the other. Two rivals that were
| making money hand over fist while AMD was bleeding money.
|
| AMD picked open standards and made investments on open source
| frameworks and libraries commensurate with their financials,
| the hope being that the community could help pick up some of
| the slack. The community, understandably, went with the
| proprietary solution that worked well at the time and had
| resources behind.
|
| The net results is that the Nvidia ecosystem has gained a
| dominant position in the industry and benefits from being
| perceived as a quasi-standard. On the other hand, open source
| efforts by AMD or others get viewed as "not serious".
|
| The financial situation of AMD has improved somewhat over the
| last couple years. So AMD is "taking AI more seriously now".
| But it might be too late and the proprietary ecosystem has
| probably won.
| parker_mountain wrote:
| For what it's worth, AMD is also incredibly proprietary. The
| drivers being open source really helps with compatibility and
| your kernel, but you're still interacting with a massive
| computer running it's own OS with its own trusted code
| solution. And that computer also has DMA to your computer.
|
| I would consider their open efforts to be "not serious" for
| anyone but the consumer space - games, desktop users, maybe
| even professional text editors. If you're using the GPUs for
| "professional" applications in a one-off scenario, even AMD
| falls short.
|
| I'm honestly not sure what the moral of this story is.
| JonChesterfield wrote:
| What OS do you mean? The closest thing I can think of is
| the embedded CPU that gets called CP in the ISA docs, which
| mostly schedules work onto the compute units. That has
| firmware which is probably annoying to disassemble, but
| it's hard to imagine it doing anything particularly
| interesting.
| beebeepka wrote:
| Are they "incredibly proprietary" compared to the
| competition? Clearly they aren't. Nvidia offers blobs in
| both consumer and professional markets. Even going to the
| extent of gimping performance hardware through drivers on
| more than one occasion.
|
| That said, I think AMD isn't really competing with Nvidia.
| Sure, their R&D budget is smallish but it feels like
| they're somewhat fine with the current status quo.
| paulmd wrote:
| > Nvidia offers blobs in both consumer and professional
| markets
|
| So does AMD.
|
| https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/firmware/
| lin...
|
| And while they have an open version of the userland, it's
| also missing features compared to the proprietary one,
| etc.
|
| Besides, in the end it truly hardly matters whether the
| firmware is loaded at runtime or lives in updateable
| flash. It's still not "your PC" in the Stallman sense
| either way, it's been tivoized regardless of whether
| firmware is injected at runtime or during assembly. You
| cannot load unsigned firmware on AMD anymore either,
| firmware signing started with Vega (iirc) and checksums
| now cover almost all of the card configuration similar to
| NVIDIA.
|
| Firmware is also the only way to get proper HDMI
| support... which is why AMD still does not support HDMI
| 2.1 on linux. HDMI Forum will not license the spec openly
| and implementations must contain blobs or omit those
| features.
|
| https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/1417
| beebeepka wrote:
| Hey, I am not white knighting for AMD here. For all we
| know, they could only have been pursuing open standards
| because they've been forced to, as the underdog.
|
| Can we really assign blame to them specifically for not
| fighting the hdmi forum on our behalf?
| delfinom wrote:
| >own OS with its own trusted code solution
|
| AMD is working on moving to things like the open source
| form of AGESA. They plan to start deploying openSIL by
| 2026.
| amunicio wrote:
| > I'm honestly not sure what the moral of this story is.
|
| That people will go with what is easier and works?
|
| That open source and open standards don't win by default?
| That it takes a lot of persistence and effort.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| The moral of the story is that Nvidia invested a lot more
| in low level software developers for their GPU solutions
| and AMD did not, and it shows.
|
| "Open source" by itself is not a magic dust you can
| sprinkle on your projfcts that will make your software work
| well.
| gary_0 wrote:
| A company that goes open source might get the icing for
| free, but they still have to bake the cake themselves.
| williamDafoe wrote:
| AMD's focus was always on pure compute power at a good
| price. And they always beat NVidia at that game. AMD
| cards always had the highest hash rate per dollar in
| crypto mining. AMD has 100% of the console market and the
| fastest iGPUs by 2x over Intel.
|
| NVidia decided to use gimmicks to sell their cards
| including texture compression, lighting tricks, improved
| antique video encoders, motion smoothing, bad proprietary
| variable refresh rate, ray tracing, cuda and now machine
| learning features.
|
| Nvidia is fortunate that machine learning has taken off.
| That is masking AMD winning market share from weak
| overpriced NVidia 3D products!
| dotnet00 wrote:
| Calling features which are integral to all modern games
| and most of which also got adopted by other vendors
| 'gimmicks' is kind of ridiculous.
| newjersey wrote:
| I personally don't have any insider information but just
| wanted to add what your saying fits with the meta on the
| gaming community side where commentators are frustrated
| that nVidia has so much hubris that they think they can
| just sell essentially last generation level technology
| without the step up (I think it was 3xxx vs 4xxx or
| something like that where you'd expect the 4060Ti to be
| at least as good as 3070Ti) and just trying to make up
| for it in "software".
|
| It probably takes a lot of confidence in your software
| developers to make this kind of decisions.
| m463 wrote:
| Isn't this sort of how specialized hardware kind of works?
|
| At some point, hardware (necessarily?) evolves to become
| optimized to do one thing, and then you have to just treat
| the driver as an API to the hardware.
|
| Even "simple" things like keyboards and mice are now small
| computers that run their own code, moreso more complex
| devices like sound cards and hard drives.
|
| And since graphics card performance seems to be the
| bottleneck in a lot of computing, it has become super
| specialized and you just hand off a high-level chunk of
| data and it does magic in parallel with fast memory and
| spits it out the hdmi cable.
