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https://www.forbes.com/sites/marcochiappetta/2024/07/10/amd-...
AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M
191–200 of 284 posts
Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M
#192Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M
#193Former AMD employee here (2007-2012)
AMD 'dropped the ball' BADLY when (2012) then-VP Ben Bar-Haim decided to do a software purge, and focused on retaining the over-bureaucratic folks of ATI/Markham.
Net result: NVidia was (and did) pick up a lot of very smart researchers and developers from AMD (I know of a couple whom were thoroughly disgusted with AMD management at that time)
He also trashed a lot of good and useful software projects for seemingly protectionist reasons (if it wasn't ATI/Markham, it was dumped)
Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 itera…
I think the key is that CUDA is much more like the Microsoft Windows software part of the duopoly than the Intel x86 hardware part of the old Wintel duopoly. At best back in the glory days of that era, you could have weird hackish things like WINE ... until Microsoft's business model changed and started being interested in supporting virtualization to build up Azure.
The key is that while there were many clones of x86, there never really was an attempt at a company built around "run MS Windows programs natively" because maintaining software compatability is an order of magnitude harder than doing it for hardware.
Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M
#195I've been thinking that NVDA stock is massively overpriced - yes, AI is a hot topic, but their only advantage is the software stack. It is just a matter of time until Intel and AMD realize that they should join hands and do an open-source CUDA alternative for their respecitve GPUs (yes, Intel has competetive GPUs and just like AMD and Nvidia they will try to get a share of the AI chip market share).
pytorch already supports AMD with device=cuda
already opensourced ROCm/HIP
https://github.com/pytorch/pytorch/blob/fb8876069d89aaf27cc9...
Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M
#196My 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?
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…
They don't need parity. They just need ROCm (or OpenCL) to be a reasonably viable alternative.
Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M
#197Earlier 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.
You get free access to hardware for courses if you teach CUDA courses.
Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
What if I told you that non - competes aren't a thing in Germany. (And a big part in other parts of US)
As someone who has been stuck in Silicon Valley for 20 years I can say hands down the German and European teams I’ve worked with far outshine the hacker ego Hollywood hipster techbros of San Francisco. Yet the latter make 2-5x the income.
Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M
#199Nice to see AMD finally doing something about competing in the compute market (LLM being the hottest thing at the moment)! Though apparently MI300X is a fine product as well. But it still needs code.
If they spent the 665M on improving ROCm instead they'd get a hell lot more return on it.
Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M
#200This is an indictment of Lisa Su's own ROCm strategy. An implicit admission of failure, without explicitly admitting it. I predict this acquisition will cause even more software schizophreny inside AMD as multiple conflicting teams pinball their way around towards nowhere in particular.