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Re:AMD Reports Q2 2020 Earnings by orbifold on Wednesday July 29, 2020 @04:56AM (#23984695)
The stock price is in part determined by the discounted future Cashflow, the one of AMD is pointing upwards that of Intel seems neutral or declining. Intel had a long string of failures and bad acquisitions recently, which points to bad management. AMD has all the potential to attack Nvidia’s deep learning moat with in house talent. Maybe this is all wishful thinking though, but my AMD calls jumped 46% within a day.
Re:AMD Reports Q2 2020 Earnings by hangonhn on Wednesday July 29, 2020 @12:16PM (#23988439)
This might be wild speculation but I just now realized that AMD, Nvidia, and, of course, TSMC are all Taiwanese lead. Did Taiwan have some kind of incubator or have some kind of special emphasis on semiconductors or is this just pure coincidence? I wouldn't be so surprised if Taiwan isn't such a small country (relative to its bigger neighbors). Just wondering.
Re:AMD Reports Q2 2020 Earnings by kenhwang on Wednesday July 29, 2020 @12:35PM (#23988651)
The government of Taiwan realized that their semiconductor industry might be the one thing that the US would be willing to go to war with China over to protect. So the government has invested heavily in ensuring they maintain critical mass in semiconductor expertise, typically by investing heavily in university education and research in related engineering fields. Computer/electrical/materials engineering is pretty much the default major everyone gets funneled into without capacity limits since at least the 70s.

For example, my parents and all their friends weren't well off enough to afford private university, but majors at public university were limited by the government based on projected need with slots offered to only the highest test scores. They couldn't test high enough to secure a public university slot for accounting, art, architecture, education, medicine, and trades such as automotive repair or plumbing. So they all ended up with computer science and engineering degrees. Fully paid for by the government.

They basically treat the semiconductor industry like how the US treats its defense industry.

Re:AMD Reports Q2 2020 Earnings by pickle-wizard on Wednesday July 29, 2020 @03:17PM (#23990532)
I have long held the opinion that education should be part of national defense.

I think is a good example of what happens when you do that.

Re:AMD Reports Q2 2020 Earnings by corin_ on Thursday July 30, 2020 @04:18AM (#23995795)
There's a fairly commonly held view that improving education access means giving people more ways out of poverty and therefore less people choosing armed forces as their career.

It seems intuitive to me that as war technology progresses, number of humans becomes less of a factor in military strength, but I know so little about this area that I couldn't guess how greatly alternative educational opportunities impact military applications, nor at what point in the past/future the scale might tip between wanting policies that push more into armed forces vs. no longer being so important (and I assume it would be different for different countries, too).

But I do believe good, free education should be a key part of any country, regardless of whether it helps national défense or not. If that drives up the cost of recruiting people to the armed forces then fine - I'm no fan of them in general, but if people are going to risk their lives potentially in wars then it shouldn't be because their choices were limited to that vs a life of poverty.

Re:AMD Reports Q2 2020 Earnings by jl2718 on Thursday July 30, 2020 @09:16AM (#23997717)
Interesting how they invert the qualifications for the disciplines versus US universities. It makes a lot of sense for a centrally-planned education system to force higher admission requirements for disciplines with less rigor and lower job demands. I have a suspicion that the US college system would implode for lack of willing customers and greatly reduce rigor to pablum. It’s basically a babysitting service here. It also makes it clear that pursuit of some measures of prestige reduce effectiveness of a system.
Re:AMD Reports Q2 2020 Earnings by jdhzzz on Wednesday July 29, 2020 @12:37PM (#23988676)
I vaguely recall a John C. Dvorak column (yes, I am too lazy to look it up) from the 1990s (maybe?) concerning a trip to Taiwan where he wondered if they were doing an experiment to see what would happen if everyone got a degree in electrical engineering.
Re:AMD Reports Q2 2020 Earnings by thephyber on Wednesday July 29, 2020 @10:13PM (#23993694)
Took me a minute, but it showed up in Google books:

https://books.google.com/books?id=C6VFJIbxX7MC&lpg=PA71&ots=...

Re:AMD Reports Q2 2020 Earnings by mjayhn on Wednesday July 29, 2020 @12:39PM (#23988711)
I started going to the Super Computer/HPC confs here in the USA over the last few years and it was shocking how few American companies are there with impressive hardware engineering. Maybe the Japanese/SKOrean/Taiwanese companies showing up are the Dell/IBMS of those countries and I'm just not familiar with the names but walking around the conference always gives me this feeling that the USA is lagging behind or sitting this one out. The majority of companies I see are the usual hardware conf goers; IBM/HP and then a bunch of Gov/NSA/DOD groups on the USA end with a few universities. On the AIPAC end tons of what I feel like are small hardware companies doing cool bleeding edge nvmeoF/arm/fpga stuff, TONS of universities with really cool looking projects, etc.
Re:AMD Reports Q2 2020 Earnings by jhoechtl on Wednesday July 29, 2020 @02:50PM (#23990279)
But there is nothing to be set out. Either you play and win or you have already lost by not playing.

