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Re:AMD Alveo V70 AI inference accelerator card by gymbeaux on Tuesday January 10, 2023 @02:08PM (#34329848)
AMD has finite resources, like any company, and they’ve been focusing on CPU/datacenter dominance, which to me is both the safer bet and the more-lucrative bet. It wasn’t that long ago that AMD was on the brink of bankruptcy (~2016), so I appreciate that they’re not trying to divide their attention.

Their attempts at entering the ML space so far have been failures, and they are wise to hold off on really competing with Nvidia until they have the bandwidth to go “all in”. Consciously NOT trying to compete with Nvidia is the reason they didn’t go bankrupt. Their Radeon division minted from 2016-2020 because they focused on a niche Nvidia was neglecting- low-end/eSports (also leveraging their APU expertise to win PS4/Xbox contracts).

I think Nvidia will eventually lose its monopoly on ML/AI stuff as AMD, Apple, Qualcomm, Amazon and Google chip away at their “moat” with their own accelerators/NPUs. As mentioned though, the Nvidia Edge really comes from CUDA and other software, not the hardware. I doubt that Apple, Qualcomm, Amazon or Google will be interested in selling hardware direct to consumers. They want that sweet, sweet cloud money and/or competitive advantages in their phones (like photo processing). I don’t want to be paying AWS $100/mo for a GPU I could pay $600 once for. I do think AMD/RTG will go hard on Nvidia eventually, and it will not matter whether you have an AMD or Nvidia GPU for Tensorflow or spaCy or whatever else.

Re:AMD Alveo V70 AI inference accelerator card by cptskippy on Tuesday January 10, 2023 @04:15PM (#34331608)
> AMD has finite resources, like any company, and they’ve been focusing on CPU/datacenter dominance, which to me is both the safer bet and the more-lucrative bet.

Cloud/datacenter based ML is a huge growth market. Having the same software work on a consumer GPUs and enterprise ML cards is one of Nvidia's competitive advantages.

Re:AMD Alveo V70 AI inference accelerator card by lostmsu on Tuesday January 10, 2023 @04:27PM (#34331758)
> AMD has finite resources, like any company, and they’ve been focusing on CPU/datacenter dominance

Why can't large companies tap the investment market? E.g. they could sell bonds to fund it, borrow, etc.

Re:AMD Alveo V70 AI inference accelerator card by vosper on Tuesday January 10, 2023 @05:10PM (#34332268)
Well they definitely can, and do. They have made the decision that the reward isn't worth the risk.

The idea (not aiming at you here, you didn't say this) that senior leadership at AMD is unaware of NVIDIA's lead in this space, and haven't repeatedly considered whether to invest in competing, is absurd. Likewise the idea that anyone outside of AMD understands better than AMD does what it would take in terms of investment _and opportunity cost_, is also absurd.

Senior leadership at AMD isn't dumb. The fact that they're not doing something we want doesn't make them dumb, either. Again, not aiming at you with this little rant :)

Re:AMD Alveo V70 AI inference accelerator card by lostmsu on Tuesday January 10, 2023 @05:24PM (#34332398)
They may not be dumb, but they may have narrow vision (which I suppose is still dumb). Bad decisions in top tiers of the largest world companies are not unheard of.
Re:AMD Alveo V70 AI inference accelerator card by gymbeaux on Wednesday January 11, 2023 @12:39AM (#34335385)
Yeah but no one can deny Lisa Su is an MVP and knows what she’s doing. She’s borderline overqualified for CEO of AMD IMO
Re:AMD Alveo V70 AI inference accelerator card by lostmsu on Wednesday January 11, 2023 @01:41AM (#34335780)
> but no one can deny Lisa Su is an MVP and knows what she’s doing

In her area. We have no real info on how proficient she is in other areas like ML.

Re:AMD Alveo V70 AI inference accelerator card by gymbeaux on Friday January 13, 2023 @01:25PM (#34371791)
I’m not sure that’s really a separate “area”. She understands ML as it pertains to hardware and software sales better than anyone in this thread.
Re:AMD Alveo V70 AI inference accelerator card by modeless on Tuesday January 10, 2023 @05:34PM (#34332506)
The idea that AMD management can't possibly have made any dumb decisions is the absurd thing here. It's entirely possible that AMD carefully considered Nvidia's position, carefully considered their strategy, and made the wrong decision. It happens all the time in all sorts of companies.
Re:AMD Alveo V70 AI inference accelerator card by ClumsyPilot on Tuesday January 10, 2023 @06:59PM (#34333218)
> The idea that senior leadership at AMD is unaware.. Senior leadership at AMD isn't dumb.

Lets try this with another company:

The idea that leadership at Lehmon Brothers is unaware of the fact that they are trading subprime loans is absurd! The leadership isnt dumb

The Idea that leadership at Being is unaware of safety issues with 737 Max is absurd! How could you suggest that anyone outside boesing understands better than they do the risks involved?

Re:AMD Alveo V70 AI inference accelerator card by vosper on Tuesday January 10, 2023 @08:52PM (#34334096)
The fact that a couple of other companies have had dumb leadership in no way proves that AMD's is dumb. You're essentially claiming that because Lehman and Boeing had dumb leadership, all senior leadership at all companies is dumb (because there's nothing linking AMD to these other companies except that they're all companies). And that is an absurd claim.
Re:AMD Alveo V70 AI inference accelerator card by ClumsyPilot on Wednesday January 11, 2023 @06:22PM (#34346535)
I am not sure if they are dumb, the jury is still out, but your entire post is the textboom example of logical fallacy, appeal to authority.

You are claiming that AMD leadership is infalliable based on no evidence whatsoever. Thats whats absurd

Re:AMD Alveo V70 AI inference accelerator card by _carbyau_ on Wednesday January 11, 2023 @02:58AM (#34336181)
Maybe they are not dumb. But my next GPU will be nVidia because of their decision. Hence I am disappointed at not having a competitive rival.

I may not know better. But I know what I like.

Re:AMD Alveo V70 AI inference accelerator card by BizarroLand on Thursday January 12, 2023 @05:21PM (#34361078)
Can you guess why they would be putting hardware into the ML workspace field but not backing that up with equivalent software integration?