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| For the keyboard/mouse now being small computers that's
| been true since the 1970s. Almost all keyboards for a
| period of about 30 years had an 8048 or 8051 CPU. It's
| how they serialized the keystrokes. From the model M
| keyboard through to everything up till the USB era.
| wmf wrote:
| The moral is that PSP FUD has nothing to do with AMD's lack
| of success in AI.
| alfalfasprout wrote:
| I'm not so sure anymore. The big reason is that now that the
| ML framework ecosystem has fragmented into different "layers"
| of the stack, very few people are directly writing CUDA
| kernels anymore.
|
| As a result, with things like XLA now supporting AMD GPUs
| using RoCM under the hood the feature gap has closed A LOT.
|
| Sure, Nvidia still has the performance crown lead with CuDNN,
| NCCL, and other libraries providing major boosts. But AMD is
| starting to catch up quite fast.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| They've been getting piles of money from Ryzen for 5-6 years
| now. How long am I supposed to wait?
|
| According to the latest ROCm release notes, it supports Navi
| 21. Well, at least the pro models. It doesn't even mention
| the 5000 or 7000 cards. My current understanding is that 7000
| support is mostly there a few months late and 5000 was
| abandoned partway done after years of vague promises.
|
| At least it might support windows soon. Not my sub-4-year-old
| GPU, of course, god forbid. But most of the rest of them.
| williamDafoe wrote:
| AMD wasn't very profitable until 2018. The company's debt
| to equity ratio was terrible (due to previous CEO mistakes
| 2000-2012) until they paid off their huge debts with Ryzen
| 3 in ~2020. Be patient, grasshopper ..
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=amd%20debt%20to%20equity%20
| r...
| BeetleB wrote:
| > They've been getting piles of money from Ryzen for 5-6
| years now
|
| Hardware is very capital intensive. They've _not_ been
| making much until much more recent. From 2012 through 2017,
| almost all years were a net loss. They hit $1B net profit
| only in 2020. I imagine quite a bit of that money went into
| keeping /accelerating the pace of Ryzen, and paying off
| debts. Only now do they have more breathing room for other
| endeavors. If they diverted a chunk of that change to AI,
| they probably would have a lower performing Ryzen right
| now.
|
| So no, they did not have piles of money.
| cypress66 wrote:
| Nah. AMD was already profitable in 2018. This is just big
| mismanagement.
|
| Just having 30 extra good software engineers focusing on AI
| would have made such a massive difference, because it's so
| bad that there's a lot of low hanging fruit.
|
| As someone who was pretty invested in AMD stock since 2018,
| it always made me pretty angry how bad they managed the AI
| side. Had they done it well, just from the current AI hype
| the stock would probably be worth 50 bucks more.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| >AMD picked open standards and made investments on open
| source frameworks and libraries commensurate with their
| financials, the hope being that the community could help pick
| up some of the slack.
|
| This has been their claim, but more often than not they
| haven't actually done anything to encourage the community to
| pick up slack. So many of their graphics tools have been
| released with promises of some sort of support or of working
| with the community yet have basically had nothing to help the
| community help them.
|
| Even accepting the unreasonable idea that they can't afford
| the full-time developers for the various tools and libraries
| they come up with, they often don't even really work with the
| community to build and maintain those.
|
| One of the bigger cases which contributed to turning me off
| from AMD GPUs was buying a 5700XT at launch, only to be led
| on for over a year about how ROCm support was coming soon,
| every few months they'd push back the date further until they
| eventually just stopped responding at all. Trying to develop
| on their OpenGL drivers was a similar nightmare as soon as
| you wandered off the old well worn paths to more modern
| pipeline designs.
|
| Another glaring example would be Blender's OpenCL version of
| Cycles, which was always marred with problems and hacks to
| work around driver issues. They tried to work with AMD for
| years before finally just dropping it and going for CUDA (and
| thus HIP) even though AMD's HIP support, especially on
| Windows, is still in a very early state.
| starkd wrote:
| That would explain my Radeon Graphics card I never managed to
| get working properly. It arbitrarily froze. I was told that it
| did that for Linux and that it was guaranteed to work on
| Windows. But when I tried it on Windows, it did the exact same
| thing. They were unresponsive.
| emmender wrote:
| the range of technology that needs to come together for ai
| training is underestimated. there is cuda of course, but there
| is also nccl, infiniband, gpudirect, each of which requires
| years of sw and hw maturity. unlike the cpu which has a clean
| interface (instruction set) the gpu has no such thing - it is
| more like an octopus with tentacles into networking, compute,
| storage etc.
| amelius wrote:
| > The trouble is that AMD just didn't take AI seriously.
|
| No worries, AI is not very complicated tech. It's just a core
| that can do arithmetic (something AMD already knows how to do
| very well) copied a very large number of times on a chip, plus
| some interconnect.
|
| CPUs with all their speculative execution and random memory
| access patterns are much more complicated.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| AI is more than just the underlying math. The software
| ecosystem is very important, which is what NVIDIA's lead is
| built on. AMD has a very hard time providing an "it just
| works" type experience in the way that NVIDIA offers these
| days.
|
| Machine learning engineers (or most people writing GPU code)
| do not typically have the time, knowledge or interest to
| diagnose driver issues and beg AMD engineers to address them
| in a reasonable time frame.
| croes wrote:
| AI is only one use case of CUDA and at first it wasn't the main
| use case.
| [deleted]
| sergiotapia wrote:
| It's pretty funny that Lisa Su is related to Jensen Huang. Like
| McDonalds and Burger King being owned by different brothers.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| She's not related to him, that was some myth that spread online
| but it's not true, please stop spreading it without citing
| concrete sources.
| polski-g wrote:
| Barack Obama and Donald Trump are 42nd cousins. Everyone is
| related.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| Some decade and a half ago my now ex gf who is
| microbiologist told me that mankind at one time in the past
| went through some drastic filter and that all humans alive
| are descendants out of just 5 mothers. And they could have
| been related too in the past. So yes we are all one big
| family, not that it helps with anything
| chasil wrote:
| There is less genetic diversity in the human species
| because of the evolutionary bottleneck that occurred.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_bottleneck#Human
| s
| delfinom wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve
|
| >One common misconception surrounding Mitochondrial Eve
| is that since all women alive today descended in a direct
| unbroken female line from her, she must have been the
| only woman alive at the time.[45] However, nuclear DNA
| studies indicate that the effective population size of
| the ancient human never dropped below tens of
| thousands.[49] Other women living during Eve's time may
| have descendants alive today but not in a direct female
| line.[50]
| sergiotapia wrote:
| > Technically, it is safe to say that Lisa Su's own
| grandfather is actually Jen-Hsun Huang's uncle. Although they
| aren't really niece and uncles, they are very close
| relatives.
|
| https://www.techtimes.com/articles/253736/20201030/fact-
| chec...
| peterfirefly wrote:
| > Like McDonalds and Burger King being owned by different
| brothers.
|
| Adidas and Puma.
| voodoomagicman wrote:
| and Trader Joes / Aldi
| dchftcs wrote:
| It's not very surprising they'd be distant relatives, as a
| matter of odds.
|
| Taiwan is a small place and Taiwanese Han people came from a
| relatively non-diverse group of immigrants (e.g. largely
| Hokkien). For these two to have got a good education and risen
| to the top like this as immigrants to the US, likelier than not
| they were from educated or rich families.
|
| If you filter for Taiwanese families educated or rich during
| the years they were born, the scope would probably have been
| somewhat small and covered an even smaller range of bloodlines,
| possibly even all somewhat related to a handful of historical
| clans.
|
| The degree of separation between people like them from a small
| geographical region tends to be fairly small in general.