The only chance to sit it out would be a giant technological leap as in quantum computing, I just don't see that leap.

Re:AMD Reports Q2 2020 Earnings by andromeduck on Wednesday July 29, 2020 @12:32PM (#23988630)
Look up Morris Chang. The man's a visionary and the single reason why Taiwan still exists as a sovereign nation.
Re:AMD Reports Q2 2020 Earnings by kevin_thibedeau on Wednesday July 29, 2020 @12:23PM (#23988525)
They're not crippled by shortsighted management.
Re:AMD Reports Q2 2020 Earnings by disgruntledphd2 on Wednesday July 29, 2020 @05:06AM (#23984762)
I really don't see anyone de-throning Nvidia from the deep learning market.

I'd like to see it, but I'm not sure anyone can catch up now.

Re:AMD Reports Q2 2020 Earnings by ChefboyOG on Wednesday July 29, 2020 @11:13AM (#23987528)
I think it's highly unlikely that any traditional chip company dethrones Nvidia in DL, at least in a reasonably soonish time horizon. As others have said, CUDA is just too far ahead in terms of development and adoption.

However, I think NVIDIA is still vulnerable—but against AWS/GCP/Azure, not Intel/AMD.

My opinion is that deep learning is moving to the cloud. That's a bigger conversation with a lot of nuances, but if you take that basic assumption, then the development of ASICs like TPU/Inferentia become a big threat to Nvidia.

If the biggest buyers of chips in deep learning are the clouds, and the clouds are increasingly developing their own chips for deep learning, Nvidia is in a tough spot. They'll always have a place among labs that use their own machine, and of course, Nvidia's business is bigger than machine learning, but in general I think the clouds are a real threat.

Re:AMD Reports Q2 2020 Earnings by orbifold on Wednesday July 29, 2020 @05:45PM (#23991922)
It is relatively trivial to hook any new accelerator you develop into the popular deep learning frameworks. In the case of AMD there actually already exists a mature compiler framework for their GPUs and their cards are mostly on par with Nvidia's. Most deep-learning researchers don't write custom CUDA kernels, but simply stitch high level operations together in python. So as soon AMD delivers a performance / power advantage there will be almost no friction to deploy a AMD only cluster.

One of Nvidia's actual moats is their system building competency, which AMD lacks. They can sell you a box / a whole server room configuration, since their acquisition of Mellanox together with network equipment.

Re:AMD Reports Q2 2020 Earnings by ksec on Wednesday July 29, 2020 @05:52PM (#23991977)
Yes, but there is one assumption in this hypothesis which I think is not accurate.

The cost of Hardware Development is the main cost contribution.

Which I think is not true with regards to both GPU and GPGPU computing. The major cost for GPU is Drivers, and CUDA for GPGPU. i.e It is Software.

Unlike ARM where AWS/GCP/Azure can make their chips and benefits from the Software ecosystem already in place for ARM, there is no such thing on GPU. Drivers and CUDA is the biggest moat around Nvidia's CPU. And unless Developers figure out a way to drive the cost of DL and Drivers down, there is no incentives to switch away from Nvidia's ecosystem.

That is why I am interested to see how Intel tackle this area. And if History will repeat itself again in the Voodoo, Rage 3D and S3 Verge era.

Re:AMD Reports Q2 2020 Earnings by deepGem on Wednesday July 29, 2020 @06:49AM (#23985294)
Not happening. nVidia has a stranglehold on deep learning because of CUDA and Cudnn. I don't see any AMD alternatives to take over either of these. So I wouldn't bet too much on AMD taking over the deep learning chip market.
Re:AMD Reports Q2 2020 Earnings by CoolGuySteve on Wednesday July 29, 2020 @08:30AM (#23985889)
Who’s writing bare CUDA though? For most tasks a framework like Tensorflow or PyTorch is good enough.

If AMD could provide a backend for the most popular frameworks then they could skip over the CUDA patent issue completely.

The real problem is that it seems like AMD’s not investing substantially in software teams to make it happen.

Re:AMD Reports Q2 2020 Earnings by deepGem on Wednesday July 29, 2020 @11:40AM (#23987885)
In the deep learning world every major framework works on top of Cudnn which works on top of CUDA Pytorch, Tensorflow you name it.

https://github.com/pytorch/pytorch/issues/10657

That is the state of Pytorch support for AMD GPUs.

Re:AMD Reports Q2 2020 Earnings by jacquesm on Wednesday July 29, 2020 @10:52AM (#23987293)
> Who’s writing bare CUDA though?

I do. Not everything you can do with a CUDA card is deep learning. In fact that's just one of many applications.

Re:AMD Reports Q2 2020 Earnings by shaklee3 on Wednesday July 29, 2020 @09:19AM (#23986308)
Lots of people do. We write cuda all the time.
Re:AMD Reports Q2 2020 Earnings by popinman322 on Wednesday July 29, 2020 @07:27AM (#23985505)
This. The software lead is just incredible; almost everything uses CUDA.

