Comment by whywhywhywhy 8 days ago
The answer is in the question, because if they had the foresight to do such a thing the tech would already be here, instead they thought 1 dimensionally about their product, were part of the group that fumbled OpenCL and now they're a decade behind playing catch up.
Yeah. Easier said than done, I know, but they need to not just catch up to nVidia but leapfrog them somehow.
I would have said that releasing cards with 32GB+ of onboard RAM, or better yet 128GB, would have gotten things moving. They'd be able to run/train models that nVidia's consumer cards couldn't.
But I think nVidia closed that gap with their "Project Digits" (or whatever the final name is) PCs.
This: provide cards with extra larger VRAM pools than the competition - to provide a real edge in LLM inferencing - and the users will come.
This happened with bitcoin.
"good group" is carrying a lot of weight here. You can't buy that. You can buy good small groups, but AMD needs a good large group, and that can't be bought.
Honestly if they got some high tier talent in, did a deep audit of existing talent and cut where there were any doubt then worked on their drivers in the open and shipped cards with 48GB+ VRAM then Nvidia would be in a difficult situation in 2 years.
Gotta open the drivers fully though because if you make the hardware totally outspec'd where it matters (VRAM) and the drivers are open then talent within the biggest orgs will go out of their way to help make your tech work in their farms, it's the only way to not be forever playing catchup.
The second article I ever submitted to Hacker News back in 2011 was on AMD's efforts to build a CUDA competitor[1]. I don't think it's lack of foresight.
[1]https://www.semiaccurate.com/2011/06/22/amd-and-arm-join-for...
A good group can catch up significantly in 2 years. They will still be behind, but if they are cheaper (or just you can buy them) that would still go a long way.