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

183 points spacebanana7 | 3 comments | 01 Apr 25 14:37 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source

I appreciate developing ROCm into something competitive with CUDA would require a lot of work, both internally within AMD and with external contributions to the relevant open source libraries.

However the amount of resources at stake is incredible. The delta between NVIDIA's value and AMD's is bigger than the annual GDP of Spain. Even if they needed to hire a few thousand engineers at a few million in comp each, it'd still be a good investment.

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Vvector ◴[01 Apr 25 14:59 UTC] No.43547594[source]▶
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.

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1. fancyfredbot ◴[01 Apr 25 15:35 UTC] No.43548052[source]▶
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.
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2. red-iron-pine ◴[01 Apr 25 17:46 UTC] No.43549596[source]▶
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.

3. Vvector ◴[01 Apr 25 21:02 UTC] No.43551293[source]▶
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