There has been some progress, but PyTorch still isn't fully functional with ROCm yet and that feels like a good litmus test.

https://github.com/pytorch/pytorch/issues/10657

Re:AMD Reports Q2 2020 Earnings by ngcc_hk on Wednesday July 29, 2020 @04:55PM (#23991505)
The Apple ecosystem with its amd graphic cars and future Apple Gpu card seems to be a fight. Or at least maintain certain software not totally all cuda all the way down. And also the gaming with amd dominates both gaming platform.

Really do not want just one players. And hope the high level plays have more completion.

Still interest in Taiwan part. Purely from economic point of view. How secure are we ok that front, if all eggs are in one basket. Hk is fallen. Taiwan or South China Sea is in play. That will affect the supply chain.

Re:AMD Reports Q2 2020 Earnings by bgorman on Wednesday July 29, 2020 @11:16AM (#23987550)
I think the stranglehold is about to burst.

Intel is launching a GPU/Deep learning accelerator, Huawei is thinking about launching a GPU. Pytorch and Tensor flow work well enough on AMD GPUs. There are also custom deep learning ASICs from Google. There is simply too much competition at this point for CUDA to continue to be the standard.

Re:AMD Reports Q2 2020 Earnings by qchris on Wednesday July 29, 2020 @01:19PM (#23989209)
Is there any chance that some of the upcoming open-source cross-platform standards like WebGPU could have an effect on this, if tooling around them was built to support writing more GPGPU-focused code?
Re:AMD Reports Q2 2020 Earnings by NikolaeVarius on Wednesday July 29, 2020 @11:03AM (#23987422)
DLSS is black magic
Re:AMD Reports Q2 2020 Earnings by throwmemoney on Wednesday July 29, 2020 @06:37PM (#23992348)
Have you heard of the billion dollar unicorn from England, United Kingdom called Graphcore?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_zvU0uwIafQ

https://www.graphcore.ai/products/mk2/ipu-machine-ipu-pod

Re:AMD Reports Q2 2020 Earnings by jhoechtl on Wednesday July 29, 2020 @02:52PM (#23990297)
Just saying deep learning still is mostly a marketing fad...
Re:AMD Reports Q2 2020 Earnings by TomVDB on Wednesday July 29, 2020 @03:33PM (#23990706)
Last quarter, Nvidia’s datacenter segment exceeded $1B in revenue for the first time, and it’s close to overtaking the gaming segment as largest business segment.

Marketing fad or not, it’s not a bad business to be in.

Re:AMD Reports Q2 2020 Earnings by Shorel on Wednesday July 29, 2020 @06:27PM (#23992272)
I say the total opposite.

It is barely starting. In 10 and 20 years it will be huge.

Re:AMD Reports Q2 2020 Earnings by RavlaAlvar on Wednesday July 29, 2020 @06:59AM (#23985342)
I am not seeing AMD putting any serious contenders for CUDA though.
Re:AMD Reports Q2 2020 Earnings by xondono on Wednesday July 29, 2020 @09:59AM (#23986728)
They don’t really need to.

Nvidia will have to validate and launch all of it’s PCIe4 on Epyc/Ryzen processors, so it’s not like AMD won’t benefit from the Deep Learning hype

Re:AMD Reports Q2 2020 Earnings by zucker42 on Wednesday July 29, 2020 @12:18PM (#23988467)
Isn't HIP+ROCm a serious "competitor" to CUDA? You can convert your code automatic from CUDA to HIP. At least that's why the advertising says; I haven't used it myself. Plus, PyTorch and Tensorflow have AMD support, I thought.
Re:AMD Reports Q2 2020 Earnings by TomVDB on Wednesday July 29, 2020 @03:32PM (#23990689)
It may convert your own code, but it can’t convert the CUDA libraries.

It also doesn’t help that AMD has stopped supporting ROCm for the current consumer GPUs.

Re:AMD Reports Q2 2020 Earnings by slavik81 on Thursday July 30, 2020 @02:45AM (#23995347)
Which CUDA libraries are you referring to? NVIDIA libraries like cuBLAS? There are ROCm libraries for a subset of those, but it's definitely a work-in-progress.
Re:AMD Reports Q2 2020 Earnings by butterisgood on Wednesday July 29, 2020 @03:27PM (#23990644)
They might not have to, as others have pointed out. Intel, on the other hand, is fighting the multi-front battle against a lot of competitors. It’s great for consumers, but Intel might have to decide to focus too.
Re:AMD Reports Q2 2020 Earnings by nabla9 on Wednesday July 29, 2020 @07:02AM (#23985358)
Wait until Nvidia buys ARM from SoftBank and steals CPU markets from both Intel & AMD in high-end high profit HPC/DL sector.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-22/softbank-...

Re:AMD Reports Q2 2020 Earnings by blinkingled on Wednesday July 29, 2020 @07:22AM (#23985476)
Why do they have to wait to buy ARM to do that?
Re:AMD Reports Q2 2020 Earnings by NameDoesntExist on Wednesday July 29, 2020 @02:16PM (#23989886)
Presumably the patent minefields of the CPU industry.