Lisa Su Says the "Team Is on It" After Tweet About Open-Source AMD GPU Firmware | Hacker News Reader

Lisa Su Says the "Team Is on It" After Tweet About Open-Source AMD GPU Firmware

phoronix.com

37 pointsmfiguiere14 comments

There's been plenty of criticism (and mostly justified as far as I can tell) of AMD's efforts. But on the flip side, I think we should also acknowledge what is communicated by the fact that the CEO[1] of the company is directly addressing issues like this, and making it clear that they plan to fix them. With a lot of companies the size of AMD, you'd never get that kind of communication from the CEO.

It's a small thing, but it is one thing that keeps me optimistic that AMD will eventually develop the great software stack they need.

[1]: Or whoever controls her Twitter account. I have no idea if she actually reads/posts herself, or pays a staffer to do that stuff. But I'm assuming she approved the content of the tweet in either case.

I’m sorry but why do you feel “we’re on it” is directly addressing anything or conveying a clear plan to fix it? That sounds like the opposite of how I would describe this.

> why do you feel “we’re on it” is directly addressing

How could it be described as anything but? It isn't specific, but it is direct.

I suppose it is literally a direct statement. However if I ask someone what they’re going to do about X, and they say they’re working on it, I’m going to assume they have no idea what to do about X, and are in fact not working on it.

Maybe that stems from your experience but I don't think that's a fair expectation in general. Sharing detail about their approach could have all sorts of downsides. It might be they are still investigating multiple approaches and don't know which one they'll pick (this is usually what I mean when I say that). It might be the CEO doesn't want to disclose details about the work that would be better filtered through marketing. It could be they're trying to avoid leaking trade secrets.

That’s fine. But it still amounts to having said nothing of value

That makes no sense to me. It's a confirmation that they are working on it, rather than ignoring it. It's nothing but value.

However if I ask someone what they’re going to do about X, and they say they’re working on it, I’m going to assume they have no idea what to do about X, and are in fact not working on it.

Fair enough, but I would say that applies to an actual conversation. I don't consider a couple of back and forth Tweets to be a conversation. That's not what Twitter is for, or how it's usually used, IMO. Twitter is for short, pithy, quick little comments ... like "The team is on it".

And not to beat a dead horse, but again, I assign some particular weight to this simply because this was the CEO of the company - not some low level flunky, or even a VP where they are one of 3,362 VP's they might have.

Would a more detailed response be appreciated? Sure, 100%, absolutely. But to my way of thinking, this response is still significant.

That’s fine. But the message is not that they’re doing something or not. It’s that no meaningful info was conveyed.

> I’m sorry but why do you feel “we’re on it” is directly addressing anything or conveying a clear plan to fix it?

I'm not saying it conveys a plan, but rather that it conveys intent and that - coming directly from the CEO - that is significant. Again, compare to most other companies of the size of AMD... would the CEO of the company respond to tweets like that? I'd say "no" in general, and that that is part of why this carries meaningful weight. Clearly the issue is important enough to get the attention of Lisa Su, and important enough for her to respond. That tells me something. YMMV, of course.

> They should immediately stop development of high end ML libraries and fix their basic shit.

I always hate this type of comment, it's so disconnected from reality. Someone writing Python libraries isn't going to suddenly jump into firmware development and fix bugs that have eluded other developers.

If anything, writing and thoroughly testing those libraries will help surface bugs.

I really like the direction that AMD takes on open source recently¹. Since Nvidia has a long history of working against FOSS and Intel isn't a big player in dedicated GPUs market yet, we need AMD to support open source principles. Especially now, when more and more computation is getting delegated to GPUs.

¹ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/02/hdmi-forum-to-amd-no...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Tiny-Corp-70p-MES-Firmware

I've always wondered what exactly is wrong with AMD's GPUs that makes them such a terrible experience to use for GPGPU. Some have suspected that there is a deep hardware problem, but as I have learned more about hardware, most of it is actually programmable, because it turns out, simple non-x86 CPUs are so extremely area efficient that you can just sprinkle them anywhere you want. The vast majority of bugs are actually software bugs of some sort.

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