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| Maybe the bigger surprise is that both companies are led by
| Taiwanese Americans.
|
| What's the story behind the semiconductor industry being
| centered at Taiwan of all places?
| claritise wrote:
| Mostly government incentives... the taiwanese government
| had amazing foresight when most other countries didn't and
| was well positioned to attract their nationals back from
| the USA (at the time intel / TI veterans) to build out
| taiwain's hardware manufacturing sector.. which eventually
| led to the founding of TSMC.. and the rest is history.
| Right time and place, but more importantly, a government
| with amazing judgement and foresight.
| tootie wrote:
| Adidas and Puma were founded by rival brothers too.
| Decabytes wrote:
| I think the work that Lisa Su has done has been great. But their
| graphics division has been playing catch up with Nvidia for
| years.
| williamDafoe wrote:
| NVidia loves to cite steam surveys to mislead customers but the
| truth is they have 0% market share in consoles (not in steam
| surveys) and the new AMD M780 iGPU (7940hs APU) just wiped out
| NVidia's entire MX product line and is literally 2x faster than
| Intel's best iGPU and equal to an m1650 laptop GPU! If they are
| not careful NVidia could fall below 50% of the graphics market
| very very soon!
|
| I remember a time when ATI 9600 was the #1 card on the market.
| It can come again, and quicker than you think ...
| cypress66 wrote:
| Market share on consoles is just a matter of business deals.
| On PC instead, market share is more of an indicator of how
| good a product is because people get to choose the GPU.
|
| In terms of technology Nvidia is quite ahead, and has been
| for more than a decade.
|
| > the new AMD M780 iGPU (7940hs APU) just wiped out NVidia's
| entire MX product line and is literally 2x faster than
| Intel's best iGPU and equal to an m1650 laptop GPU!
|
| Pretty sure Nvidia doesn't give a shit about such a low end
| market segment.
| NayamAmarshe wrote:
| I think if AMD focused on consumer cards more, it could be a game
| changer.
|
| Nvidia is nothing but overpriced and if AMD is able to offer
| something really cool for really cheap, it might spark an
| interest in the gaming community which eventually means a win in
| the overall global market.
| taeric wrote:
| I want to believe this, but I have been burned way too many
| times in the past trusting anything other than Nvidia. The list
| of companies that were supposedly going to be better is rather
| exhaustive in the space. It is frustrating.
|
| That is, what makes you think Nvidia is a) overpriced and b)
| not doing the best they can?
| NayamAmarshe wrote:
| I bought an RX580 and it's still working great! It was an
| excellent card with no drawbacks and was relatively cheap
| too.
|
| I'd like AMD to go back to the RX580 days, when the offerings
| were simple, cheap and made sense.
|
| I also have an Nvidia card, I don't have any complaints but
| they are NOT cheap that is for sure.
|
| Nvidia was charging extra for DLSS. RTX2050 vs GTX1660 had a
| huge price difference. When the leak happened we found out
| DLSS doesn't even require AI cores to run properly, it was
| purely a software limit. So they were really selling
| overpriced and underpowered hardware.
|
| The bad thing is, Nvidia keeps increasing the prices because
| AMD is not competing well enough and there's no limit to
| Nvidia's pricing. Top of the line cards used to sell for $300
| and we thought that was expensive.
| batman-farts wrote:
| I can agree on one point: if I want 3D acceleration to Just
| Work on Linux and I'm muting my inner Stallman, the Nvidia
| binary drivers have always enabled thtat for me. But on the
| gaming side, I definitely get the feeling that a bit of
| Microsoft syndrome is starting to set in at Nvidia: we're by
| far the market leader, so you'll take what we give you. DLSS
| is constantly pumped in their marketing (and by reviewers,
| who are sometimes adjunct marketers) as a no-brainer
| upscaling solution that you don't need to ever turn off. But
| I've had two games (Death Stranding and Marvel's Midnight
| Suns) crash repeatedly and unpredictably with DLSS enabled,
| then run happily stable once DLSS was turned off. I only even
| became aware of the Marvel game because it was advertised in
| their Game Ready! driver update, but both the drivers and the
| game clearly weren't ready. In that particular case, it was
| also primed to devolve into a circular firing squad between
| Nvidia, Epic providing Unreal Engine, and the game developer
| as to who implemented what wrong... something I think we'll
| probably continue to see.
|
| As far as overpricing goes, I think the pushback (and AMD's
| pricing advantage) will definitely come on VRAM. I was only
| able to get a 3080 10GB close to MSRP when the GPU shortage
| started to abate, and people are already reporting that it's
| maxing out that amount on Diablo 4 at 1440p ultrawide max
| settings. Yes, there's been inflation, Moore's Law isn't what
| it used to be, and it had been years since I had bought a
| discrete GPU, but that doesn't change the fact that I've paid
| a premium price and I'm not future-proof for 4K or ultrawide,
| either of the two popular monitor upgrade paths. The bulk of
| this can be attributed squarely to Nvidia's desire to
| maintain market segmentation and profit margins. If AMD
| really can close the yawning CUDA gap on the software side
| and start to force more commoditization in the GPU market, it
| can only be a good thing.
| bick_nyers wrote:
| Unpopular opinion but NVIDIA is not overpriced when you
| consider the fact that it's the only product that actually
| works.
|
| I've also been burned so many times by AMD GPUs that I have
| more faith in Intel catching up in the ML space than AMD.
|
| Would love to be wrong though.
