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Comment by Schlagbohrer | Hacker News Reader

I can't wait until we have real competition against NVIDIA, whether it is from a Chinese chip maker or someone else. Hopefully then these kinds of intentional crippling of hardware/firmware will be avoidable by buying an equivalent product from another firm.

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AMD has been #1 for HPC and #2 in AI for a very long while. The currently shipping Helios systems go toe to toe with nVidia's next gen that aren't even shipping, yet (by nVidias own numbers).

These are multi-million dollar datacenter systems, not consumer. If you mean the consumer market, it's coming but it's going to be 2028-29 most likely (if the bubbled hasn't popped by then).

Strix Point is quite good but not the same thing as a DGX, though. Same idea, different methodology.

AMD's "datacenter HPC without consumer HPC" strategy was one of the biggest corporate whiffs in history. If AMD had taken consumer GPGPU seriously at any point in the decade leading up to LLM takeoff, they wouldn't have had to stand on the sidelines for years as NVDA charged 80% margin on matrix multiplication. They could have had 1/2 or even 1/1 market cap compared to NVDA. Instead, they have a tenth, and even that's largely grace in the forward looking estimations.

Haha that’s been the AMD story when it comes to graphics in general.

I miss the old days when they released enthusiast products like the R9 295X2. Though that’s just the gaming enthusiast market in general declining (not that this happened organically though, it feels like a deliberate choice).

Ha! That was certainly a card you had to be an enthusiast to put up with, with its 500W TDP :)

I have many pleasant memories of keeping myself warm just by opening Witcher 3 on my R9 390.

It's less AMD not doing commercial GPGPU than nVidia completely staying out of the PC and server market. Remember AMD competes with both of them (nVidia and Intel) and is smaller than both.

AMDs revenue this quarter just passed Intels for the first time in history and they still are dominating in the HPC market which is fairly immune to the AI bubble (while also selling everything they can build at a high premium to AI datacenters).

AMDs margins on their Instinct datacenter GPUs is nearly as good as nVidia's. They just can't get contract volume at TSMC to make more because nVidia buys all of it.

You have competition now but its locked on AWS hardware, Trainium and Inferentia:

https://youtu.be/Bteba8KLeGc

https://d1.awsstatic.com/onedam/marketing-channels/website/a...

https://youtu.be/5SgZ3zRJFAY

Even for things like the huawei ascend, what makes them crap for price to perf I think is still dram. They actually cost more than nvidia clusters last I checked. Just like how regular laptops and phones are now being squeezed upwards to become closer (and uncompetitive with) apple devices.

China is never going to let anyone under its control _release_ AI that is capable of disrupting world order.

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