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Comment by 0dayz | Hacker News Reader

Sure, but I think you can't really blame AMD for it.

Nvidia has dominated the market for a long time, and unlike Intel they up the prices and wisely spent enough of it on R&D, Nvidia is just reaping the rewards for it.

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Sure you can. The difference between the CPU and GPU markets is that AMD is a competent competitor in one of them. Pre-Ryzen AMD knew they weren't competitive and AMD CPU pricing reflected that. The reason nVidia is getting away with their pricing is that AMD has been producing mediocre hardware (and drivers) and pricing it as if it were premium and competitive for the money. AMD's continually declining GPU market share indicates that customers aren't buying their argument.

But it applies to AMD in every way. I could understand that pre-ryzen when they were really cash restricted and had nothing to compete anyways. So you don't throw money at software devs. but the software side apart from (Windows) gaming is still a shit show with AMD today.

We wanted to use MI50s at work because it was promised they can do SRIOV, but we never got any further with AMD support than "it should work". They took ages to respond, and could not tell what was wrong from the extensive logs and hwinfo we provided them with.

Also the PCI reset bug that plagued multiple generations. There's a guy maintaining a kernel module that works around that issue in a whacky way. According to his research and reverse engineering, AMD could fix that with a firmware update to those cards. Even got in contact with AMD engineers briefly and outlined what the problem was. Then radio silence, and a couple months later AMD added a very similar workaround in their kernel module, the amdgpu driver. It's just that a fix in there doesn't make any sense whatsoever, because you need that fix when you do PCI passthrough, in which case you explicitly do not load the amdgpu module, as you don't use the GPU on the host machine but, well, pass it through to the VM.

They haven't been rich enough for long enough for it to matter.

As you noted pre-Ryzen they just didn't have the FCF to persue this kind of R&D. Ryzen was a bet the farm situation, if you are already betting the farm on one thing it's highly inadvisable to try do it on two things at the same time.

Nvidia benefits greatly from not having a split focus. They make GPUs, this is all. AMD needs to divide their efforts between staying ahead of Intel now that they have finally won themselves a lead which is no mean feat given how hard Intel has been chasing them down -and- putting out reasonable gaming GPUs -and- trying to come up with their first home-run datacenter GPU product which just hasn't happened yet.

I just don't see how they could have possibly had the money to try beat Nvidia over the last 5-6 years.

The money didn't come to Nvidia immediately. They were in exactly the same spot as ATI when they introduced hardware shaders in GF3 and later pioneered GPGPU on them. Moreover, ATI sometimes progressed in huge leaps (such as Radeon 9800Pro which was miles ahead of anything from Nvidia). ATI and then AMD just ignored general purpose massively parallel computations for a while, and then didn't know what to do with it, while Nvidia had a vision and actually implemented it.

"didn't know what to do with it" in a direst of times. It amazes me how selective people's memory is. Huang is not some amazing visionary. He's a ruthless businessman. Imagine if Intel had allowed him to steer that ship as he imagined all those years ago. Dark, dark times.

I applied for a job with AMD's GPU division. I am senior and qualified, and the hiring manager was a petty tyrant. At a company as large as AMD, departments have their own culture. Lisa Su has done an incredible job revitalizing their position in the CPU market, but the GPU side needs some serious attention.

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