| dlivingston wrote:
| Would you mind commenting on how you've been burned by AMD
| GPUs in the past?
| Hamuko wrote:
| I've received _two_ broken AMD cards in the last 30 days.
| It 's also the very literal definition of "burned", as
| they're consistently hitting >110degC hot spot in
| minutes. The RMA process is also god awful and the
| software isn't that good.
|
| It feels like there's actually no other option than
| Nvidia.
| bick_nyers wrote:
| In DDR3 era heat, drivers, crashes (lots of crashes)
| during gaming.
|
| In DDR4 era heat, drivers during game dev (substance
| painter, UE4 etc.). Lots of finicking with the
| card/drivers/software.
|
| On my home NAS (Ubuntu for longest time, now Kubuntu)
| I've had more random issues with my RX 580 than my 3060,
| I know it's not the most fair comparison due to their age
| but still.
| taeric wrote:
| For me, it was buying a graphics card that was endorsed
| by Intel that turned out to not support any of the
| advanced graphics that were happening at the time. I was
| less than happy. I think Matrox, back in the day, was
| also a bit of a disappointment. Supposedly they supported
| standards and were going to be amazing. Reality is they
| were not amazing.
| dpflan wrote:
| Indeed, consumer/edge. There is of course model training and
| model execution. NVIDIA seems really poised for training, of
| course can be nice for execution at cloud scale, but
| consumer/edge is probably all about execution.
| tpmx wrote:
| Well, no. AMD's AI future is not about consumer cards.
| tracker1 wrote:
| I think that AMD needs to really push ahead on two fronts. The
| first being price/performance. They need to do much more than
| just being a few percent ahead of NVidia on price. They need
| moderate cards that have 48gb vram at under $2k that are
| competitive to the 4090. That's only half the battle, because
| said cards need to compete with top NV cards for gaming, just so
| that people will buy them for play and stay to dev with.
|
| The other front is developer experience and tooling, NVidia is
| way ahead on this front and entrenched. They need cleaner
| integrations and abstractions for OpenCL. This should probably
| include clean support for Python tooling as well as for Rust
| targets. The former being massive for education and common use
| space and the latter being for those that want to eek out
| performance without necessarily using C. Both of which will mean
| more community involvement and investment that lasts longer than
| AMD is typically known for.
|
| If AMD targets mainly support for Linux tooling, then is
| should/must also support WSL for windows users. No idea where Mac
| is headed in terms of expansion boards on M2 or future gen. But
| they definitely need to expand the user base with good,
| relatively cheap higher end cards as well as devex.
|
| Edit: the top end mentioned at 48gb is just for top consumer
| comparison... I think good tooling for 16-24gb cards in the
| $500-1200 space that is gaming competitive and can handle AI
| experimentation and workstation workloads would go a long way as
| well.
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| The Instinct line is for AI and the current top of the line has
| a 128GB of HBM3 ram on die. I am assuming it way north of $2k,
| though. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-instinct-
| mi300-data-ce...
| tracker1 wrote:
| Yeah, but my meaning is to offer a good to great value gaming
| card that can do a job of getting feet wet in the AI side. I
| don't think the bulk of people dipping their toes into AI on
| NVidia/Cuda are using their really expensive cards. AMD needs
| to win over the hobbiest and SOHO workstation types.
|
| The same types that will run a 5950x/7950x for 16-cores
| without jumping to threadripper or server parts are the same
| ones that are playing with Cuda on 3080/4080 class hardware.
| This drives the market in open-source and prosumer into the
| professional path.
| angm128 wrote:
| Totally agree on that, securing a piece of the AI market will
| be a huge challenge. No one will buy AMD for AI when the
| software isn't compatible and no one will buy AMD for AI to get
| wonky software for the same price as NVIDIA.
|
| Affordable cards with lots of memory and good software support
| is the only solution to maybe get into the market. Double the
| memory for some gaming cards (just like NVIDIA's 3060 12GB and
| the 4060 TI 16GB)
|
| Additionally data center products with enormous vram amounts
| and very fast interconnects will be important
|
| AMD can't even take orders that NVIDIA can't keep up with
| because they are producing on very similar nodes. NVIDIA can
| easily outspend AMD for TSMC production capacity
| renewiltord wrote:
| More RAM and CUDA-equivalent quality. Otherwise worthless.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| If Lisa Su wants Nvidia's crown then she's going to have to
| actually compete.
|
| That means creating the most awesome products possible at the
| lowest price practical.
|
| In GPU's, AMD is doing the exact opposite.
|
| And winning GPUs is what will allow winning AI.
|
| Put another way, AMD simply does not compete with Nvidia - it
| trails along behind, trying to match the Nvidia products in
| specs, and being slightly less ridiculously expensive.
|
| AMD GPUs are overpriced and AMD's most recent GPUs - the 7600 is
| garbage - this is not a strategy that is going to win any crown.
| JonChesterfield wrote:
| It's a capability war. You don't need to be cheaper, you need
| to better.
| jheriko wrote:
| imagine thinking a CEO means shit!!! LOLOLOL roflcopters. get
| fucked.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| We desperately need CUDA to die. I have some hope the EU will see
| the light and ban CUDA if Nvidia refuses to open it.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| What keeps AMD from clean-room reverse-engineering CUDA, a la
| Compaq? Patents? If so, that's a problem _caused_ by
| government, so I wouldn 't look to them to fix it.
| mikepavone wrote:
| I'm not sure why AMD hasn't just directly implemented CUDA,
| but they did ship HIPify which can translate CUDA code to
| HIP. Doesn't work for everything, but seems to work for a lot
| of important ML code. ROCm stack doesn't seem very fully
| baked though. Only a handful of consumer GPUs are officially
| supported and stability seems less than great
| lvl102 wrote:
| I don't think Nvidia competition is coming from AMD. It's way too
| late for that to happen. MSFT/GOOG/META will have their hands
| dirty now and AMD might be left watching. Not to mention what
| Apple has in store for the next few years. The best thing for AMD
| would be to partner up with MSFT. CUDA/PyTorch is here to stay
| for a very long time.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| Neither AMD or Intel have taken ML seriously enough. GOOG has
| TPUs but those are pretty much only for Google. Meta may be
| building their own ML accelerator chips as well, but again,
| those will likely stay inside of Meta.
|
| > CUDA... is here to stay for a very long time.
|
| Yes, this unfortunately seems to be the case. It would've been
| great to have more competition in this space. CUDA is closed
| source which sometimes leads to issues, but it works and is
| well supported by Nvidia and still has the first-mover
| advantage. I still have some hope for OneAPI (from Intel) but
| I'm not holding my breath.
