I mean, you say there was “just no money” but AMD signed a deal over three years ago to acquire Xilinx for $50b. They’ve been on an acquisition spree in fact. Just not anything related to gpgpu, because that wasn’t a priority.
Yes, after you spend all your money there’s nothing left. Just like after refusing the merger with nvidia and then spending all the cash buying ati there was nothing left. Times were very tough, ATI and consoles kept the company afloat after spending all their money overpaying for ATI put you there in the first place. Should have done the merger with nvidia and not depleted your cash imo.
More recently could easily have spent 0.5% of the money you spent on Xilinx and 10x’d your spend on GPGPU development for 10 years instead. That was 2020-2021 - it’s literally been 5+ years since things were good enough to spend $50 billion on a single acquisition.
You also spent $4b on stock buybacks in 2021... and $8 billion in 2022... and geohotz pointed out your runtime still crashed on the sample programs on officially-supported hardware/software in 2023, right?
Like the assertion that a single dime spent in any other fashion than the way it happened would have inevitably led to AMD going under while you spend an average of tens of billions of dollars a year on corporate acquisitions is silly. Maybe you legitimately believe that (and I have no doubt times were very very bad) but I suggest that you’re not seeing the forest for the trees there. Software has never been a priority and it suffered from the same deprioritizing as the dGPU division and Radeon generally (in the financial catastrophe in the wake of the ATI debacle). Raja said it all - gpus were going away, why spend money on any of it? You need some low end stuff for apus, they pulled the plug on everything else. And that was a rational, albeit shortsighted, decision to keep the company afloat. But that doesn’t mean it’s the only course which could have done that, that’s a fallacy/false logic.
Nothing drives this home more than than this very interview with Lisa Su where she is repeatedly probed around her priorities and it always comes back to hardware. Even when she is directly asked multiple sequential questions probing at her philosophy around software, she literally flatly says hardware is what’s important and refuses to even say it’s a priority today. “I don’t know that. I am a hardware person”, and that’s how she’s allocated resources too.
I agree Xilinx is a very important piece for building systems, and it’s led to a lot of innovation around your packaging etc, but it’s also been a massive miss on systems engineering too. Nvidia has picked PHYs with higher bandwidth-density per era and built the hardware to scale the system up, as well as the software to enable it all. The network is hardware too, there is much more to hardware than just single-package performance and AMD is falling behind at most of it, even with Xilinx.
Again, though, from a developer perspective every single person’s formative experience with gpgpu has been getting excited to try opencl, APP, HSA, ROCm, or HIP, and then AMD shattering it, followed by “wow CUDA just works”. You guys have been an awful company to work with from the dev side.
And again, I’m sure you do look at it in terms of “we target the commercial stuff because they pay us money to” but you really should be thinking in terms of where your addressable market is. Probably 70% of your market (including iGPUs) is using GCN era gaming hardware. You simply choose not to target these users. This includes a large number of current-gen products which you continue to sell into the market btw - those 5700G are Vega. Another 25% or so is using rdna1/2 and you didn’t target these until very recently (still not on Linux, the dominant platform for this). And you are continuing to add numbers to this market with your zen4 APUs - you simply choose not to support these on ROCm at all, in fact.
Your install base is backwards-weighted, and in fact is only becoming moreso as you lose steam in the desktop market - 85% of dGPUs sold this gen were the competition's. And literally going into this generation you completely kicked all legacy hardware to the curb anyway, except for Radeon vii, the weird fragile card that nobody bought because it was worse than a 2080 at a higher price a year later. You have no long-term prospects because you stubbornly refuse to support the hardware that is going to be accessible to the people who want to write the next 20 years of software for you, you are literally targeting the inverse of your install base.
Sorry to say it, and again not mad at you personally etc, but the other comments are right that this is seemingly a problem that everyone can see except for the people who work at AMD. The emperor has no software.
It is hard to think of a more perfect example of the Innovator's Dilemma: you targeted the known, stable markets while a smaller, more agile, more focused (in R&D spend, etc) competitor visibly created a whole new segment, that you continued to ignore because there still wasn't Big Money in it yet. It's a tale as old as time, and it always comes from a place of execs making safe, justifiable, defensible decisions that would have been completely rational if things had gone differently and GPGPU compute didn't become a thing. But it's not a defense to the question of "why did you miss the boat and what are you going to do differently going forward", either. Understanding why the decision was made doesn't mean it's a good one.
One of the points I've been making is that the reason the mining booms keep coming back, and AI booms, etc is that "dense compute" has obviously been a thing for a while now. Not just HPC, not just crypto, but there are lots of things which simply need extreme arithmatic/bandwidth density above all else, and as various fields discover that need we get surges into the consumer gaming market. Those are the wakeup calls, on top of HPC and AI markets visibly and continuously expanding for a decade now, while AMD watched and fiddled. And again, as of 5+ years ago AMD was not nearly so destitute they couldn't start moving things forward a bit - you were so destitute you were looking to start acquisitions to the tune of tens of billions a year, tens of billions of dollars in stock buybacks, etc.
