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AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

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Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#201

Post by glzone1 »

non-e-moose wrote: post #193

Former 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 usef…

Wasn't there a point at which AMD was actually looking at buying nvidia but Jensen wanted to be something like CEO. Jensen actually worked at AMD so there was already a connection there.

Instead AMD bought ATI which if I remember was barely hanging on. Not saying it was a bad purchase, just interesting that a bet on ATI (always had buggy drivers in my experience) which hadn't really demonstrated success ... how decisions ripple for a while.

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#202

Post by sillysaurusx »

wsay wrote: post #187
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

As someone who has designed and taught those courses, my experience (admittedly only one persons) is that you pick what will work with the least hassle - because you'll have plenty of hassle elsewhere and probably no real time to deal with any of it without making more.

This is actually one of my favorite comments of all time, because it's how software wins. The software that students use is the software the industry uses about five years later.

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#204

Post by fortran77 »

KeplerBoy wrote: post #78
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.

The biggest frameworks are still from other players though. Pytorch, tensorflow and jax aren't funded by Nvidia.

Yeah but the frameworks use CUDA in their NVIDIA implementation , don’t they?

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#205

Post by ahartmetz »

chidli1234 wrote: post #178
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.

AMD is (according to their own statements) in the process of picking up a lot of software manpower. And wages in Finland are European tier, not US West Coast. Why lay them off?

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#206

Post by YetAnotherNick »

flakiness wrote: post #179
fngjdflmdflg wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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...

Co authoring a book is not "metric shit ton of money".

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#207

Post by samuell »

wantsanagent wrote: post #77

I'm curious how this deal happened. There are a lot of LLM shops out there, how did this nordic co get the attention of AMD and why did they think this co stood out among the crowd.

They've been around since before the LLM era? (I learned about them in 2018)

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#208

Post by nojvek »

physicsguy wrote: post #188
fngjdflmdflg wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

I hold an NVidia instructors cert from when I worked in academia. They even give you access to hardware while you’re running courses on it. It’s super easy and totally free.

I won an Nvidia GPU while I was doing my advanced graphics course for making custom shaders.

Had to buy a new power supply just so I could use it.

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#209

Post by YetAnotherNick »

cityofdelusion wrote: post #165
littlecranky67 wrote: post #34

I'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).

Problem is the CUDA advantage is gigantic and it has been known for years in GPGPU processing, way before AI was a meme. AMD has lost countless developers over the year just on hello world style projects. Developers had a solid 6-7 years of living with OpenCL when the green rival had a very mature and nice CUDA sitting there. I’ve been out of that world for a while now, but it was truly painful and turned a lot of de…

No, the amount of code written in CUDA for pytorch could easily be rewritten in CUDA for few million or tens of millions of investment. The problem is that it is damn near impossible to get good performance in AMD. For complicated CUDA programs like flash attention(few 100 lines of code), no amount of developers could write those few 100 lines for AMD to get the same performance.

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#210

Post by rubatuga »

rib3ye wrote: post #147
littlecranky67 wrote: post #34

I'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).

NVDA P/E ratio 78.70 AMD P/E ratio 263.25 If NVDA is overpriced, AMD is REALLY over-priced.

When you see p/e mentioned in a debate run far away.
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