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I was at AMD in the mid-late 2000s helping design CPU/APU/GPUs

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Re: I was at AMD in the mid-late 2000s helping design CPU/APU/GPUs

#111

Post by btouellette »

creativeSlumber wrote: post #58
btouellette wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm quite familiar as I worked for Intel for over a decade as an engineer. It's absolutely true that leadership has fluctuated a lot but the 2003-2010 era had fairly clear cut leaders for each generation. AMD was the choice for just about everything through the Athlon 64 single core era but the Core 2 Duo run had them relegated to superiority in the very bottom end of the market only for a long time. https://www.anan…

Is it possible that maybe your view point is biased against AMD since you worked for for Intel during that time?

The benchmarks for all these CPUs that my personal view point is based on are all out there. Anandtech was my favorite source for this at the time due to relatively detailed testing and a clear understanding of the implications of architecture decisions. The complete history of their contemporaneous reviews are still online and userbenchmark.com has independent data on these older CPUs as well although obviously with less control over potential mitigating factors.

AMD was struggling to release CPUs that were competitive against year old Intel Core 2 Duos which remained the status quo through their Bulldozer architecture. Things started turning around with Ryzen when a combination of architecture improvements and typical workloads taking more advantage of multicore flipped the script.

The bits about "true" multicore are also sketchy considering Bulldozer was using shared L2, fetch/decode, and floating point hardware on each module and calling a module two "cores" for marketing purposes.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/4955/the-bulldozer-review-amd...

Re: I was at AMD in the mid-late 2000s helping design CPU/APU/GPUs

#112

Post by JonChesterfield »

alberth wrote: post #108

> I spent 6+yrs @ AMD engg in mid to late 2000s helping design the CPU/APU/GPUs that we see today . Is that a far statement to make, given ~20-years has passed?

It seems a bit dubious since there's the trainwreck of Bulldozer on x64 sitting between then and the ryzen cores that managed to dethrone intel. I'm pretty sure the GPUs were VLIW without direct access to system memory too. I think one could sketch a lineage from the PS4 processor through to el capitan with a bunch of handwaving but that also seems to be after that time period.

Re: I was at AMD in the mid-late 2000s helping design CPU/APU/GPUs

#113

Post by shmerl »

paulmd wrote: post #106
shmerl wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For like 8 years their drivers on Linux were a nightmare and AMD could have come in and done better. AMD eventually did while Nvidia's drivers remained a nightmare almost until these days. But sure, AMD could have done it sooner.

> AMD eventually did while Nvidia's drivers remained a nightmare and yet that trillion-dollar valuation built over the last decade is built with customers almost entirely running on those "nightmare" linux drivers, while AMD's linux drivers crash running the sample app on supported hardware+OS, and nobody at AMD cared until finally a tech-bro with a loud enough platform shamed them into fixing it... ... and this is s…

Nvidia only cares about a specific market. I.e. it doesn't care about desktop users. That's what I was talking about. So despite their pools of cash, Nvidia is a trash company when it comes to Linux support.

Re: I was at AMD in the mid-late 2000s helping design CPU/APU/GPUs

#114

Post by JonChesterfield »

Apreche wrote: post #80

I predicted years ago they would make a CPU and you would be able to buy an All-NVidia PC. I think the reason that hasn't happened is because of the failed purchase of ARM. And looking at the market dominance of NVidia, it seems they were right to block that acquisition.

There was an arm CPU from nvidia branded "Tegra" from circa 2010. I remember a laptop (or maybe a mini pc style thing) based on that and power consumption being shameful but my recollections are hazy.

Vaguely interesting side note, yandex found that from poor search terms very easily and google abjectly failed to. I hope google are tracking how frequently people use their engine to find yandex, while remembering bing being mostly used to find google and maybe the death of yahoo.

Re: I was at AMD in the mid-late 2000s helping design CPU/APU/GPUs

#115

Post by mistrial9 »

kkielhofner wrote: post #70
disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nvidia have invested a lot in CUDA, and they have C & Fortran bindings for a lot of scientific stuff, apart from all the DL/Gen AI stuff that's super hot right now. Like, I started using CUDA (through frameworks) over ten years ago, and basically nobody has come up with anything competitive since then.

