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AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

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Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#241

Post by mandevil »

joe_the_user wrote: post #233
mandevil wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 x8…

CUDA is absolutely not equivalent to Windows as a platform. It's essentially a single API, not a huge, multilayer and futzy platform with multiple weirdly behaved APIs. Moreover, companies aren't buying GPUs to keep their huge stable of legacy applications running. They want to create new AI applications and CUDA is a simple API for doing that (at a certain level).

CUDA is a programming language with libraries (cuBLAS, cuSPARSE, etc.) that are constantly having things added and try to maintain backwards compatibility. It's not as big and hefty as all of Win32 sure, but it's still far more difficult than x86 compatibility.

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#242

Post by xmprt »

627467 wrote: post #55
thenaturalist wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The economy and startup world isn't a zero sum game. Ultimately the AI play* is open source for the foreseeable future, even more so for AMD if they want to sell their chips. And if Silo AI's people accelerate competition in the AI HW space by accelerating Triton development/ raising the industry's competitive edge against Nvidia, we all benefit from stronger competition. And in most other European startup hot spots,…

Actually, it is zero sum. there's finite resources, human talent, and centers for decision making. yeah, European startup gets American money today, and American decision making center grows larger. whether the money paid into Europeans now is used to prop up new generation of startups - in any meaningful way - will remain to be seen. most likely: these senior staff/founders will probably allocate their cash where it…

The world is very much not zero sum and never has been. If it was then we'd be stuck in the stone age because every advancement that benefits one person would hurt the rest. Instead we see that over the course of history the average wealth of the world has gone up. There are certainly some negative intangibles that come from that (eg. climate change or ecosystem collapse) but it's hard to quantify if that makes it zero sum and even so, the context of this thread is about human vs human zero sum games.

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#244

Post by latchkey »

light_hue_1 wrote: post #154
anonym29 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"fix"? What is there to fix? AMD has been simultaneously fighting Intel and Nvidia, two MUCH larger companies, and it's been winning the fight against Intel for close to a decade now. It's certainly not Lisa Su's fault that the clowns over at Intel got stuck on variations of 14nm (with clever marketing names like 14nm+++++) for nearly a decade, but credit certainly is hers for introducing Zen and putting AMD back on…

> "fix"? What is there to fix? AMD has been simultaneously fighting Intel and Nvidia, two MUCH larger companies, and it's been winning the fight against Intel for close to a decade now. There's everything to fix. AMD is sitting on a gold mine and is squandering massive amounts of money every month that they don't just get their shitty software stack in order. AMD could be as rich as NVIDIA. Instead, Lisa Su for some…

> Instead, Lisa Su for some insane reason refuses to build even the most mediocre ML-capable libraries for their GPUs.

Spending $665m on a company that builds AI tooling, is a refusal?

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#245

Post by Certhas »

jacobgorm wrote: post #172
baobabKoodaa wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't know about Lumi specifically, but top tier scientific supercomputers should typically have 80+% utilisation rate:

https://doku.lrz.de/usage-statistics-for-supermuc-ng-1148309...

Smaller machines will tend lower from what i have seen. If you give a large enough pool of scientists access to significant compute resources, they will generally figure out how to saturate them. Also, scientific teams often can't pay top software engineers. Lots of hardware is a way to compensate for inefficient code. If Lumi is underutilized to such an extent someone is funking up.

There is of course no commercial use case for these computers. That's not the point of these machines.

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#246

Post by gibolt »

nh2 wrote: post #240
sillysaurusx wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not always. One of our machine learning courses was taught in Matlab. Unsurprisingly, nobody used Matlab after uni, or 5 years later.

Matlab is fairly easy to work with (initially) and is great when learning a new concept, instead of learning that plus arbitrary syntax of the tool.

It isn't particularly fast though, and the simplicity quickly becomes an obstacle when solving a real problem.

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#248

Post by pjmlp »

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…

While I agree with the sentiment towards CUDA, the example is a bit off, given that C++ basically lost all mindshare in distributed computing, to Java and others, and is hardly visible in CNCF projects landscape.

Displacing C++ in compiler development and HFT/HPC/GPGPU with Java 22, most likely not happening, everwhere else it has been loosing mindshare, the current cybersecurity laws versus WG21 attitude towards them, doesn't help.

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#249

Post by snowpid »

zombiwoof wrote: post #198
snowpid wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks :) (

But I guess there are also very capable American teams and narcissistic European CS.

(I guess it is a very good question why this difference exist and how to change economic policy)

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