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Comment by WithinReason | Hacker News Reader

Short version: AMD's software incompetence. Very few hardware companies have the competence to properly support their HW. You see this problem again and again, HW companies designing HW that's great on paper but can't be used properly because it's not properly supported with SW. Nvidia understands this and has 10 times as many SW engineers than HW engineers. AMD doesn't. Intel might too.

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I think you're totally right with this, just to add - it's often possible to do a lot of things that are neat in hardware but create difficult problems in software. Virtually always when this happens it turns out to be nearly impossible to actually create software that takes advantage of it. So it's massively important to have a closed loop feedback system between the software and hardware so that the hardware guys don't accidentally tie the software up in knots. This is common in companies that consider themselves hardware companies first.

Examples being the PS3 cell architecture and HP's Itanium chips

Strongly agree. There's a surprising cultural difference between the two. As a software engineer in a different hardware company, I can see where the fault lines are, and it takes continual management effort to make it work properly.

(I note that if we had an "open" GPU architecture in the same way that we have CPU architectures, things might be a lot better, but the openness of the IBM PC seems to be a historical accident that no company will allow again)

Chalking it up to “software incompetence” is a bit simplistic, to say the least. AMD was on the brink of bankruptcy not too long ago and their GPU division was struggling to even trend water. They didn’t have an alternative to CUDA because they couldn’t afford one and no one would use it anyway, OpenCL stagnated because most vendors didn’t want to implement functionality that only the biggest players wanted, and their graphics division had to pivot from optimizing for gaming (where they could sell) to optimizing for compute as well.

Now that AMD has the capital they are playing catch up to Nvidia. But it’s going to take time for their software to improve. Hiring at boat load of programmers all at once isn’t going to solve that.

It's been a while since AMD was on the brink of bankruptcy, they had enough time to do something about compute and yet it's still not usable, see the George Hotz rant. OpenCL stagnated because 2.0 added mandatory features that Nvidia didn't support so it never got adopted by the biggest player.

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