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| This is a cute headline but let's see AMD put out some software
| to actually run DNN training on their hardware. Currently either
| impossible or too onerous to be worth the trouble.
| kamikaz1k wrote:
| Well, George has an acquihire exit option.
|
| > The goal of the tiny corp is: "to commoditize the petaflop"
|
| > ... If we succeed at this project, we will be on the cutting
| edge of non NVIDIA AI compute. We have the ability to make the
| software, and that's the hard part.
|
| [1]
| https://geohot.github.io//blog/jekyll/update/2023/05/24/the-...
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Wouldn't being hired by AMD violate geohot's settlement
| agreement with Sony from a decade and change ago? AFAIK he
| basically agreed to never touch anything with the words
| "PlayStation" on it.
| klooney wrote:
| Maybe he could take a golden parachute as a part of the
| acqui-hire.
| alecco wrote:
| HN thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36065175
| 1-6 wrote:
| AMD can take it with FPGA's and their Xilinx purchase. GPUs are
| unsustainable in the long run.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Gonna take a collosal screw up by Nvidia to give that up
| FloatArtifact wrote:
| Well AMD really needs to work on its software stack to support
| AI.
| moffkalast wrote:
| If AMD throws twice the VRAM onto their cards they'd be a no
| brainer for that regardless. OpenCL is pretty well supported
| now.
| paulmd wrote:
| AMD is trying to get people to pay $5000 for a workstation
| card too. The days of Radeon VII being $699 are long past.
|
| Part of it is that as you shrink, the PHYs don't shrink much,
| so everyone is incentivized to minimize the number of memory
| channels and reduce the PCIe bus size/etc on lower tier
| products. And in turn, since GDDR6 tops out at 16 Gbit (=2
| Gigabyte) per chip, that means a 4-PHY card tops out at 8GB,
| etc.
|
| And while you can do clamshell... you want to be selling
| those cards to workstation users, not giving them away to
| gamers! It is the same problem NVIDIA faces, the fact that
| GDDR density has not increased leaves them with one single
| move (clamshell) and they've traditionally reserved that for
| workstation cards (and 3090) to increase margins.
| williamDafoe wrote:
| Rx 7900xt is $760 and it's an incredible bargain now, IMHO
| ...
| paulmd wrote:
| Yeah if you don't need CUDA the 7900XT is better right
| now than people give it credit for. People are super mega
| butthurt about prices right now, to probably an
| unreasonable degree, and they're ignoring some of the
| actually decent options that exist.
|
| 4070 at $600 (rip microcenter steam GC deal) is a pretty
| ok deal too, much better than people give it credit for.
| For less than a 6950XT you get 4GB less VRAM but it pulls
| 200W less power which is very noticeable, and gets DLSS2
| (even if you don't like DLSS3!) which is significantly
| better at 1440p and 1080p, which is a big perf and perf/w
| boost, with better quality than FSR2. Even HUB now likes
| the 4070 over 6900XT for a generalist kinda build:
| https://youtu.be/Iy3ikm8MxOM?t=875
|
| Or yes, the 7900XT on top, the launch MSRP sucked but
| $700-750 is OK for what you get. If you are otherwise
| getting 6900XT/6950XT I'd probably just recommend
| spending up and getting the 7900XT (or 4070), they really
| are a lot more efficient and have better featureset etc.
| It'll be worth it, suck it up and do it. 6800XT makes
| sense at like $450, that'd give it space vs the 4070, but
| people are getting irrational over the whole situation.
|
| 3090 is also an underappreciated competitor. What if
| there was a 3080 Ti 24GB, with DLSS2 and stuff but not
| $1600? There is, it's $700 on ebay. However, I am
| uncomfortable with the VRAM on the back with how hot
| GDDR6X runs, a lot of those cards mined for a lot of
| years... if you can get 3090 Ti it has only VRAM on the
| front, or get an evga one, or something. It's ok, at $700
| it's a similar proposition to 6900XT/6950XT at $600 but a
| bit more VRAM and you get DLSS2.
|
| 6700/6700XT for $300 is a screamer of a deal and it's not
| really surprising AMD can't beat it. They're in the "1080
| Ti vs 2070" situation, they over-cut on the old stuff and
| the new stuff can't really edge past it nor is the value
| great against a deeply cutdown older card (6700XT is a
| $480 card for $300!). It's not gonna last forever, if
| that's the featureset you want I'd consider buying. There
| will probably be a decent replacement eventually but
| that's clearly the value peak of what they can do with
| RDNA2 and it makes RDNA3 look poor in many ways. The
| successor in this price segment is, best case imo, 7600
| 16GB, and that's a bit slower and more limited in a lot
| of ways, and not really more efficient either. N32 may
| not really compete favorably with it in either cost or
| perf/mm2.
|
| 4060 Ti is junk but 4060 8GB at $299 for basically 3060
| Ti performance (4060 Ti is closer to 3070 at 1080p and
| 1440p) is reasonable imo, and DLSS will put it clearly
| over the top of the 7600 at 1080p (FSR sucks). I'm
| guessing AMD has to get $279 down to $249 or $229 by the
| time the 4060 launches. I'm guessing 7600 16GB will
| probably launch at $329 and drop to $299, and that'll be
| a decent option vs 4060 8GB too (and cost viable).
| Probably there will be a 7500XT 8GB or 6GB cutdown at
| $199 (12GB at $250?), doubt they can go too much below
| that (die cost isn't the problem/cutdowns don't help
| memory bus size). It'll be a bit slower than a 6700XT for
| sure, and not all that much more efficient, and you go
| down to a PCIe x8 bus, but it does have some newer stuff.
|
| I think the 16GB versions of both 4060 and 4060 Ti are
| DOA, the 4070 is a lot faster and has enough. 6800XT is
| potentially still compelling in this segment too.
