https://towardsdatascience.com/on-the-state-of-deep-learning...
These things take time. CUDA took what, a decade to become what it is today? And it was developed by a company that wasn't on its deathbed.
Arguably AMD still doesn't have much weight to throw around. Their profits are meager. Their P/E is absolutely insane for a hardware company (240!), suggesting a dramatic correction in the foreseeable future. Stocks on an upward trajectory help attract top talent. On a downward trajectory they actively repel it.
So they probably have like half a dozen engineers working on this, and not those magical $500K/yr engineers that can actually turn shit into gold, because a hardware company wouldn't be able to hire them (or afford them, for that matter).
Yes, in a market today that is trading relatively low in PE~20 - 25ish.
AMD would have to grow 12 times its profits to normalise that price, as much as I am pro AMD in the Intel/AMD case, 12 times profit is a little over the top.
I'm sorry, but this makes absolutely no sense at all. P/E or corrections have absolutely nothing to do with it. Salaries are paid from revenue, not from profits, and their revenues have been growing for years. They don't need to pay engineers in stock options.
This is about priorities and execution. Getting 10 engineers to focus on an obvious multi-billion dollar opportunity that leverages existing investments is not "throwing your weight around". It's basic management competence.
And it's interesting work. I don't believe that engineers need low P/Es as an incentive to work on a key part of AI infrastructure that only very few people get to work on.
In the time it took the other company to contact me, do 6 interviews, negotiate contract, and get me signed, I haven’t even been contacted by AMD. Their position is still open, I’m a perfect fit and I haven’t been rejected either. I suppose I’ll get an automatic rejection letter at some point.
The online application system for AMD is just quite bad. Looking at my application in their system, everything is full with “Unknown” and I can’t event put in my skills. It wouldn’t surprise me if on their database I’m a horrible candidate.
It's also a hard slog, and something very few people _really_ know how to do. Ideally you have to be both deep learning / HPC expert _and_ low level programming expert, and on an "exotic" platform to boot, not on the CPU. Such people are scarcer than hen's teeth, and they have no problem whatsoever getting mid-six-figure employment at companies that don't treat them as an afterthought, and where they can hope for a strong upward trajectory career-wise.
I agree with the rest of your point, and in particular that this is an existential threat to AMD as a whole. I don't get why they don't treat it as one.
Be that as it may, I think you're severely overestimating the present level of "management competence" allocated to something that's not currently perceived as a do-or-die situation at a company that was dying just a year ago.
Just for completeness: Tensorflow has (upstream) ROCm support. When training some of our transformer models, the performance difference was not large compared to AMD's Tensorflow fork.