> Nvidia have invested a lot in CUDA, This is a significant understatement. For quite some time Jensen has been saying repeatedly that 30% of their R&D spend is on software. With the money-printing machine that is Nvidia if that holds they're going to continue to rocket ahead of competitors in terms of delivering actual solutions. The "What are you talking about? AMD/Intel runs torch just fine!" crowd clearly haven't…

chicken and egg arguments.. good points and not untrue, but look elsewhere in this topic and see extensive anti-trust behavior, questionable license practices, deceptive public statements and deceptive handling of binary blobs. Very much like Intel - excellent tech in certain places, very mob-like business behavior in other places.

"What are you talking about? AMD/Intel runs torch just fine!" refers indirectly to the value of having competition in markets, not jump on the (well-funded,slick) monopoly bandwagon.

Re: I was at AMD in the mid-late 2000s helping design CPU/APU/GPUs

#116

Post by kcb »

_zoltan_ wrote: post #104
Jlagreen wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is wrong, please check what DGX is. DGX is a complete data center from Nvidia where Nvidia is the supplier of everything themselves: - CPU+GPU from Nvidia - Rack from Nvidia - Interconnects + networking from Nvidia - SW from OS to application framework from Nvidia The only thing Nvidia really needs partners with DGX is memory (RAM + SSD). One reason Nvidia's margins are so high is because they provide the whole…

no, this is not true. DGX is (right now) a 4U box with 8xH100 on a daughterboard. Don't believe me? Do you believe nvda? https://www.nvidia.com/en-sg/data-center/dgx-h100/

DGX is the branding for the whole platform too. It's right on that page...

Re: I was at AMD in the mid-late 2000s helping design CPU/APU/GPUs

#117

Post by stagger87 »

alberth wrote: post #108

> I spent 6+yrs @ AMD engg in mid to late 2000s helping design the CPU/APU/GPUs that we see today . Is that a far statement to make, given ~20-years has passed?

No, and the content of the tweets certainly dont support his claim. As someone else pointed out he's already tweeted this "story" in the past. It's all low effort self promotion for his brand.

Re: I was at AMD in the mid-late 2000s helping design CPU/APU/GPUs

#118

Post by wmf »

shmerl wrote: post #113
paulmd wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AMD eventually did while Nvidia's drivers remained a nightmare and yet that trillion-dollar valuation built over the last decade is built with customers almost entirely running on those "nightmare" linux drivers, while AMD's linux drivers crash running the sample app on supported hardware+OS, and nobody at AMD cared until finally a tech-bro with a loud enough platform shamed them into fixing it... ... and this is s…

Nvidia only cares about a specific market. I.e. it doesn't care about desktop users. That's what I was talking about. So despite their pools of cash, Nvidia is a trash company when it comes to Linux support.

AFAIK a lot of Hollywood visual effects are done on Linux + Nvidia so they probably support that market.

Re: I was at AMD in the mid-late 2000s helping design CPU/APU/GPUs

#119

Post by wmf »

imtringued wrote: post #85
nickpeterson wrote: post #10

People keep yelling about nvidia stock but that feels like a huge bubble. AI disillusionment will hit and the stock will implode. Nvidia hasn’t made any inroads on producing actual systems, just gpus. Once Apple or Microsoft have a fast enough chip (TOPs wise), nobody will care about nvidia lead except in the datacenter. Seems like a failing position to me.

Google has powerful TPUs. The real question is, why isn't Meta building their own?

Meta is on their Nth generation.

Re: I was at AMD in the mid-late 2000s helping design CPU/APU/GPUs

#120

Post by shmerl »

wmf wrote: post #118
shmerl wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nvidia only cares about a specific market. I.e. it doesn't care about desktop users. That's what I was talking about. So despite their pools of cash, Nvidia is a trash company when it comes to Linux support.

AFAIK a lot of Hollywood visual effects are done on Linux + Nvidia so they probably support that market.

Not really familiar with it, but hopefully they can get unstuck from Nvidia, especially on Linux. Only very recently things started improving it seems and not even with Nvidia's effort but outside community working on nova + nvk.
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