|
| AMD really needs to figure their shit out with the N32
| die though. They actually do need a competitor to 4070
| besides just RDNA2 rebrands. I think with the
| unexpectedly (apparently) poor performance of RDNA3 it's
| just not worth it, like I just haven't heard any rumor
| mill shit about N32 at all. The MCDs alone would use as
| much 6nm silicon as a whole 7600 and then you have a
| chunk of N5P too. With how short wafers are for other
| products (IO dies, Epyc, N31, etc) it may just not be
| worth bringing N32 to market. Who knows, but, I'm getting
| more and more curious.
|
| Numbers: https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/13vm5
| ti/geforce_r...
|
| Tim from HUB talks candidly about FSR:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycXkvVfc2yw&t=2541s
|
| (the quality difference at 1080p and 1440p is
| significant, and that's where $200-300 cards will be
| running. Even in the 4070 segment... starting to become
| an issue for 7900XT etc)
| dpflan wrote:
| Indeed, are you aware of the current state of AMD's equivalent
| to CUDA? And how far behind would be, and what would need to be
| done to near equivalence? It seems like the opportunity and
| differentiator. I wonder how Apple silicon software is doing...
| llm_nerd wrote:
| Instead of trying to integrate the whole stack of, say,
| pytorch, Apple's primary approach has been converting models
| to work with Apple's stack.
|
| https://github.com/apple/coremltools
|
| Clearly no one is going to be doing training or even fine
| tuning on Apple hardware at any scale (it competes at the low
| end, but at scale you invariably will be using nvidia
| hardware), but once you have a decent model it's a robust way
| of using it on Apple devices.
| coredog64 wrote:
| I've tried a few models and none have worked. It's not that
| they need more resources, just that it freezes and then
| dies with an inscrutable stack trace somewhere in the OS.
| If someone from AMD sees the parent comment, please don't
| copy Apple!
| dpflan wrote:
| Mind sharing which ones and your approach? Haven't there
| been shared posts of success to follow?
|
| Also, yes, anyone from AMD, I think we all want more
| variety in the market, what do you need help with?
| llm_nerd wrote:
| Not every model feature and op is supported (though it is
| growing with every release), but personally I've had
| surprising success with it. It has allowed me to leverage
| some models efficiently on both Intel, Apple Silicon and
| iPhone/iPad devices.
|
| I mean...the number of people using PyTorch models ported
| to CoreML is probably several magnitude greater than the
| number of people actually having success with AMD's
| initiatives in the space thus far...
| polski-g wrote:
| ATI drivers have been terrible for over 20 years.
| williamDafoe wrote:
| Obviously you stopped buying AMD products 4Y ago when Raj
| Koduri left. Without his corrosive effect, many reviewers are
| saying AMD adrenaline tools are NOW MUCH BETTER than NGreedia
| ...
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| But on Linux they're superior to NVidia's closed source
| garbage.
| angry_octet wrote:
| How so? You mean graphics or compute?
|
| The whole concept of the way graphics drivers works is
| bonkers, thanks to IP issues and game patching, but in
| production the NVIDIA drivers are very reliable and
| sophisticated.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| From my perspective as an admin of several GPU clusters.
| viewtransform wrote:
| Have you revisited it recently in the last 2-3 years? OpenGL,
| Vulkan and DX12 drivers have been completely rewritten from
| scratch and share a common hardware abstraction layer. They
| pass all Khronos conformance tests, OEM and ISV certification
| tests and have similar performance as Nvidia on SPEC
| benchmarks.
| fulafel wrote:
| They were at some point but they're better than NVidia now
| for normal desktop etc use at least on Linux. They went open
| source and upstreamed the drivers, like Intel.
|
| On the GPGPU stack front it may be different but CUDA is also
| really low level and abstracted away by ML stacks. And some
| of them also had OpenCL / SYCL backends at one point, I
| wonder what's the story there.
| mikepavone wrote:
| Unfortunately, the ROCm stack seems to use a fair bit of
| separate kernel code and it's not nearly as stable in my
| experience. I have a 5700 XT (not officially supported by
| ROCm, but close enough to some other cards that some have
| had success). It's perfectly stable for demanding games,
| but just straightforward DMA is enough to cause GPU hangs
| with ROCm for some reason.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| AMD re-hired Jim Keller in 2012, and his team started development
| of AMD's Zen cores (that are the foundation of Ryzen/Epyc) before
| Dr. Su came on board.
|
| Credit for the decision to put Keller back in charge of AMD's CPU
| core design goes to AMD CTO Mark Papermaster.
|
| I would give the launch of products based on Zen as much credit
| for AMD's turnaround and present success as I would give Doctor
| Su.
| pmarcelll wrote:
| Dr. Su joined AMD in January 2012 as senior vice president,
| before Jim Keller was re-hired (in August 2012).
| viewtransform wrote:
| When Dr Su took over - there was no coherent product roadmap at
| AMD. There were various headless zombie projects because of a
| management exodus around 2012.
|
| Dr Su made some decisive calls to stop projects and placed a
| prescient long term bet on high-performance computing.
|
| She shut down low-power tablet asic designs, shut down the
| SeaMicro acquisition, shutdown Keller's K12 ARM chip, shutdown
| a large monolithic CPU/GPU asic with shared memory and planned
| a shift from Global Foundries to TSMC.
|
| Deep Learning was not on the radar unfortunately. It fell under
| Raja Koduri's group and he made an unfortunate bet on Virtual
| Reality (way before Zuckerburg started his metaverse fantasy).
|
| It the end it helped that Intel stumbled badly allowing AMD to
| recover financially.
| contingencies wrote:
| "AI in everything". Err, yeah. AI in your breakfast cereal.
| What's the point? Show me the applications, IMHO most of the time
| it's not adding value. LLMs generating mediocre content faster
| than humanity is not a long-term business model. Ten thousand CS
| grads running ROS with standard vision algorithms who don't
| understand it's the _least_ efficient way to approach most
| problems. We 've got the west jumping up and down about how China
| or Russia's being denied chips, but the fact is chips from many
| generations ago are adequate for most deployment scenarios today.
| Anything hyper specialist is sold on-sensor-chip anyway, so
| where's the relevance for AMD going forward as desktop declines
| and Samsung and Apple have their own mobile solutions? Do large
| scale chip makers really run on such an extremely faddy, hypey,
| business model, or is Su just running out of steam?
