HipKittens: Fast and furious AMD kernels

Post by elteto » Sat, Nov 15, 2025, 2:39 AM UTC

wmobit wrote: post #12

elteto wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the performance comparison table, basically AMD could be NVIDIA right now, but they aren’t because… software? That’s a complete institutional and leadership failure. Ironically, building chips is the actual _hard_ part. The software and the compilers are not trivial but the iteration speed is almost infinite by comparison. It goes to show that some companies just don’t “get” software. Not even AMD!

I'd go so far as to say it's the exact opposite. It's faster and easier to change the hardware than the software.

Post by latchkey » Sat, Nov 15, 2025, 2:42 AM UTC

AMDAnon wrote: post #17

observationist wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The MBAs are in charge, and now AMD is the new Intel? It's not only not fixable overnight, but it's not fixable at all if the leadership thinks they can coast on simply being not as bad as Intel, and Intel has a helluva lot of inertia and ability to simply sell OEM units on autopilot. Sounds like the AMD board needs to get their heads out of their asses and shake up leadership.

The MBAs have always been in charge to an extent. But the real issue is we don't want to invest in beating Nvidia on quality. Otherwise we wouldn't be doing stock buybacks and instead use the money on poaching engineers. The mindset is that we maintain a comfortable second place by creating a shittier but cheaper product. That is how AMD has operated since 1959 as a second source to Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel.…

Post by 0manrho » Sat, Nov 15, 2025, 3:21 AM UTC

BNE wrote: post #23

0manrho wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AMD never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity Well said, their Instinct parts are actually, at a hardware level, very very capable pieces of kit that - ignoring software/dev ecosystem - are very competitive with NVidia. Problem is, AMD has a terrible history of supporting it's hardware (either just outright lack of support, cough Radeon VII; or constantly scrapping things and starting over and thus the eco…

Our hardware is arguably better (spec for spec) apart from critical areas like memory bandwidth, and GPU to GPU bandwidth. You can tweak your implementations to get the same if not better performance. We do that, we see this, our customers see this. ROCM pre Rock, suffers from the ossification in the engineering organization. The Rock seeks to completely change that, and the team driving it is amazing. Try out the pr…

Post by JonChesterfield » Sat, Nov 15, 2025, 3:32 AM UTC

AMDAnon wrote: post #14

wewewedxfgdf wrote: post #4

You'd think AMD would swing in on something like this and fund it with the money needed to succeed. I have no knowledge of it but my guess is no, AMD never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity - when it comes to GPUs and AI.

AMD pays the bare minimum in software to get a product out the door. The company does not even have working performance testing and regressions routinely get shipped to customers. Benchmarks the executives see are ad hoc and not meaningful. HipKittens is an improvement but AMD does not have the ability to understand or track kernel performance so it'll be ignored. This isn't fixable overnight. Company-wide DevOps and…

Post by toasterlovin » Sat, Nov 15, 2025, 5:22 AM UTC

observationist wrote: post #15

LtdJorge wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vast amount of CUDA libraries for anything you can think of. I think there’s where they have the biggest leverage.

AI is going to be so ubiquitous, something principled and open is going to supersede cuda at some point, as HTML5 did for Flash. CUDA isn't like an x86 vs ARM situation where they can use hardware dominance for decades, it's a higher level language, and being compatible with a wide range of systems benefits NVIDIA and their competitors. They're riding out their relative superiority for now, but we're going to see a s…