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AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

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Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#171

Post by blackhawkC17 »

p_j_w wrote: post #162
blackhawkC17 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When you account for medical costs, rent (especially compared to the localities in the USA that provide these huge salaries), extra vacation time, and for those with children, education and child care, this gap narrows considerably. That's what Europeans generally say to justify or cope with their low salaries, but it's not true. After accounting for all these, an SV, NYC, Seattle, etc., engineer ends up with far m…

>After accounting for all these, an SV, NYC, Seattle, etc., engineer ends up with far more disposable income than their EU counterpart. I said it narrows the gap, not closes it. > https://www.statista.com/statistics/725764/oecd-household-di ... Your link is behind a paywall, I can't view that data.

Point noted, Wikipedia breaks down the data better - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c....

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#172

Post by jacobgorm »

baobabKoodaa wrote: post #129
jacobgorm wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except the EU paid for the hardware https://eurohpc-ju.europa.eu/supercomputers/our-supercompute...

Where in that source does it claim that Silo didn't have to pay to use the hardware?

I don’t think it is possible to pay for access to LUMI. I know my company has been in talks about getting free access as it sits under utilized most of the time. These supercomputers are mostly vanity projects for EU politicians, there is no commercial use case.

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#173

Post by baumy »

light_hue_1 wrote: post #153
xyst wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nvidia also spends a metric shit ton of money to make sure professors use and teach on their platform. I don’t remember any alternatives in uni. Maybe OpenCL but only lightly mentioned

> Nvidia also spends a metric shit ton of money to make sure professors use and teach on their platform. Nah. People teach what they use because that's what's easy.

It's definitely both.

I'm sure plenty of professors use CUDA in their courses because it's what they actually use. At the same time, in 2013 when I was in college I took a course on "parallel computing" as a CS elective. The professor told us on day 1 that NVidia was sponsoring the course and had donated a bunch of GPUs to the clusters we could remotely connect into for the sake of the class. Naturally we used CUDA exclusively.

I know for a fact that this happened at a lot of schools. I don't know if it's still happening since I'm not in that world anymore, but don't see why it would have stopped.

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#174

Post by joe_the_user »

IshKebab wrote: post #161
btown wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The underinvestment in, and abandonment of, a project for a CUDA compatibility layer https://github.com/vosen/ZLUDA?tab=readme-ov-file#faq by AMD a few months ago hints that they no longer see CUDA compatibility as a goal. Perhaps they see Silo as a way to jumpstart bringing ROCm to parity with CUDA's toolkit. It's hard to understand if there's an underlying strategy to how they'll stay relevant from a software persp…

It makes no business sense for them to try to get CUDA compatibility. That would just cement CUDA as the de facto standard, at which point they are locked in to playing catch up forever as nVidia intentionally adds features to break compatibility. Much more sensible to work on getting rock solid support for their own standards into all the major ML platforms/libraries.

It depends what means by "business sense". Compatible makers have profited, did profit during PC era. Indeed, one of AMD's core businesses is make xx86 compatible CPUs.

Nvidia and standard-maker is limited in what breaking changes they introduce - these can harm their customers as much as they harm the competition. Intel failed to force all their changes on AMD as the xxx86 market expanded (notably, the current iteration of CPUs standards was set by AMD after Intel was unable to sell their completely new standard).

Still, I'd acknowledge that "business sense" today follows the approach of only aiming for markets the company can completely control and by that measure, CUDA compatibility isn't desirable.

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#175

Post by fngjdflmdflg »

xyst wrote: post #144
eightysixfour wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, nvidia spends a lot of time and money developing software that induces demand for their GPUs.

Nvidia also spends a metric shit ton of money to make sure professors use and teach on their platform. I don’t remember any alternatives in uni. Maybe OpenCL but only lightly mentioned

>Nvidia also spends a metric shit ton of money to make sure professors use and teach on their platform.

Do you have a source for this claim? Or do you simply mean that since they spend money making it better that professors end up using it on their own accord?

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#176

Post by Narhem »

eightysixfour wrote: post #31
mastax wrote: post #24

I’d argue that a factor in CUDA’s success is their army of in-house researchers which use CUDA to do novel things. Sometimes those things get turned into products (OptiX) other times they are essentially DevRel to show off what the hardware can do and documentation for how to do it. Additionally I’m sure they use pre-release hardware and software and give feedback about how to improve it. I don’t know what AMD has in…

Yes, nvidia spends a lot of time and money developing software that induces demand for their GPUs.

