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Comment by alanfranz | Hacker News Reader

If.

If they can proritize _and_ execute on that vision.

there is also second mover advantage, where they just need to copy-cat the best part of nvidia's ML stack and dont waste time figuring out what works/what doesn't work.

they will get users simply because they will be alternative to nvidia. Add good pricing strategy and it can be immediate success

I'm actually happier if they deliver a mediocre GPU performance seamlessly. I would be as annoyed as the gamers to be priced out of a great desktop/video setup. If hype more fully occupied Nvidia's fragile race cars I'd have a nicer laptop.

> there is also second mover advantage, where they just need to copy-cat the best part of nvidia's ML stack and dont waste time figuring out what works/what doesn't work.

Seems like patents would stop that.

didn't know nvidia patented matmul and dot product

There's a lot more involved than matmul and dot products.

Didn't the Google v Oracle lawsuit end up confirming that you can't patent an API?

AMD doesnt have to implement CUDA api, they just need to make sure their compute framework works well with pytorch/tf/MLIR or whatever high level framework is being used.

Cuda itself will change over time, so no reason for AMD to pick cuda, because nobody writes CUDA kernels by hand, they use high level frameworks

But CUDA kernels are everywhere, not just in high-level frameworks. Look at DeepSpeed, for example, which is used in training LLMs.

So what? They can be replaced by amd kernels if there will be adequate tooling support

No, it confirmed reimplementing an API is not copyright infringement.

The patent claims were rejected simply because the Google implementations were written in such a way the patents did not apply.

With Ryzen and their other recent products and their rapid pace of improvement, they certainly have developed a decent track record of that.

They're crushing it on hardware, but being left behind in the firmware/software.

Getting Intel proprietary advantage in widely used open source packages and systems is something Intel has been very, very good at doing. I use POWER9 systems and... Yeah, the software porting situation has been rather annoying (especially in media processing libraries that rely on things like embree, opencolorio and the like)

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