AMD has HIP.
I shouldn't be surprised that AMD's ecosystem is lagging behind, since their GPU division spent a good decade suffering to be even relevant. Not to mention that NVIDIA has spent a lot of effort on their HPC tools.
I don't want this to be too negative towards AMD, they have been steadily growing in this space. Some things do work well, e.g. stable diffusion is totally fine on AMD GPUs. So they seem to be catching up. I just feel a little impatient, especially since their cards are more than powerful enough to be useful. I suppose my point is that the gap in HPC software between NVIDIA and AMD is much larger than the actual capability gap in their hardware, and that's a shame.
While I am a little bit of a fan of AMD, there's still work to do. I think AMD really needs to take advantage of their production margins to gain more market share. They also need to get something a bit closer to the 4090 on a performance gpu + entry workstation api/gpgpu workload card. The 7900 XTX is really close, but if they had something with say 32-48gb vram in the sub-2000 space it would really get a lot of the hobbiest and soho types to consider them.
Their hardware is good but if all they were selling was Macbooks and iPhones with Windows and Android on them, they wouldn't have anything near their current margins.
If they hadn’t made platform changes they would have never been able to turn into what they are today. I hardly thing that is ‘little to do’.
They would likely barely exist. They have ‘achieved product market fit’ as the saying goes. Which requires more than just a sharp UI, as their history shows
It was more forced upon them than anything else.
The move to M1 was an actual innovation that came after their success.
The real story of the company though is the iPhone, which is absolutely their own technical innovation.
They are a brand first, and a technical company second. That doesn't mean they aren't doing cool technical things. But a lot of companies do cool technical things and still fail.