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AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

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Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#261
post #240

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.

Also did an algorithms in machine learning course in matlab

It’s a great language choice for it

It weeded out the script kiddies who incorrectly signed up wanting a Tensorflow or PyTorch course

It’s a fairly bland and slow but usable language for the task

Shits me off to no end a lot of engineering courses moreorless indoctrinate their students into using it unconditionally, though

Octave exists but is a relative pain to use

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#262
post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>Those companies have money to make ‘nice’ things which open source software doesn’t have the time to do. I would posit it's a lack of will rather than time.

Moreso lack of will to effectively mass organise

Thousands of OSS devs would be willing to devote serious time to it, but can’t/won’t run the gauntlet of starting such a ludicrously large project from scratch

It’s easy to contribute, difficult to be the one organising the contributions

A real “where do I even begin” problem

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact you're posting this comment in a thread of a press release of the acquisition of a European startup entity is in itself a counterfactual, wouldn't you agree? One of the Cofounders of Silo is ex-Nokia... Should tell you everything about zero-sum games. Sure, the US is the dominant financial and technological economy on the planet and that will not change for the foreseeable future. But implying a globalized,…

> geniously recognized the value of free and global trade and invested heavily in its Navy to enable and protect said trade This reads like a person taking credit for the sun rising in the east and setting in the west. United States is rich for three reasons: Firstly USA stole textile and other technology from the British empire. Secondly, gen 1 ‘non-free trade’ empires like the British got demolished in the war. All…

oversimplified explanations here - great to relieve some hostility perhaps but not complete.. lots of holes in this blanket explanation.

History of trade protectionism ? that is older than sailing ships. Yes, the achievements of old Europe include flaming the largest and deadliest wars in world history. The USA benefited from not being destroyed? sure OK.. maybe war is a bad idea for prosperity.

Modern trade values might be divided into "oil and gas" and then everything else.. "arms trade" and then everything else.. Big Pharma ? ok you got me, yes the US rules it financially, but then old Europe has some assets like that, but not on front stage.. thinking textile dye chemistry for an example.

The USA has no special awards for inventing trade protectionism, just a vigorous practice at the right time due to the idiocy of others.

You speak English pretty well.. maybe that language is part of the success here? many other angles easily come to mind...

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#264
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Don’t European programmers make much less than Americans? I wouldn’t be surprised if they kept a pretty big footprint over there. Big picture the US unemployment rate is quite a bit lower than the EU, so I’m sure any global company is happy to draw from the bigger pool. Finally, benefits can be unbalanced in favor of one entity or another without being zero sum. Even if the US benefits more from this deal, the purcha…

> US unemployment rate

do not believe this number.. it is a manipulated statistic on the front line of old class wars regarding labor versus capital. hint- capital interests know the Federal government very well

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Because nobody has been fired or fiscally punished for firing excessive number of people? :) People are notoriously bad at predicting potential positives, so firing people means nobody can prove that something wasn't created. In reverse it is possible to blame people for overhiring because that can be supported by hard numbers.

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

No, I think it’s a source for the claim and not the actual evidence of what they spent it on.

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#267
post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My experience in university was the exact opposite. The stuff we were using was 5-10 years behind what industry was using.

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m also bullish on Intel, but clearly not as much as you. Intel is transitioning right now. x86 is never going to reclaim the crown of most important architecture, so Intel is trying its best to become a foundry for all the fabless customers out there. It’s going to take a long while, but right now they’re the best company to compete with TSMC in ten years. If Apple uses their foundries next decade, you’ll know Inte…

> x86 is never going to reclaim the crown of most important architecture To be clear, I assume you are including 32-bit and 64-bit, e.g., x86-64. I am surprised by this comment. To me, x86 won the architecture battle because of Linux (and less Microsoft Windows). Nothing is so cheap to deploy and maintain as a Linux server that runs x86-64 procs. Yes, I know you can buy single board computers, but x86 wins in the tri…

ARM. Every second that passes, for each person that is born that will use a computer, at least two people who will never use a computer is born. Those two people will own a phone though, and that phone will have an ARM chip.

As time goes on, more and more ARM chips will take roles traditionally taken by x86-64. Hell, ARM is already the best-selling architecture. Laws of scale will dictate that investments in x86-64 will fail to keep pace with ARM. Apple Silicon is already showing a small fragment of that effect. The chips are incredibly competitive, and for what Apple has chosen to focus on (perf-per-watt), unbeatable. ARM investments by other companies are catching up to Apple, and x86-64 does not make enough money to reverse that trend.

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#269
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.

as sibling mentioned the 188GB is for a pair. The memory bump is from enabling the 6th block of memory that is otherwise disabled on H100s. I assume an "NVL box" is still 8 total GPUs, so more like

    8x H100 NVL (94GB, 800W)
the AMD box has a lot more GPU memory

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#270
post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AMD PE ratio is that high due to their purchase of Xilinx. It's forward PE ratio is much much lower, in the 50s.

I'm curious, how does the all-stock acquisition that closed 2.5 years ago affect their trailing P/E but not their forward P/E ?

Different accounting methods from what I gather. The acquisition is being accounted for over a 5 year period for the trailing p/e but not being included in the forward p/e over this 5 year period. This really shows how p/e is not a great metric in a vacuum.
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