No nvidia makes great tooling. Like as a startup if I had to pick a development tool AmD fails repeatedly while nvida tooling is like matlab level of usefulness.

Those companies have money to make ‘nice’ things which open source software doesn’t have the time to do.

For 100m you could probably make some pretty sweet clones if amd is hiring anybody to man that position.

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#177

Post by SebaSeba »

pavlov wrote: post #86
SebaSeba wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Contrary to what you say, Finnish startups have been very successful. Here's just a couple examples: - Supercell sold 81.4% stake to Tencent in 2018 with a valuation of $10.2 billion. - Wolt was acquired by DoorDash in 2021 with a valuation of $8.1 billion. The list is much longer with startups that currently generate revenues of tens or hundreds of millions in a year that have not been sold.

These two are great success stories, but they’re also the only Finnish unicorn exits in the post-Nokia era. The exits were somewhat less exciting to founders than these numbers suggest. Supercell sold 51% to SoftBank already in 2013 for 1.1B EUR. And Wolt’s purchase price was paid entirely in DoorDash stock which was down 75% by the time the lockups expired. Startups generating low-hundreds of millions in annual reve…

Both Supercell and Wolt have their headquarters steadily in Finland. The founders and Finnish early investors have gained hundreds of millions or billions of euros wealth for themselves which they have further spended and invested in Finland. They have paid huge amounts of taxes and keep on doing all of these since they are still located in Finland. It's hard to downplay the value of those IMO. Overall Rovio wasn't a complete disaster either. First made billions of euros for many years and was later sold to Sega for >$700 million. Still has HQ in Finland.

There's plenty of interesting and fast growing startups still left here. For example Supermetrics, Varjo, Smartly, Iceye, Aiven to name a few. IMO you are being pessimistic.

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#178

Post by chidli1234 »

mastax wrote: post #24

I’d argue that a factor in CUDA’s success is their army of in-house researchers which use CUDA to do novel things. Sometimes those things get turned into products (OptiX) other times they are essentially DevRel to show off what the hardware can do and documentation for how to do it. Additionally I’m sure they use pre-release hardware and software and give feedback about how to improve it. I don’t know what AMD has in…

It's an acquisition, usually for patents/IP. There will be layoffs.

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#179

Post by flakiness »

fngjdflmdflg wrote: post #175
xyst wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nvidia also spends a metric shit ton of money to make sure professors use and teach on their platform. I don’t remember any alternatives in uni. Maybe OpenCL but only lightly mentioned

>Nvidia also spends a metric shit ton of money to make sure professors use and teach on their platform. Do you have a source for this claim? Or do you simply mean that since they spend money making it better that professors end up using it on their own accord?

They co-author the definitive CUDA textbook, and it's based on their sponsored class (You can find the story in the intro of the book.) https://www.amazon.com/Programming-Massively-Parallel-Proces...

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#180

Post by SebaSeba »

SebaSeba wrote: post #177
pavlov wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These two are great success stories, but they’re also the only Finnish unicorn exits in the post-Nokia era. The exits were somewhat less exciting to founders than these numbers suggest. Supercell sold 51% to SoftBank already in 2013 for 1.1B EUR. And Wolt’s purchase price was paid entirely in DoorDash stock which was down 75% by the time the lockups expired. Startups generating low-hundreds of millions in annual reve…

Both Supercell and Wolt have their headquarters steadily in Finland. The founders and Finnish early investors have gained hundreds of millions or billions of euros wealth for themselves which they have further spended and invested in Finland. They have paid huge amounts of taxes and keep on doing all of these since they are still located in Finland. It's hard to downplay the value of those IMO. Overall Rovio wasn't a…

In any case, I agree in that the acquisition is great news and the economy is in a depression. :) Huge part of it is because Finnish mortgages are mostly straight tied to Euribor unlike in other Euro countries and since post covid the interest rates went up, Finns got f*cked. Hopefully the Euribor interest rate will be going down and the mortgages will start to become smaller, at least when they are being paid off.
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