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

183 points spacebanana7 | 1 comments | 01 Apr 25 14:37 UTC | HN request time: 0s | 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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danielmarkbruce ◴[01 Apr 25 14:49 UTC] No.43547462[source]▶
They likely haven't put even close to enough money behind it. This isn't a unique situation - you'll see in corporate america a lot of CEOs who say "we are investing in X" and they really believe they are. But the required size is billions (like, hundreds of really insanely talented engineers being paid 500k-1m, lead by a few being paid $3-10m), and they are instead investing low 10's of millions.

They can't bring themselves to put so much money into it that it would be an obvious fail if it didn't work.

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DanielHB ◴[01 Apr 25 15:26 UTC] No.43547934[source]▶
It amazes me how much these companies make actually gets spent on R&D, you see the funnel charts on reddit and I am like what the hell. Microsoft only spends ~6bn USD on R&D with a total 48bn of revenue and 15bn in profits?

What the hell is going on, they should be able to keep an army of PhDs doing pointless research even if only one paper in 10 years comes to a profitable product. But instead they are cutting down workforce like there is no tomorrow...

(I know, I know, market dynamics, value extraction, stock market returns)

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disgruntledphd2 ◴[01 Apr 25 17:27 UTC] No.43549373[source]▶
R and D in the financial statements I've seen basically covers the entire product, engineering etc org. Lots and lots of people, but not what regular people consider RnD.
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1. DanielHB ◴[02 Apr 25 13:57 UTC] No.43556756[source]▶
I know, R&D is like that in every company. It is mostly "development" not research.

What I am pointing out is that they could be doing a shit ton of research, what happened to big companies sponsoring fringe research? That used to be a thing, at Microsoft even.