[Drybones]

I disagree. The market ready for disruption was the CPU market stagnated by Intel. It was also the perfect opportunity to put the limited financial resources behind to come out with a viable product to compete that didn't need a ton of software ecosystem to work. Datacenters, gamers, Cloud hyperscalers, Supercomputers, they all needed something to replace their aging and inefficient Intel Skylake Xeons and Core CPUs. And their chiplet tech made it possible to make this CPU product span the entire portfolio for cheap.

If they decided to compete with GPU, they would have just lost in gaming GPU sales to NVIDIA due to mindshare and they wouldn't have had the resources to develop the software to compete. And datacenter GPUs were still a niche and rare product.

AI/ML was not realistically something they could predict or bet the house on 7 years ago. And just like Lisa said in the recent presentation, AI is in its early stages and will be a growing and long term business venture.

Additionally, their CPU chiplet developments were critical in producing the talent and experience that would translate to GPU chiplets that AMD is not utilizing on RDNA 3 and CDNA 3, providing a strategic advantage over NVIDIA.

They still have the time to enter it with their MI300s AND now they have the money and resources to develop their software ecosystems more.

AMD absolutely made the right move to focus on Zen and HPC. It's not their fault that investors are blindly overhyped about AI.

AMD's greatest threat in datacenter AI hardware isn't even NVIDIA. It's the biggest tech companies producing their own AI hardware (Google, Meta, Tesla, Amazon) effectively and eventually eliminating the need for AMD or NVIDIA GPU/AI hardware.

[aunty_helen]

I appreciate your points but you're being generous to AMD. They bought ATI in 2006. I remember in 2007 seeing CUDA for the first time in the password cracking scene and thinking wow they've done something amazing. OpenCL was there too, the "one framework heterogenious processing" sounded amazing but quickly became the ugly cousin.

Then in 2011 with crypto, once again Nvidia was always supported but ATI was that other case that required the different install with only some support.

Then 6 years ago when I started working professionally in ai, it was CUDA only for most of the applications. AMD had some stuff but had pretty much given up on OpenCL and at this point was a distant second. If you chose AMD you were quickly going to be locked out while the cool kids played with CUDA and TF. This was in a time when there may have only been one framework or library to do a particular algo. So it really was a lockout.

So to your point, 16 years ago when I first saw GPGPU, you could bet your house on it becoming something massive. The scientific applications alone were obvious to anyone with a copy of BOINC.

Nvidia have shown a masterclass of building something as a corporate over many years and really dominating all competition. AMD should have jumped onboard with TF and made sure any CUDA enabled algo had a _insert whatever AMD would have used_ equivalent. But they didn't, they couldn't even get linux drivers to work.

[beebeepka]

Absolutely. I wouldn't say they made all the right choices, whatever that means, but I don't remember Nvidia being stagnant.

Attacking the x86 servers was the best, most obvious thing they could've done. As it turns out,nit saved the company.

Going straight against Nvidia, as people suggest (for completely selfish reasons), would've killed them