AMD leaps after launching AI chip that could challenge Nvidia dominance

[nightski]

AMD gatekeeps this functionality behind it's non-consumer cards. They don't realize that having a consumer card and being able to develop on it is a gateway to using AMD. I can use CUDA on any Nvidia card I buy. I can't believe they are so incredibly dense on this.

[65a]

You can run inference and training on consumer AMD cards today. It works fine, including llama.cpp, stable diffusion, hugging face transformers, etc. Way cheaper for a given performance/VRAM target as well.

[Symmetry]

That's something that's started changing over the last few months. Official support for the RX 7900 GPUs for Linux has been added to the most recent versions of ROCm and over on the ROCm subreddit people are reporting success getting other RDNA 3 cards working. On Windows you've got consumer cards from the previous generation getting official support too.

This is, obviously, way overdue and it might not be enough to let AMD get back into the race but

[latchkey]

In my eyes, the real problem is that there is no cost effective developer access to high end cards, like the MI300x. This breaks the developer flywheel that you would normally point at consumer cards for.

Where can you rent time on one? Traditionally, AMD has only helped build super computers, like Frontier and El Capitan, out of these cards.

This time around Azure [0] and other CSP's (cloud service providers) are working to change that. I will have the best of the best of their cards/systems for rent soon.

[0] https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/azure-high-performanc...

[LeanderK]

lol, this is so stupid. Don't they realise that people usually develop locally and train on a server? You don't need a super beefy GPUs to do it, so you buy nvidia. So people are used to nvidia, debug and fix bugs etc. It's not a very smart decision, looks like the decision makers have no idea what's going on.

[riffic]

*its

[FredPret]

AMD needs to launch drivers, not chips. Who’s going to develop ML models on a card that can’t connect to a popular ML model?

I look at their financial performance and it’s staggering how they’ve missed the boat - and this is during a huge boom on gaming, crypto, and AI.

Compare:

https://valustox.com/AMD

VS

https://valustox.com/NVDA

[qaq]

That is the confusing part say you need to hire 100 people at 1 mil. per year comp to get drivers to a good state. Thats 1/3 of their quarterly profit but would prob double the revenue in a few years.

[visarga]

That's not such a big concern, LLMs run on all things today. It won't be that hard to make them work on AMD. Before 2020 we had much more architectural diversity.

[bigbillheck]

> AMD needs to....

https://www.amd.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2023-10-10-am...

[Workaccount2]

Whats insane is that AMD has been known for it's shit drivers for over a decade now...and nothing has happened to address this. Like surely everyone internally knows it, all the execs know it, the board knows it, investors know it...but somehow it has never been addressed.

At this point it's almost like it has to be intentional, like some perceived tradeoff ingrained in the culture that generates shit software.

[machinekob]

They are not only missed AI boom, they are also seems to be overpriced by a huge margin compared to Intel or even NVDA.

[brucethemoose2]

Wait... this headline totally wrong.

This is the actual source[1]:

> The AMD Instinct M1300A APU was launched in January 2023 and blends a total of 13 chiplets, of which many are 3D stacked, creating a single chip package with 24 Zen 4 CPU cores fused with a CDNA 3 graphics engine and eight stacks of HBM3 memory totaling 128GB.

Its literally a typo (or renamed SKU?) for the MI300A. So... the street is jumping on AMD because of a typo echoed by a ton of outlets?

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/genci-upgrades-ad...

[jacoblambda]

It is a typo but in a different way. They are referring to the MI300X (mentioned again later).

The discussion on the MI300X was on HN like 12 hours ago (after the AMD announcement event yesterday):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38550271

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfSZqjxsr0M

[w-m]

From yesterday: AMD MI300 performance – Faster than H100, but how much?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38550271

[xnx]

> Advanced Micro Devices shares were marked 2% higher in premarket trading

2% is a "leap"?

It looks like NVDA is up ~1.5% since yesterday.

[jraby3]

They are up 6% today which is significant.

[DeathArrow]

Do they have a good CUDA alternative?

[no_wizard]

Can't speak to how it compares to CUDA however they are developing ROCm[0]

[0]: https://www.amd.com/en/products/software/rocm.html

[dekken_]

it's called hip, and it's mostly the same

AMD have their own thrust gpu impls, so from a high level they are somewhat interchangeable

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

I don't know, but couldn't people use LLMs to drastically lower the cost of switching? Converting a codebase to use a different platform doesn't require creativity.

[machinekob]

No

[TheBigSalad]

It barely moved. This stock goes up and down 5% all the time. It was at the current price a week ago.

[ChrisArchitect]

Some more discussion yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38548330

[cloudengineer94]

They gotta keep working on the software side of things like drivers, FSR and more.

AMD is so far behind on this.

In the other hand though, their 3D Cache chips are amazing

[bryanlarsen]

On Linux, AMD drivers are far ahead of Nvidia. Switching from a 970 to a 3750 fixed a bunch of visual glitches for me.

[riffic]

msn.com, really?

[ek750]

what would you prefer? Would WSJ or other paywalled sites make you happy?

Don't make me start submitting aol links.

[machinekob]

This time AMD will win for sure (Copium)

[mupuff1234]

AMD market cap is bigger than Intel.

[gafage]

According to the news and tech blogs AMD is always ahead of nvidia in all regards. But then, you have real life...

[eganist]

> According to the news and tech blogs AMD is always ahead of nvidia in all regards. But then, you have real life...

Do you have examples of both sides of this claim?