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Comment by wmf | Hacker News Reader

Something that isn't really talked about is that Tiny Corp has been kind of working against AMD's interests. Tinybox is/was about replacing MI300s with much cheaper 7900 XTXs. I'm not terribly surprised to discover that AMD is not investing in ROCm on consumer cards (which are a different architecture) even though they're technically supported.

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No one would be buying A100's if CUDA hadn't been supported on all desktop Nvidia cards for years. Desktop cards provide an accessible on ramp to the ecosystem. PhD grads with boxes of desktop cards turn into the purchasers of data center chips.

Nvidia was forced to do that because it was so early, they had no customers except PhDs. I see no evidence AMD wants to do that right now, and instead focusing on extracting value from deep pocket enterprise customers.

The way things go, I think the AMD consumer card experience will only get better once AMD manage to gimp consumer cards’ ML throughput or RAM.

> The way things go, I think the AMD consumer card experience will only get better once AMD manage to gimp consumer cards’ ML throughput or RAM.

Que? Making things worse will make things better?

They'll let you do some things on a consumer card as soon as they can make sure that you can't effectively use the consumer card in place of an enterprise card.

so, artificial market segmentation?

...that's exactly how you get disruptive competition.

It's worth noting this is a game nvidia has already been playing for a long time by intentionally limiting the performance of higher precision floating point operations on consumer cards.

If you ask ML engineers now 100% will have started on desktop cards. Trying to squeeze the most money out of everyone just makes the ecosystem fail.

Look at IBM, they sell technologies that no one uses until they get hired to work on them specifically. It's profitable enough but it's not a way to grow the ecosystem/market.

I think you are preaching to the choir, and AMD is not listening.

AMD would be selling 48GB 7900s or AI-only W7900s if they really wanted a consumer card ramp.

They don't. Not because they can't (they literally prevent OEMs from doing so, who would double up VRAM in a heartbeat without AMD lifting a finger), but because AMD doesn't want that.

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