| barbariangrunge wrote:
| Smart light bulbs, powered by GPT-5
| jpgvm wrote:
| Jim Keller saved AMD and chances are his company Tenstorrent will
| end up being a big dog in AI. AMD should buy his startup in an
| all-stock deal given the lofty AMD valuation. Bring the maestro
| back, win the AI generation of chips.
| silisili wrote:
| I'm actually curious to see how it plays out. There's no
| shortage of bickering Keller vs Su here, it seems every AMD
| thread devolves into it.
|
| If Tenstorrent 'wins', while Intel is able to catch and beat
| AMD, I think that would prove the strongest case for Keller.
|
| If AMD keeps staying as far ahead and they have been, it makes
| a strong case for Su.
|
| The truth is likely a combination of the two.
| tpmx wrote:
| He does hardware, not software (wherein AMD's problem lies).
|
| Hardware-oriented companies often struggle to build good
| software stacks for the simple reason that they don't know
| what's good or bad in software, so they don't know who to hire.
| williamDafoe wrote:
| Jim Keller had nothing to do with the rx6000 series of AMD
| graphics cards and this is the best series that AMD has ever
| produced! I think you have the credit Lisa Su with firing Raj
| Koduri who went to Intel to make his flaky-driver hot graphics
| cards there! Raj is now laid off at Intel, too!
| osti wrote:
| I think attributing AMD's current success to any one person is an
| insult to all the other employees of the company.
| laweijfmvo wrote:
| Jim Keller has entered the chat...
|
| /s
| phkahler wrote:
| Jim Keller tells people how important everyone else is to
| "his" success.
| cdibona wrote:
| It does ignore a ton of contributions from a ton of people, but
| that is the job of the CEO and cofounder. If anything I always
| want to know more about Chris Malachowsky, Nvidia's cofounder.
| Their relationship I thought was pretty special, esp in the
| beginning. Nothing like the woz/jobs relationship, imo.
| nightowl_games wrote:
| If it was a failure would you feel comfortable saying the buck
| stops with Lisa?
|
| The CEO has more power and responsibility. They receive blame
| for company wide problems and conversely deserve credit for
| company with success.
| osti wrote:
| If it was a failure I wouldn't attribute that to Lisa Su
| either. Because AMD's success kinda started around the time
| Lisa Su joined, the products they came out with at the time
| certainly didn't have much to do with Lisa, technology wise
| or strategy wise.
|
| There are definitely many cases where CEO should bare
| responsibility for the company's success or failure, but
| definitely not in the case of AMD.
| cmsj wrote:
| Dr Su became AMD CEO in 2014 when they were deep in the
| ruinously awful Bulldozer CPU architecture.
|
| The first Zen products didn't launch until 2017 - that is
| when their "success kinda started" at least in the CPU
| market.
|
| Here's a quote from Suzanne Plummer, senior director of the
| Zen project, in September 2015: "This is the first time in
| a very long time that we engineers have been given the
| total freedom to build a processor from scratch and do the
| best we can do."
|
| You could make a reasonable argument that supplying the
| GPUs for PS4 and Xbox One, both of which pre-date Dr Su's
| appointment, is their "success kinda start[ing]", but one
| could also argue that AMD was really the only vendor
| capable of providing the APUs needed.
| osti wrote:
| CPU development cycle is definitely longer than 3 years,
| especially for a big change like that. Zen architecture
| design certainly started before 2014. So I think it's
| fair to say that she started around the time AMD became
| successful.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| Zen started in 2012. But it might have been a total
| disaster if it weren't for Su. We simply don't know. At
| the very least Suzannes quote hints at Su having at least
| a very significant impact.
| scrlk wrote:
| "Designing microprocessors is like playing Russian
| roulette. You put a gun to your head, pull the trigger,
| and find out four years later if you blew your brains
| out." (attributed to former DEC CEO Robert Palmer)
| burnte wrote:
| It's not, though. Zen didn't launch until 2017, she
| started in 2014. Early work began in 2012, yes, but it
| was on track for 3 years under her before launch, she
| deserves a lot of credit as leader to bring that project
| to fruition.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Writing an article praising one person doesn't mean you are
| diminishing or insulting everyone you didn't mention in the
| article.
| osti wrote:
| When your title is "someone saved the whole company", it
| definitely is diminishing everyone else's work, at least in
| the case of AMD.
|
| Like someone else mentioned here, Jim Keller always says
| "team work" and all when someone praises him. Microprocessor
| as complex as a modern consumer CPU certainly involves so
| many people that attributing it to any one person is just
| impossible.
|
| But obviously now we are getting into the topic of whether
| any CEO is that important to a large company. I'd like to say
| they aren't, but our hero worshipping culture makes it hard
| to break out of that mindset.
| [deleted]
| cmsj wrote:
| You could certainly make a good argument that Dr Su's
| direction/focus, as CEO, allowed successful projects to
| flourish into compelling products.
| throwaway2990 wrote:
| No. It's not an insult. As CEO she has final say. She's the one
| who says he's or no. She's made the right choices to get AMD
| where they are today.
| Sparkle-san wrote:
| Saying yes or no seems a lot less impactful than actually
| doing the work. Engineers without a CEO can still create
| something, a CEO without engineers is basically worthless.
| osti wrote:
| No, see my other comment as to why.
| throwaway2990 wrote:
| Your other comment doesn't change my statement. You're
| wrong. End of story.
| xedrac wrote:
| I feel like the CEOs job is to surround themselves with great
| people and a vision, then get out of the way. Beyond that,
| it's more of a sales job than anything.
| williamDafoe wrote:
| Not really. It was Lisa's decision to stop shipping CPUs
| with locked clock multipliers! She also made the decision
| that eight cores and 16 threads would become the industry
| standard for laptops and desktops! These are major
| strategic decisions which made her a hero to computer
| buyers!
| melbourne_mat wrote:
| She's a competent leader there's no doubt. But to say she saved
| AMD is just more mindless leader worship. TSMC saved AMD, because
| they gave AMD the ability to produce CPUs that could finally
| compete with Intel.
| FooBarBizBazz wrote:
| Buried in the article:
|
| > [Jensen] Huang, who is a distant relative of [Lisa] Su's [...]
|
| This is an excellent, Dickensian level of coincidence. And they
| both come on stage in leather motorcycle jackets.
|
| May this rivalry of -- what, cousins nth removed? -- bring us
| great new chips.
