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AMD YOLO

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Re: AMD YOLO

#61

Post by BitwiseFool »

georgeecollins wrote: post #40

I would really love it if people on Hacker News could weigh in on how much of a moat they think CUDA really is. As in: How hard is it to use something else? If you started a project today how much would you want to get paid to not use CUDA? A lot of readers on this site have a good insight into this and it is a key question financial people are asking without the knowledge many people here possess.

AMD's competitor to CUDA is ROCm. Historically, AMD has been hobbled by the quality of their drivers and because they sold less performant hardware. AMD has traditionally been the budget option for both CPUs and GPUs. Things have changed in the CPU space because of Ryzen, but sadly AMD has not been able to realize an equivalent competitive advantage in the GPU space. Intel has also entered the GPU market, but they are even farther behind than AMD. The same problems I am about to describe apply to them as well, to a higher degree.

Rewriting CUDA programs to run using ROCm is expensive and time consuming. It is difficult to justify this expense when in all likelihood the ROCm version will be less efficient, less performant, and less stable than the original. In the grand scheme of things, AMD hardware is indeed cheaper but it's not that much cheaper. From a business standpoint, it's just not worth it.

Knowing what I know about how management thinks, even if AMD managed to make an objectively superior product at a much better price, institutional momentum alone would keep people on CUDA for a long time.

Re: AMD YOLO

#62

Post by voidmain0001 »

panstromek wrote: post #57
blackeyeblitzar wrote: post #47

I saw a video the other day that showed a new AMD laptop processor that is comparable to the Apple processors in performance and battery life. That was very surprising and also a great thing for windows or Linux laptops. But at the same time, the market for these and the potential for profit isn’t really that big. Consumers are willing to pay for a premium for Apple but not anyone else.

Do you have a link? I'd like to know which model that was.

Maybe this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7HUud7IvAo

Re: AMD YOLO

#63

Post by itsoktocry »

ein0p wrote: post #7
dlcarrier wrote: post #3

AMD is probably undervalued, but Nvidia is clearly way overvalued. I don't think the reckoning will come from AMD stealing Nvidia's market share, it'll come when the hype bubble collapses and businesses start treating neural networks like commodities, running whatever is cheapest instead of the absolute most powerful. AMD is in a great position, because they make both great GPU/NPU hardware and great CPU hardware.

> Nvidia is clearly way overvalued Tell me you haven't looked at Nvidia's financials (especially the margins) without telling me. It basically prints money, now and in the foreseeable future, and all of its products are permanently sold out, even at the insane prices Nvidia is charging.

>Tell me you haven't looked at Nvidia's financials (especially the margins) without telling me.

What happens to industries that have huge margins? They get compressed by competition. The biggest companies on the planet, literally, are figuring out how to not pay Nvidia those huge margins.

Re: AMD YOLO

#65

Post by czk »

BitwiseFool wrote: post #61
georgeecollins wrote: post #40

I would really love it if people on Hacker News could weigh in on how much of a moat they think CUDA really is. As in: How hard is it to use something else? If you started a project today how much would you want to get paid to not use CUDA? A lot of readers on this site have a good insight into this and it is a key question financial people are asking without the knowledge many people here possess.

AMD's competitor to CUDA is ROCm. Historically, AMD has been hobbled by the quality of their drivers and because they sold less performant hardware. AMD has traditionally been the budget option for both CPUs and GPUs. Things have changed in the CPU space because of Ryzen, but sadly AMD has not been able to realize an equivalent competitive advantage in the GPU space. Intel has also entered the GPU market, but they ar…

Never underestimate the power of institutional momentum! cough IBM AS400

Re: AMD YOLO

#66

Post by smallmancontrov »

deadbabe wrote: post #21
Jalad wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AMD is probably undervalued, but Nvidia is clearly way overvalued. AMD trades at a price to earnings ratio of 99, NVDA trades at a PE of ~38. PE isn't everything when looking at companies, but I don't see other reasons to think AMD is undervalued

Is PE even anything? If you guided your investing based on sane PE ratios for the past decade you would have been consistently unhappy with missing out on huge gains in tech companies.

PE is appropriate for companies going steady. It's not appropriate for companies that are growing or dying.

Thought experiment: A and B have the same earnings per share, but everyone expects A to double its revenue going forward and B to go steady. Should shares of A go for the same price as shares of B? If you think so, I can front-run you.

Thought experiment 2: A and B have the same earnings per share, but everyone expects A to halve its revenue going forward and B to go steady. Should they go for the same price? If you think so, I have some bags for you to hold.

The easy answer is that PEG is more appropriate for growing companies and PB is more appropriate for dying companies (since this is HN, I'll also mention that "Team and TAM" is the metric for seed stage). The hard answer is that there is no substitute for modeling the finances of the company and applying a DCF, but your brokerage app can't do that for you so PE/PEG/PB still have their place.

Re: AMD YOLO

#67

Post by blackeyeblitzar »

panstromek wrote: post #57
blackeyeblitzar wrote: post #47

I saw a video the other day that showed a new AMD laptop processor that is comparable to the Apple processors in performance and battery life. That was very surprising and also a great thing for windows or Linux laptops. But at the same time, the market for these and the potential for profit isn’t really that big. Consumers are willing to pay for a premium for Apple but not anyone else.

Do you have a link? I'd like to know which model that was.

I believe it was this particular laptop: https://hothardware.com/reviews/rog-flow-z13-review

It’s the same processor that is in that new Framework desktop that was on HN recently, but for some reason Framework is not putting it in laptops: https://frame.work/desktop

Re: AMD YOLO

#68

Post by newsclues »

xnx wrote: post #59
drexlspivey wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AMD hired 1 guy to do it and then fired him

I wondered if John Carmack would take his strong knowledge of low level hardware and interest in AI and work on this, but he seems to be working on a non LLM flavor of AI.

Or Abrash?

Re: AMD YOLO

#69

Post by _zoltan_ »

ac29 wrote: post #53
littlestymaar wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 2 MI300s Not two cards, two boxes (with 8 cards each I'd assume).

It weighed 750 pounds so I think he got more than 16 cards. Or maybe they sent entire servers?

that's the only way for MI300X. It's not a PCI card...

Re: AMD YOLO

#70

Post by fangpenlin »

I heard that Nvidia's graph cards are the best in the class in terms of power consumption vs TFLOP ration. I wonder what's the number of AMD vs Nvidia? I would like to see the number because power consumption is going to take a big portion of AI training. In comparsion, hardware might not be that expensive in the long run.
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