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AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

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131–140 of 284 posts

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#132
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stocks of companies that develop extremely niche and technical things is a tiny sliver of the stock market that I actually think communities like HN would be better at valuing than the market. Technology stocks are the only ones I personally day trade for that reason. Example: at the beginning of a pandemic lockdowns, any HN user could have anticipated increased internet usage and buy Cloudflare/Fastly stock and made…

Intel's profit, and revenue, have declined for 3 consecutive years. Their price to earnings ratio is 36. Nvidia's revenue is now greater than Intel's with 20% of the employees that Intel has. Their PE ratio is 78, roughly double that of Intel. The market valued Nvidia as growing and Intel as not.

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Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#133
post #4

My cursory understanding is that Silo is a developer of LLMs that run on top of compute platforms. Isn't the problem with no one using AMD's accelerators the fact that their programming environment is sub-par compared to CUDA, or even Apple's?

Silo.ai is mostly a consulting house for various proof-of-concept type of projects with the LLM product being only the recent addition

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#135
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Benchmarks were just run, MI300x is onpar/better than an H100. Next generation of MI (MI325x) is coming out end of the year and those specs look fantastic too. Especially on the all important memory front. 288GB is fantastic. Both companies will leapfrog each other with new releases. Anyone who believes that there should only be a single vendor for all AI compute will quickly find themselves on the wrong side of hist…

Comparisons against H100 I have seen are always: 8x AMD MI300X (192GB, 750W) 8x H100 SXM5 (80GB, 700W) Never against 8x H100 NVL (188GB, What the customer does not see is how AMD must spend 2 times more money to produce a chip that is competitive against architecture that is soon 2 years old.

> Never against 8x H100 NVL (188GB, Probably because they aren't widely available yet. It is also a dual card to get that much memory, which is still less than 192GB and far less than 288GB.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/18780/nvidia-announces-h100-n...

> What the customer does not see is how AMD must spend 8-10 times more money to produce a chip that is competitive against architecture that is soon 2 years old.

Source?

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

they have loyal and stable staff with healthy family lives unlike 8 of 10 California companies

Employee loyalty isn’t a good thing. One of the best things about Silicon Valley is that people can swiftly change companies when they get higher offers. Non-competes are void in California. There’s a reason US salaries for software devs are 2-5x EU salaries for similar roles.

employee loyalty is a good thing if it's bought and not expected

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#138
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Intel has competitive GPUs No they don't. Both Intel and AMD compare their newest GPU favorably against Nvidia's H100 that has been on the market longer and soon to be replaced and then it's never H100 NVL for a reason. Intel and AMD can sell their GPU's only with lower profit margin. If they could match FLOPS per total ownership they would sell much better. Both are years behind.

Benchmarks were just run, MI300x is onpar/better than an H100. Next generation of MI (MI325x) is coming out end of the year and those specs look fantastic too. Especially on the all important memory front. 288GB is fantastic. Both companies will leapfrog each other with new releases. Anyone who believes that there should only be a single vendor for all AI compute will quickly find themselves on the wrong side of hist…

> 288GB is fantastic

This reminds me of those "192GB is fantastic" people that bought maxed-out M2 Ultras for AI inference. It can be awesome, but you need a substantial amount of interconnect bandwidth and powerful enough local compute before it's competitive. In products where AI is an afterthought, you're fighting against much different constraints than just having a lot of high-bandwidth memory.

I've always rooted for Team Red when they made an effort to do things open-source and transparently. They're a good role-model for the rest of the industry, in a certain sense. But I have to make peace with the fact that client-side AI running on my AMD machines isn't happening. Meanwhile, I've been using CUDA, CUDNN, CUBLAS, DLSS, on my Nvidia machine for years. On Linux!

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's a culture problem and the C-suite is aware of it, then one reason to buy a company with a working software stack is to percolate their culture into your company so you can be successful.

I have a friend working there and it's a bunch of old curmudgeons stuck in their way. Good luck changing culture with a single acquisition

The company I used to work for is doing this to the engineering org in my current employer. It requires the leadership from the old company to be embedded in very senior positions, and it requires buy-in from the existing C-suite. There's a lot of backroom politics to change culture along with a bunch of work to prove yourselves to people who aren't involved in the backroom. There have been a bunch of points at which I didn't think it would continue but so far the original team has been pretty successful at rising.

Think of it as a reverse McDonnell-Douglas.

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