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141 points zdw | 9 comments | | HN request time: 0.415s | source | bottom
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andrewstuart ◴[] No.45665124[source]
Despite this APU being deeply interesting to people who want to do local AI, anecdotally I hear that it’s hard to get models to run on it.

Why would AMD not have focused everything it possibly has on demonstrating and documenting and fixing and showing and smoothing the path for AI on their systems?

Why does AMD come across as so generally clueless when it comes to giving developers what they want, compared to Nvidia?

AMD should do whatever it takes to avoid these sort of situations:

https://youtu.be/cF4fx4T3Voc?si=wVmYmWVIya4DQ8Ut

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1. lmm ◴[] No.45665186[source]
Hardware companies are extremely bad at valuing software. The mystery isn't that AMD is bad at it, the mystery is that NVidia is good at it. They also have a probably 30-40 year head start. AMD is trying as much as they can, but changing culture takes time.
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2. DeepYogurt ◴[] No.45665268[source]
Intel and arm are also pretty good at it. amd feels like the outlier here
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3. AnthonyMouse ◴[] No.45666390[source]
ARM, and even moreso the companies that make ARM devices, are terrible at it. And there's a reason for that.

The customers of hardware companies generally don't want to get proprietary software from them, because everybody knows that if they do, the hardware company will try to use it as a lock-in strategy. So if you make something which is proprietary but not amazing, nobody wants to touch it.

There are two ways around this.

The first is that you embrace open source. This is what Intel has traditionally done and it works really well when your hardware is good enough that it's what people will choose when the software is a commodity. It also means you don't have to do all the work yourself because if you're not trying to lock people in then all the community work that normally goes to trying to reverse engineer proprietary nonsense instead goes into making sure that the open source software that runs on your hardware is better than the proprietary software that runs on your competitor's.

The second is that you spend enough money on lock-in software that people are willing to use it. This works temporarily, because it takes a certain amount of time for competitors and the community to make a decent alternative, but what usually happens after that is that you have a problem because you were expecting there to be a moat and then ten thousand people showed up to each throw in a log or a bag of wet cement. Before too long the moat is filled in and you can't it back because it was premised on your thing working and their thing not, so once their thing works, that's the part that isn't under your control. And at that point the customers have a choice and the customers don't like you.

The problem AMD has is that they were kinda sorta trying to do both in GPUs. They'd make some things open source but also keep trying to hide the inner workings of the firmware from the public, which is what people need in order to allow third parties to make great software for them. But the second strategy was never going to work for AMD because a decade ago they didn't have the resources to even try and now Nvidia is the incumbent and the underdog can't execute a lock-in strategy. But the open source thing works fine here and indeed gets everyone on their side and then it's them and the whole world against Nvidia instead of just them against Nvidia. Which they're gradually starting to figure out.

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4. z3ratul163071 ◴[] No.45666418[source]
it follows that all are good except amd :D

i know, i know we have s...fest sw layers on other chips like the ones from qualcomm, broadcom etc.

5. ur-whale ◴[] No.45667276[source]
> the mystery is that NVidia is good at it

They are absolutely not.

Just less bad than AMD, which is an extremely low bar.

6. rjsw ◴[] No.45668667{3}[source]
I think ARM is trying to get better at it, they are recruiting software people, that won't have much effect on the drivers for the bits of ARM SoCs that they don't design though.
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7. naasking ◴[] No.45669033[source]
> They also have a probably 30-40 year head start.

Holy exaggeration Batman!

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8. oblio ◴[] No.45669556[source]
30 years ago we had 3Dfx :-))
9. AnthonyMouse ◴[] No.45673757{4}[source]
What ARM should be doing is putting it in their license terms to require the makers of the SoCs to do it, where "it" is making the software open source, because that's the overwhelmingly obvious fit for a company in their position. And for that matter for the makers of the SoCs because none of them are going to put the resources in to make the software great by themselves and you don't want to be handing out footguns to every middle manager who can't see that.