Re:AMD's CDNA 3 Compute Architecture
by simfree on Sunday December 17, 2023 @03:31PM
(#38676116)
ATI on its own did not have a solid future, they could have easily ended up like their other local Canadian counterparts Nortel or Blackberry.
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"Dead or Canadian" yes?
I live in Toronto and knew people who worked for ATI back in the 1990s-2000s. The management structure was fucked. In those days it was generally regarded that ATI could and did produce better hardware than NVIDIA, but ATI’s drivers were horrible and only evened out near the end of the hardware’s lifetime. But the end of the lifetime was far too late and all the benchmarks would have long been done on the buggy drivers, driving people to NVIDIA.
I kid you not, but the software side of ATI’s reviews and incentives were literally QA got rewarded for finding bugs and then the software engineers were then rewarded for fixing them. You can imagine what happened next. The bitch of it is that it was overall just a symptom of the problem that the company as a whole didn’t prioritize software. NVIDIA knew that the drivers and software efficiency of using the hardware was just as if not more important than the hardware (the stories in the 1990s of how John Carmack used various hacks with hardware is a good example of that).
I generally felt that AMD(/ATI) were a hardware company first, while Nvidia were a software company first.
Though now Nvidia are outselling them in dGPUs by nearly 10x, so it's pretty easy for them to do "both".