Ask HN: Why hasn’t AMD made a viable CUDA alternative?

Back in 2015, they were a quarter or two from bankruptcy, saved by the XBOX and Playstation contracts. Those years saw several significant layoffs, and talent leaving for greener pastures. Lisa Su has done a great job at rebuilding the company. But not in a position to hire 2000 engineers x few million comp (~$4 billion annually) even if there were people readily available.

"it'd still be a good investment." - that's definitely not a sure thing. Su isn't a risk taker, seems to prefer incremental growth, mainly focused on the CPU side.

This is the difference between Jensen and Su. It’s not that Jensen is a risk taker. No. Jensen focused on incremental growth of the core business while slowly positioning the company for growth in other verticals as well should the landscape change.

Jensen never said… hey I’m going to bet it all on AI and cuda. Let’s go all in. This never happened. Both Jensen and Su are not huge risk takers imo.

Additionally there’s a lot of luck involved with the success of NVIDIA.

Where does the idea that engineers cost "a few million" come from? You might pay that much to senior engineering management, big names who can attract other talent, but normal engineers cost much less than a million dollars a year.

They literally closed a deal hiring a 1100+ ZT Systems engineers yesterday.

I think this broaches the real matter, which is that nVidia's core business is GPUs while AMD's core business is CPUs. And, frankly, AMD has lately been doing a great job at its core business. The problem is that GPUs are now much more profitable than CPUs, both in terms of unit economics and growth potential. So they are winning a major battle (against Intel) even as they are losing a different one (against nVidia). I'm not sure there's a strategy they could have adopted to win both at the same time.

However, the next big looming problem for them is likely to be the shrinking market for x86 vs. the growing market for Arm etc. So they might very well have demonstrated great core competence, that ends up being completely swept away by not just one but two major industry shifts.

they're not hiring 4 engineers, they're hiring a team.

and this isn't just developers, R&D and design are iterative and will require proofing, QA, prototyping -- and that means bodies who can do all of that.

OP said "Even if they needed to hire a few thousand engineers at a few million in comp each". That's where the number came from.

Nvidia seems to pay the bulk of their engineers 200k-400k. If the fully loaded cost is 2.2, then it's closer to 440k-880k per engineer. Probably 500k would be a good number to use

Those are mostly hardware engineers, not software engineers, right?