Earlier quoted context omitted.
AMD has hip which is basically a CUDA clone.
Only for those that equate CUDA to C++ only, and poor tooling.
They've replicated many of the libraries as well. But yea haven't personally tried it.
AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M
271–280 of 284 posts
Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Those libraries are written CUDA. Windows has had a multitude of APIs and layers (DOS, WIN32, etc) none of which were written in an underlying language/api.
Microsoft's entire history is around building a moat of APIs because the PC software industries has a wide variety. Nvidia has, so far, been focused on building actually useful things for developers. Basically, where all the other manufacturers viewed their chips as special purpose devices, Nvidia allowed developers to treat their chips as generic parallel processors and this facilitated the current AI revolution/bubble. Now that Nvidia has created this market, it can charge by the use rather than charging by processing power. The thing is that Nvidia's large potential competitors simply don't want to create clones even if they could - because clones would have to be sold by processing power rather than with a markup for their usefulness. It's worth looking at the list of x86 compatible makers [1]. Making an x86 wasn't quite something you could do in your garage but clearly the barriers to entry weren't huge. But any Nvidia compatible is going to cost a large amount of capital but can only sell by processor power and so AMD, Intel and similar sized entities don't have an interest in doing this.
Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ze…
The world was effectively a zero-sum game until the industrial revolution. For most of human history, the average growth per capita was something like 0.01%/year. There was some growth, but you could not see it in a single lifetime. Which is why conquering your neighbors, taking their possessions, and enslaving them was such a popular form of business.
I'm not sure I even agree with this. If by conquering your neighbors, your civilization grows 5x (as opposed to just having you + your neighbors), then doesn't that by definition mean it's not zero sum?
Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M
#274Earlier 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. 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?
Considering people mostly bitch about AMD driver bugs and their GPU computing-related SDKs, I don't think buying a high-level AI sweat shop is going to fix their issues. I am not even sure if in the entire Silo AI you could find 5 people who understand AMD GPU assembly code and can effectively debug generated kernels.
They'd get more value offering $500k+ comp to a few people from https://handmadecities.com/
Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Thank you all guys for the explanation. I was very puzzled seeing AMD p/e as a complete dilettante in finance reporting.
Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M
#276This 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.
I have to agree. I doubt AI architects that use high-level libraries are going to fix AMD's bottom line. Only maybe as a marketing ploy for future sales.
Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M
#277I wonder why it is 665 instead of 666?
Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 pai…
It's still a pain spending time learning matlab syntax/semantics when you could just, idk, use C or Haskell instead
Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M
#279I’m quite surprised about this acquisition (and it’s scale) for a few reasons:
1. It’s a consulting firm and not a product shop, so you’re only paying for people, although they’ve from the start tried really hard to brand themselves as a startup.
2. They’ve been training an LLM, but mainly with tax payer money using a government super computer (that uses AMD chips), which is arguably their only product, but completely open source.
3. Some of the founders are well-connected in Finland which has given them a seat (and visibility) in goverment initiatives, but this is mainly BS.
4. They have the least rigorous hiring process I’ve ever witnessed.
I remember checking them out in 2018 when I was looking into switching companies. Back then when I checked their folks on LinkedIn, the prior experience in AI most of their people had was taking a few Coursera courses.
Later they called me and asked me about joining and I’ve never had an interview where no one asked anything technical beyond what I’ve worked on.
I also hope employees get something out of this, because their offer was a revenue share on billed hours and no mention of equity. However, my understanding is that they had a large investment from private equity (Altor), so the mission was to make the PE company money and not the employees.
They’ve allowed part-time offers where you still keep working at a university, so I assume this has been quite interesting for many researchers, i.e. you get paid some on top of the crappy university pay and you also get to see real problems that companies have.
Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
Considering people mostly bitch about AMD driver bugs and their GPU computing-related SDKs, I don't think buying a high-level AI sweat shop is going to fix their issues. I am not even sure if in the entire Silo AI you could find 5 people who understand AMD GPU assembly code and can effectively debug generated kernels. They'd get more value offering $500k+ comp to a few people from https://handmadecities.com/
> I don't think buying a high-level AI sweat shop is going to fix their issues... They'd get more value...
It is a wonder why you aren't the CEO.