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Comment by m0zg | Hacker News Reader

Because until very, very recently they didn't have much weight to throw around. They were hemorrhaging money.

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).

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AMD employs 10,000 people, yet they are spectators watching NVIDIA rake in monopoly profits on GPGPU year after year. And you're saying it's because they can't afford to get 10 good engineers to work on framework support because their shares may crash at some point in the future?

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.

FWIW I applied to AMD for an HPC application engineer position (GPU compute) and a couple of weeks later to a similar position by a direct competitor.

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.

>> And it's interesting work.

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.

>Their P/E is absolutely insane for a hardware company (240!),

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.

Sorry but you have to spend money to make money and AMD could easily do this to increase its margins and revenue.

AMD is a fabless semiconductors company. They are more akin to low-level software than to the majority of hardware companies.

NVIDIA has never owned a fab either. The fabs that AMD once owned were spun out into a separate company, Global Foundries. Intel in some ways is the odd duck in the semiconductors business, still holding on to its fabs.

Not really, no. Unlike a software company it still costs them a significant amount of cold hard cash to produce each unit they sell. Captial intensive AF, especially at 7nm. They don't have to build their own fabs, but they DO have to pay for those fabs to be built, one way or another. Being fabless doesn't free you from that.

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