> And honestly, "Intel's shambolic efforts" alongside "AMD's Road to Damascus moment" is rather delicious phrasing. The author has managed to deliver quite a sophisticated insult in a single sentence.
Intel finally has really great low power/budget answers, but still loses greatly to 3d cache chips on most workloads.
Great Hope and Crosby movie.
If you wanted a GPU with 32GB of memory for AI tasks, the AMD AI Pro R9700 was (up until about a month ago) reasonably priced at ~$1300. It's not a RTX 5090 in terms of bandwidth and compute, but for the price and being actually purchasable it's a reasonable pick.
Those cards are cheap because they're not really that amazing.
It never made sense. It's slower than RAM, and what do I get for it? Persistence? I don't want persistent RAM, I like the ability to reboot to solve problems, and storing stuff on a non-volatile mediums has all sorts of legal implications which it's easier to avoid.
It's more expensive and has less storage than SSDs, even though the main downside of SSDs is their high price per gigabyte and relatively low capacities.
It's going in the wrong direction for both use cases. I guess it could have a very niche use case as a super fast persistent caching layer in front of spinning rust but that's kinda it.
Density. PCM is closer in bits-per-unit-area to Flash than to DRAM.
Optane had much lower latency than other types of durable storage, and also had very good endurance compared to NAND.
At a prior employer, we made extensive use of them as ZFS SLOG drives for large database servers. They made fsync very inexpensive.
There's an argument to be made for the persistent memory being a cheaper substitute for more RAM, but imo the gap isn't big enough to justify it when considered as a % of the rest of the system you're building around it and the performance tradeoff.
Important reminder to check your biases. I was sure Optane had missed its mark by dropping out just before LLMs became a primary use case for high $ systems.
(I didn't actually have an Intel DIMM module -- I had a different vendor's. But fundamentally there needed to be a clean way to get data from software into the durable memory domain, and there wasn't.)
SSDs are good, but an improved Optane would've been better.
If Intel had volume production of Optane and had been able to quickly reconfigure it to produce a device that could stream out model weights fast enough for inference or could have gotten a read-write device that could hold KV caches effectively, they could have made an absolute killing in the current market.
HBF is slowly going after the former market. I'm not sure flash has a great answer for the latter due to endurance issues.
I can't think of any company that is as good as Intel at having a technology that's ready or almost ready at or before the time that the market is ready for and then completely failing to sell the product into the newly developed market.
Optane was cheaper than DRAM per bit when DRAM was expensive. It price / performance didn't make sense as soon as the DRAM cycle took its dive and DRAM price became cheaper / normal / losing money depending on how or who you see and asked.
SSDs use lots of tricks to hide this latency (using RAM). However, when the data is super critical, you can't just throw some data in RAM and hope that it gets written out.
Enterprise flash drives have battery backups and keep the system alive for a moment to flush out the writes, but Optane doesn't need special tricks to get this sort of durability, it just has it.
If you have a large stream of critical data flowing in that has to be stored and can't be lost- Optane suddenly looks wayyyy better than SSDs
Think metadata in a ZFS array or database writes.
Also crazy endurance - often an order of magnitude beyond even enterprise nvmes.
...and because the things are basically un-killable thanks to endurance you can safely pick up 2nd hand used ones.
So they're a neat trick if used in precisely the right application. Hence:
>some fraction of technologists
>would've been awesome if only Intel hadn't killed it.
Maybe - it would presumably have improved further for niche cases, but doubt it would have conquered mainstream markets.
The actual problem is Intel was in such a bad position, they needed to shed weight, and Optane was not quick money.
ive seen that same amd community manager engage on reddit and actively pull in changes into lemonade server, for better ways to serve up models best on the strixhalo hardware. so they're accepting community help where it helps.
There's huge upswing in using Vulkan Compute which works across NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel (and even others), and which is apparently much easier and stable to run on AMD
that's quite a large market and their only competitor has moved on to greener pastures.
Eventually someone in the know bought the husk of Ovonyx and sued Intel.
The rule includes >90% of "remote" workers who have discovered they were classified as hybrid (a classification now eliminated) and their manager didn't make it official. Now, remote approvals are SVP level.
The issue is, AMD still pays significantly less than any company with an RTO mandate, even with the stock appreciation. And the stock has gone down 25% in the past few weeks so it's even less competitive. The typical engineer was not given an equity-weighted package, even L9 only 30% of your TC is in stock.
It's a recruiting bonanza right now and everyone's getting calls offering 50% pay bumps from 5-day office semi corps like Broadcom or Qualcomm. The better people are getting offers at Google or Apple for 3-day RTO for even greater TC bumps.
The board should've sacked the entire leadership team of Intel and AMD years and years ago.
The fact that you can sit through both a mining boom and now a generational AI boom and have little to show for it and still keep your job is a Yahoo!-level fumble.
The heavy investments into HMB between SK Hynix & AMD might also not have happened. They went down this road before HMB demand popped off and it was a risky bet.
Sharon was the AI Chief of Staff brought in through an acquihire, managed all the high-visibility external/internal AI engagements, reported directly into Lisa Su, and was being groomed to be Lisa's successor. Even with all that, she couldn't make it 2 years at AMD.
