Dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40696384 no idea why that was flagged
Same guy on Twitter posted the same story today as he did in 2020.
I was at AMD in the mid-late 2000s helping design CPU/APU/GPUs
91–100 of 139 posts
Re: I was at AMD in the mid-late 2000s helping design CPU/APU/GPUs
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure if you're familiar with CPU history, but this is roughly true. Intel's catchup to multicore offerings was trippy and severely lagged behind AMD. I think it's often forgotten that CPU leadership has fluctuated between different companies many times in the past!
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…
Core 2 as an individual core was significantly better than AMD's competing core (e.g. by being able to issue 4 simultaneous instructions vs. 3 instructions for AMD).
Nevertheless, the integration of multiple cores into an Intel multiprocessor was very inefficient before Nehalem (i.e. the cores were competing for a shared bus, which prevented them from ever reaching their maximum aggregate throughput, unlike in the AMD multiprocessors, which had inherited the DEC Alpha structure, with separate memory links and peripheral interfaces and with an interconnection network between cores, like all CPUs use now).
However this was noticeable at that time mostly in the server CPUs and much less in the consumer CPUs, as there were few multithreaded applications.
Core 2 still lagged behind AMD's cores for various less mainstream applications, like computations with big integers.
Only 2 generations later, after Core 2 and Penryn, with Nehalem (the first SKU at the end of 2008, but the important SKUs in 2009) Intel has become able to either match or exceed AMD's cores in all applications.
Re: I was at AMD in the mid-late 2000s helping design CPU/APU/GPUs
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the GPU area AMD lost, and will continue to lose to Nvidia, because they don't seem to get a grip on Software and Drivers. And that does not bode well for their long time CEO.
I mean for gaming workloads AMD GPUs are doing fine in the Xbox, PlayStation, and Steam Deck consoles.
And in PC AMD has 15.6% of the market, compared to Nvidia's 76.4% according to Steam.
https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...
Re: I was at AMD in the mid-late 2000s helping design CPU/APU/GPUs
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure if you're familiar with CPU history, but this is roughly true. Intel's catchup to multicore offerings was trippy and severely lagged behind AMD. I think it's often forgotten that CPU leadership has fluctuated between different companies many times in the past!
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…
Thanks for the color! From the article you linked, it looks like the Twitter thread is quite misleading in claiming that Intel simply slapped two cores together to achieve superiority over AMD. Your article notes a big process improvement (65nm vs 90nm) which allowed for 2x the transistors on a smaller die size along with faster clock and lower memory latency. Curious to get your take.
Re: I was at AMD in the mid-late 2000s helping design CPU/APU/GPUs
#95> In fact, AMD almost bought Nvidia but
Imagine the wealth destruction if they had merged way back then! I don't love the way mergers are regulated today but I do feel like preventing companies from growing too big through mergers is desirable.
Re: I was at AMD in the mid-late 2000s helping design CPU/APU/GPUs
#96Earlier 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…
Thanks for the color! From the article you linked, it looks like the Twitter thread is quite misleading in claiming that Intel simply slapped two cores together to achieve superiority over AMD. Your article notes a big process improvement (65nm vs 90nm) which allowed for 2x the transistors on a smaller die size along with faster clock and lower memory latency. Curious to get your take.
Intel's 90 nm CMOS process was a disaster, at least in its variant for desktop or server CPUs, all of which had an unbelievably high leakage power consumption (the idle power consumption of a desktop could be more than a half of its peak power consumption).
On the other hand, AMD's 90 nm CMOS process has been excellent.
With its 65 nm process, Intel has recovered its technological leadership, but that was not the most important factor of success, because AMD's 65 nm process was also OK and it became available within a few months of Intel's process.
AMD has lost because they did not execute well the design process for their "Barcelona" new generation of CPUs (made also in 65 nm, like Core 2). While Intel has succeeded to deliver Core 2 even earlier than their normal cadence for new CPU generations, AMD has launched Barcelona only after several months of delays and even then it was buggy. The bugs required microcode workarounds that made Barcelona slow in comparison with Core 2, and that started the decline of AMD, after a few years of huge superiority over Intel.
Re: I was at AMD in the mid-late 2000s helping design CPU/APU/GPUs
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
The difference is not just about APIs; CUDA has a single source file model that is dead easy to use whereas last I checked every competitor still had an outdated manual loading process that adds significant friction.
Doesn't SYCL also allow for a single-source-file model these days?
It is supposed to, yes. I was never able to set it up (admittedly I have not tried in a couple of years since I am not working with GPUs anymore) so I don't know how well it holds up.
Re: I was at AMD in the mid-late 2000s helping design CPU/APU/GPUs
#98I never worked at a large company and he was right there, but there are so many outstanding things in this thread, it’s hard not be surprised. Not understanding the importance of GPUs in 2006, or of being first-to-market, while confusing OpenGL with OpenCL (twice), survival bias (BELIEVE IN YOUR VISION)…
[deleted]
Re: I was at AMD in the mid-late 2000s helping design CPU/APU/GPUs
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
AMD and Apple tried to push OpenCL but the design of it, a C-like kernel compiled to the GPU with LLVM and managed by the Khronos consortium, tended to lag in absolute performance to CUDA which was able to take advantage of evolutions in GPU design more closely. Nowadays almost nobody cares about OpenCL.
Also apparently the reason behind Apple's cut with Khronos seems to be related to how OpenCL was managed by them.
"Hey Khronos, can we tweak the OpenCL spec to be even more restrictive and higher-level, then rebrand it under our proprietary 'Metal' architecture so we can license it out to our competitors?"
"...no, but you could expand on OpenCL or Vulkan compute if you wanted. There are other spec stakeholders, we can't give you carte-blanche control, Apple."
"Why do you insist upon mismanaging the industry's APIs? Screw you guys!"
Re: I was at AMD in the mid-late 2000s helping design CPU/APU/GPUs
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, I really feel like AMD is struggling with the software aspect. Even back when they were ATI and AMD bought them, the ATI drivers were garbage compared to Nvidia (from my PC gaming experience). After a few AMD and ATI cards, I just accepted the Nvidia tax, where my cards are more expensive and on paper worse, but in practice worked better. I'm really surprised AMD isn't throwing a whole bunch of money on emulati…
AMD also doesn't understand that CUDA got big because they worked on cheap consumer cards; once things were working people got interested in expensive specialized cards. Their stack is still focused on the high end only, but there's no ecosystem to support it.
To me, this is the most important point and what AMD is missing out from their current strategy. I can take an off the shelf, easy to get 4070 or 4080 and use it with CUDA to learn.
AMD's strategy for people wanting to learn, is basically no strategy.
It's always been the software holding them back, still is, need to invest in the ecosystem and not just the things easy to justify as a revenue driver.