I just flatly reject the idea that this was the best posible allocation of every dollar within the company such that this was flatly not achievable. You had money, you just didn't want to spend it on this. Especially when the CEO is Hardware Mafia and not the Software Gang.
(and I'm nodding intentionally to the "Bomber Mafia" in WW2 - yeah, the fighter aircraft probably can't escort the bombers into germany, you're right, and that's mostly because the bomber mafia blocked development of drop tanks, but hindsight is 20/20 and surely it seemed like a rational decision at the time!)
I also frankly think there is a real concerning problem with AMD and locus-of-control, it's a very clear PTSD symptom both for the company and the fans. Some spat with Intel 20 years ago didn't make AMD spend nearly a hundred billion dollars on acquisitions and stock buybacks instead of $100m on software. Everything constantly has to tie back to someone else rather than decisions that are being made inside the company - you guys are so battered and broken that (a) you can't see that you're masters of your own destiny now, and (b) that times are different now and you both have money to spend now and need to spend it. You are the corporate equivalent of a grandma eating rotten food despite having an adequate savings/income, because that's how things were during the formative years for you. You have money now, stop eating rotten food, and stop insisting that eating rotten food is the only way to survive. Maybe 20 years ago, but not today.
I mean, it's literally been over 20 years now. At what point is it fair to expect AMD leadership to stand by their own decisions in their own right? Will we see decisions made in 2029 be justified with "but 25 years ago..."? 30 years? More? It's a problem with you guys: if the way you see it is nothing is ever your responsibility or fault, then why would you ever change course? Which is exactly what Lisa Su is saying there. I don't expect a deeply introspective postmortem of why they lost this one, but at least a "software is our priority going forward" would be important signaling to the market etc. Her answer isn't that, her answer is everything is going great and why stop when they're winning. Except they're not.
it's also worth pointing out that you have abdicated driver support on those currently-sold Zen2/3 APUs with Vega as well... they are essentially legacy-support/security-update-only. And again, I'm sure you see it as "2017 hardware" but you launched hardware with it going into 2021 and that hardware is still for sale, and in fact you continue to sell quite a few Zen2/3 APUs in other markets as well.
if you want to get traction/start taking ground, you have to actually support the hardware that's in people's PCs, is what I'm saying. The "we support CDNA because it is a direct sale to big customers who pay us money to support it" is good for the books, but it leads to exactly this place you've found yourselves in terms of overall ecosystem. You will never take traction if you don't have the CUDA-style support model both for hardware support/compatibility and software support/compatibility.
it is telling that Intel, who is currently in equally-dire financial straits, is continuing to double-down on their software spending. At one point they were running -200% operating margins on the dGPU division, because they understand the importance. Apple understands that a functional runtime and a functional library/ecosystem are table stakes too. It literally, truly is just an AMD problem, which brings us back to the vision/locus-of-control problems with the leadership. You could definitely have done this instead of $12 billion of stock buybacks in 2021/2022 if you wanted to, if absolutely nothing else.
(and again, I disagree with the notion that every single other dollar was maximized and AMD could not have stretched themselves a dollar further in any other way - they just didn't want to do that for something that was seen as unimportant.)
Yes, after you spend all your money there’s nothing left. Just like after refusing the merger with nvidia and then spending all the cash buying ati there was nothing left. Times were very tough, ATI and consoles kept the company afloat after spending all their money overpaying for ATI put you there in the first place. Should have done the merger with nvidia and not depleted your cash imo.
More recently could easily have spent 0.5% of the money you spent on Xilinx and 10x’d your spend on GPGPU development for 10 years instead. That was 2020-2021 - it’s literally been 5+ years since things were good enough to spend $50 billion on a single acquisition.
You also spent $4b on stock buybacks in 2021... and $8 billion in 2022... and geohotz pointed out your runtime still crashed on the sample programs on officially-supported hardware/software in 2023, right?
Like the assertion that a single dime spent in any other fashion than the way it happened would have inevitably led to AMD going under while you spend an average of tens of billions of dollars a year on corporate acquisitions is silly. Maybe you legitimately believe that (and I have no doubt times were very very bad) but I suggest that you’re not seeing the forest for the trees there. Software has never been a priority and it suffered from the same deprioritizing as the dGPU division and Radeon generally (in the financial catastrophe in the wake of the ATI debacle). Raja said it all - gpus were going away, why spend money on any of it? You need some low end stuff for apus, they pulled the plug on everything else. And that was a rational, albeit shortsighted, decision to keep the company afloat. But that doesn’t mean it’s the only course which could have done that, that’s a fallacy/false logic.
https://youtu.be/590h3XIUfHg?t=1956
Nothing drives this home more than than this very interview with Lisa Su where she is repeatedly probed around her priorities and it always comes back to hardware. Even when she is directly asked multiple sequential questions probing at her philosophy around software, she literally flatly says hardware is what’s important and refuses to even say it’s a priority today. “I don’t know that. I am a hardware person”, and that’s how she’s allocated resources too.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40703420
I agree Xilinx is a very important piece for building systems, and it’s led to a lot of innovation around your packaging etc, but it’s also been a massive miss on systems engineering too. Nvidia has picked PHYs with higher bandwidth-density per era and built the hardware to scale the system up, as well as the software to enable it all. The network is hardware too, there is much more to hardware than just single-package performance and AMD is falling behind at most of it, even with Xilinx.