Our internally developed execs/directors/VPs have no credibility with the frontier labs or hyperscalers because they're non-technical types. They don't understand software management so they couldn't fix any of the problems with ROCm by making systemic changes in how we develop software e.g. Alan Lee who got pushed out ages ago after spending years promising ROCm would get better while nothing happened.
The only software-oriented technical VP with credibility now is Anush Elangovan. He was also brought in through an acquihire, forced us to upstream, forced us to have CI, and adopt basic software practices common at every other company. If we lose him, we're going to start plummeting fast.
I remember buying an AMD K6-2 back in the day as it was cheaper and better. I've dropped in and out of the AMD sphere depending on who was winning at the given moment.
Now they're both losing.
why not start with trying to fix that?
unfortunately most us industry fell victim to this mba-ization of companies.
And the software ecosystem was already in place (even though everything had to be rewritten).
Had Apple gone with Be instead, most likely all three companies would have gone bankrupt before 2000, and Pixar would be Jobs last successful company instead.
Where NeXT went wrong is in being astronomically expensive, which drove its addressable market to nothing. This is the exact same mistake Jobs made with the Lisa. The significantly inferior Apple II platform was far more successful.
The way I look at it, AMD and others dumped $25m into a very early AI play that never was going to be successful. I don't fault them for trying.
There was no way she could even come close to successor of Lisa though. The grooming thing was a media play at best. Dr. Fei-Fei Li would be a heck of a lot more appropriate than Sharon.
Anush is excellent and turned around the software story. If he goes, the party is over.
It's not necessary for every company to attempt 'revenue maxxing' by jumping into every field.
AMD made $3.5 billion in profit last year after all expenses were paid. It might be galling to this generation of avarists, but maybe that's enough?
You mean going mild.
The $17bn that AMD is projecting to make mid-2026 is what NVIDIA was already making mid-2023.
Both companies were somewhat similar in revenue towards the end of 2022 (just before/around the ChatGPT launch).
That's what the GP meant by "sitting out a generational AI boom".
I think Intel figured out way to be even worse…
I'm sure they pay more than Intel ;-)
A lot of said gains have been erased.
AMD has always been an also ran in this space and it shows to this day, but the true believers cannot be dissuaded of their faith so whatevs.
I honestly think Nvidia needs a worthy nemesis right now more than ever and I wish it existed but I don't think it does... Yet...
They're around, selling AMD Strix Halo (up to 128GB unified memory) on the low, equivalent to DGX Spark, level; and MI* chips for enterprise AI inference.
The problem they have and they've always had is that everyone uses CUDA. ROCm works, but everyone's toolchain is CUDA exclusive or CUDA first, so it's much harder to use AMD hardware.
Using higher level tooling (vLLM, llama.cpp) I have DGX Spark comparable performance for 1/3 the price (but without the same software out of the box experience nor the clustering network options).
I was going to say… everybody even government is coming together to make intel work but it’s in shambles
Haven’t they benefited a lot from the chips act?
AMD makes excellent CPUs and GPUs, I'm ecstatic with the products I have purchased from them, and they are now beating their biggest competitor and profiting billions every year. What more do you want? Isn't this enough for a company in 2026?
Velocity is not enough, acceleration is not enough, we now require jerk to go up.
This actually say more about Intel's heroic efforts in defending its turf.
I seriously doubt Intel has anything countering Instinct AI accelerators in terms of revenue slice. Which means despite Instinct AI accelerators having extra revenue, AMD's CPU sales is barely on par with Intel in Server Market.
We are talking about EPYC Zen 5 here and early Zen 6 revenue in late 2026. I have been banging on about the progress of AMD in server market for 5+ years. ( Edit: A quick search turns out to be 6 years [1] )
Given the price / performance AMD has had and Intel's perfect storm moment, 50% is all AMD manage to capture. I have been suggesting AMD being far too conservative with their capacity planning and has been leaving money on the table before even the AI craze on CPUs. Their sales team in Enterprise has not had the impact Intel managed. This is decades of relationship management Intel has had and utilised to the maximum.
At this rate I seriously doubt AMD will be able to compete when Intel is healed and back on their feet. ( But then Intel are well known to do stupid stuff so I guess it cancels out )
I hope Zen 6 will have more to show for. Right now it is not good enough on the CPU side. And on the GPU side not anywhere close to competing against Nvidia.
And this is speaking as someone who used to own ATI Rage 3D and bought AMD's stock at below $3.
Ya'll sniff Apple farts like it's no tomorrow.
Honestly both of them have demonstrated that they have little interest in AI. Intel gave up on Optane right as (a much-improved successor) would've helped with MoE offsetting or even as a highly durable drive for KV caching.
AMD have... turned out some decent gaming graphics cards and fine server CPUs but little else.
People are out there solding SMDs on old Nvidia mining rig GPUs to use them for inference; their hardware is not depreciating at the normal rate you'd expect from GPUs. DGX spark is finally useful now that AI can write multi-machine inference tooling optimised to it. Where's AMD in all of this? Nowhere.