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Comment by frozenport | Hacker News Reader

+1 on the AMD are morons train.

AMD recently got rid of one of the CUDA compatibility layers instead of extending it.

Chasing compatibility is a waste of time and ultimately counterproductive. The important software is open source, they can just add direct support for their stuff. What they need to do is fix the stability of their drivers, make their stuff work on every GPU they sell or have sold in the past few years (as CUDA always has), and pay employees to integrate support into all the popular open source projects while fixing every bug that gets reported.

And they need to release high-RAM versions of their next gaming GPUs. More than anything else that will incentivize people to switch. If they're selling 36 GB while Nvidia is still selling 24 GB, people will do what it takes to move over.

> What they need to do is fix the stability of their drivers, make their stuff work on every GPU they sell or have sold in the past few years (as CUDA always has), and pay employees to integrate support into all the popular open source projects while fixing every bug that gets reported.

This takes a ton of employees which is hard for a company with a fraction of the software employees of Nvidia. (On that note there's 1185 engineering job postings on the AMD site right now... https://careers.amd.com/careers-home/jobs?categories=Enginee...)

Skimping on software is penny wise and pound foolish. This is worth a trillion in market cap. If it cost a hundred billion dollars it would still be worth it. They need to swallow their pride, admit they've been wrong this whole time, and start hiring software engineers like crazy.

That's why they have like 1000 job postings in a market where nobody is hiring. I keep trying to convince people I know to apply, but they think they're not good enough for some reason.

They didn't get rid of it, they dropped development and released it as open source.

> they dropped development and released it as open source.

"They" (being AMD) didn't. The person they contracted put in a clause that allowed him to open source the work (years AFTER) AMD stopped paying him.

I don't think the person put in the cluse by himself, surely AMD would have known and agreed to it. They would own the output of any of his work anyways, it was only with their approval was he was allowed to take ownership or release it. I do think this is splitting hairs, AMD isn't the savor here but I wouldn't say they don't get any credit either.

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