Again, though, from a developer perspective every single person’s formative experience with gpgpu has been getting excited to try opencl, APP, HSA, ROCm, or HIP, and then AMD shattering it, followed by “wow CUDA just works”. You guys have been an awful company to work with from the dev side.
And again, I’m sure you do look at it in terms of “we target the commercial stuff because they pay us money to” but you really should be thinking in terms of where your addressable market is. Probably 70% of your market (including iGPUs) is using GCN era gaming hardware. You simply choose not to target these users. This includes a large number of current-gen products which you continue to sell into the market btw - those 5700G are Vega. Another 25% or so is using rdna1/2 and you didn’t target these until very recently (still not on Linux, the dominant platform for this). And you are continuing to add numbers to this market with your zen4 APUs - you simply choose not to support these on ROCm at all, in fact.
Your install base is backwards-weighted, and in fact is only becoming moreso as you lose steam in the desktop market - 85% of dGPUs sold this gen were the competition's. And literally going into this generation you completely kicked all legacy hardware to the curb anyway, except for Radeon vii, the weird fragile card that nobody bought because it was worse than a 2080 at a higher price a year later. You have no long-term prospects because you stubbornly refuse to support the hardware that is going to be accessible to the people who want to write the next 20 years of software for you, you are literally targeting the inverse of your install base.
Sorry to say it, and again not mad at you personally etc, but the other comments are right that this is seemingly a problem that everyone can see except for the people who work at AMD. The emperor has no software.
It is hard to think of a more perfect example of the Innovator's Dilemma: you targeted the known, stable markets while a smaller, more agile, more focused (in R&D spend, etc) competitor visibly created a whole new segment, that you continued to ignore because there still wasn't Big Money in it yet. It's a tale as old as time, and it always comes from a place of execs making safe, justifiable, defensible decisions that would have been completely rational if things had gone differently and GPGPU compute didn't become a thing. But it's not a defense to the question of "why did you miss the boat and what are you going to do differently going forward", either. Understanding why the decision was made doesn't mean it's a good one.
One of the points I've been making is that the reason the mining booms keep coming back, and AI booms, etc is that "dense compute" has obviously been a thing for a while now. Not just HPC, not just crypto, but there are lots of things which simply need extreme arithmatic/bandwidth density above all else, and as various fields discover that need we get surges into the consumer gaming market. Those are the wakeup calls, on top of HPC and AI markets visibly and continuously expanding for a decade now, while AMD watched and fiddled. And again, as of 5+ years ago AMD was not nearly so destitute they couldn't start moving things forward a bit - you were so destitute you were looking to start acquisitions to the tune of tens of billions a year, tens of billions of dollars in stock buybacks, etc.
I just flatly reject the idea that this was the best posible allocation of every dollar within the company such that this was flatly not achievable. You had money, you just didn't want to spend it on this. Especially when the CEO is Hardware Mafia and not the Software Gang.
(and I'm nodding intentionally to the "Bomber Mafia" in WW2 - yeah, the fighter aircraft probably can't escort the bombers into germany, you're right, and that's mostly because the bomber mafia blocked development of drop tanks, but hindsight is 20/20 and surely it seemed like a rational decision at the time!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7aGC6Sp8zQ
I also frankly think there is a real concerning problem with AMD and locus-of-control, it's a very clear PTSD symptom both for the company and the fans. Some spat with Intel 20 years ago didn't make AMD spend nearly a hundred billion dollars on acquisitions and stock buybacks instead of $100m on software. Everything constantly has to tie back to someone else rather than decisions that are being made inside the company - you guys are so battered and broken that (a) you can't see that you're masters of your own destiny now, and (b) that times are different now and you both have money to spend now and need to spend it. You are the corporate equivalent of a grandma eating rotten food despite having an adequate savings/income, because that's how things were during the formative years for you. You have money now, stop eating rotten food, and stop insisting that eating rotten food is the only way to survive. Maybe 20 years ago, but not today.
I mean, it's literally been over 20 years now. At what point is it fair to expect AMD leadership to stand by their own decisions in their own right? Will we see decisions made in 2029 be justified with "but 25 years ago..."? 30 years? More? It's a problem with you guys: if the way you see it is nothing is ever your responsibility or fault, then why would you ever change course? Which is exactly what Lisa Su is saying there. I don't expect a deeply introspective postmortem of why they lost this one, but at least a "software is our priority going forward" would be important signaling to the market etc. Her answer isn't that, her answer is everything is going great and why stop when they're winning. Except they're not.