|
| For AMD though, the software side is going to be important.
| OpenCL was a total bust, Cuda is king. They need to do something
| about that.
| angry_octet wrote:
| Unfortunately the black turtleneck look has baggage.
| klyrs wrote:
| I had to look... she's wearing short-sleeved leather jacket.
| Not all leather jackets are motorcycle jackets. Wearing short-
| sleeved anything on a motorcycle is senseless.
| angry_octet wrote:
| No-one think Jensen is getting on a motorcycle, there is an
| implied motorcycle _-style_. And you can have short sleeve /
| sleeveless motorcycle jackets, I've seen idiots wearing them
| many times.
| klyrs wrote:
| I've seen people wearing short-sleeve t-shirts on their
| motorcycles too. That doesn't make them motorcycle shirts.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| If this comment[1] is correct, they would be first cousins,
| once removed. Their closest common ancestor would be Huang's
| grandparents, which makes them first cousins, and they are one
| generation different from each other, when tracing from that
| ancestory, which makes them once removed.
|
| 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36164991
| tormeh wrote:
| AMD's AI software efforts are so trash WebGPU will be the first
| API you can use to run PyTorch on consumer AMD GPUs, not because
| AMD put some effort in, but because people want to run PyTorch in
| the browser. AMD could have ported PyTorch to OpenCL. Could have
| ported it to Vulkan. Instead they've made their own shitty
| version of CUDA that works on like 3 of their professional cards
| and nothing else. Maybe I don't understand something. That's the
| only sane explanation for what I think is completely baffling
| behavior.
| paulmd wrote:
| > Instead they've made their own shitty version of CUDA that
| works on like 3 of their professional cards and nothing else.
| Maybe I don't understand something. That's the only sane
| explanation for what I think is completely baffling behavior.
|
| AMD is laser-focused on surgically tapping high-margin markets.
| There is money in HPC, let's support that. There is money in
| AI, let's support that. Nothing more nothing less.
|
| The way to think about ROCm isn't a platform like CUDA, it's as
| an embedded processor that gets engineered into some other
| product. It doesn't matter if there isn't a good general-
| purpose OS and ecosystem etc for Zilog Z80 - we aren't making a
| computer, we are making a microwave, it only ever needs to run
| one specific piece of software (or a small handful). And that's
| what AMD has become, a processor that goes into someone else's
| platform rather than a platform in itself. We are building a
| HPC supercomputer, we are building an AI training platform, and
| for that specific product AMD might offer the best value for
| performance.
|
| The ironic thing is that's exactly what everyone is implying
| that NVIDIA might be doing now with AI, and nothing could be
| farther from the truth. Abandoning gaming/graphics and focusing
| AI would be a one-way road to the same situation AMD is in.
| Once you've abandoned that virtuous cycle it's tremendously
| hard to get back. NVIDIA has always been laser-focused on
| making sure that _innovation happens on their platform_ ,
| making sure that prosumers can write CUDA on their gaming
| hardware and grad students can write their thesis in CUDA and
| so on. It's not that NVIDIA keeps accidentally falling into
| success, they're deliberately putting themselves there, and
| they're not going to stop because of AI or anything else. If
| they stop and chase AI to the exclusion of graphics, that
| spigot will dry up, and they will no longer be in the position
| to catch the next fountain of money when it happens.
|
| Besides, all their other products center around graphics anyway
| - do you sign a big multiproduct partnership with Mediatek or
| Nintendo if you don't have a good gaming IP, and DLSS, and wide
| adoption of that software? Does Blender integrate the next
| OptiX if none of the userbase can run it? Do you just make
| quadros and not do the single last step (gaming drivers) and
| forego that revenue because it's _not enough?_ No, that 's
| crazy.
|
| Platform is hugely important to NVIDIA. It's their core
| product. Jensen told everyone 15 years ago that NVIDIA was a
| software company and people scoffed. They're not just a company
| that writes software, it's almost their primary product really.
| They write the software that sells the hardware. DLSS and AI
| and CUDA are their products, and they just sell you the fuel to
| run their product. Razor-and-blade model in action. "What if
| they just stopped selling razors" ok then in the long term you
| won't sell many blades, will you?
|
| They're just not going to do it at zero cost or a loss. And
| just like the Radeon 7850 has no real successor in the $150
| segment, that is creeping higher and higher in the stack as
| fixed costs overwhelm the progress now that moore's law is
| dying.
|
| The true threat to NVIDIA's platform is the rising costs of
| low-end products. Fixed assembly/testing/shipping costs, fixed
| die area overhead for memory PHYs, increased VRAM needs
| (without drops in the per-GB cost of VRAM) - are gradually
| sapping the low-end segment. It is already not possible to make
| a $100 or $150 GPU that's very compelling, you can equivocate
| about whether a $200 or $300 GPU could be better for the price
| but nobody is making a good $100 or $150 GPU that's a worthy
| enthusiast-tier successor to the Radeon 7850/R7 270 or similar,
| because it's just not possible, and everyone agrees on that at
| least. The RX 6500XT and similar products are never going to
| compel anyone to upgrade, that segment has gone terminal.
|
| And that threshold is creeping higher every time they shrink
| because people want more memory and GDDR density hasn't kept up
| and PHYs don't shrink. There is de-facto a "minimum die size
| that is worth it" because of the fixed size of PHYs (to get the
| fixed amount of memory people want) and in a world of spiraling
| cost-per-mm2 that means there is a minimum _cost_ that 's worth
| it, and it's inching higher and higher ever time you shrink.
| Like try to even imagine what the $200 segment is going to look
| like with RDNA4 - are they going to launch a 8500XT 16GB on N5P
| or N3 at $200, just a tiny sliver of compute area sandwiched
| between PHYs? No, they can't do it either.
|
| Console-style or Apple-style APUs are the way out and that is a
| market that NVIDIA doesn't control, and _that_ is the primary
| long-term threat to NVIDIA 's platform.
|
| But for now - they are an incredibly powerful accelerator and
| everyone reaches for their software when they have a hard task.
| People get _super upset_ when they can 't upgrade the platform
| for NVIDIA at a compelling performance increase every 2 years.
| Why would you ever give that up willingly? Not even AMD wants
| to be where AMD is.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-06-02 23:01 UTC)