Maybe AMD fears antitrust action, or maybe there is something about its underlying hardware approach that would limit competitiveness, but the company seems to have left billions of dollars on the table during the crypto mining GPU demand spike and now during the AI boom demand spike.
When I think of AMD ignoring machine learning, I can't help imagine a future YouTuber's voiceover explaining how this caused their downfall.
There's a tendency sometimes to think "they know what they're doing, they must have good reasons". And sometimes that's right, and sometimes that's wrong. Perhaps there's some great technical, legal, or economic reason I'm just not aware of. But when you actually look into these things, it's surprising how often the answer is indeed just shortsightedness.
They could end up like BlackBerry, Blockbuster, Nokia, and Kodak. I guess it's not quite as severe, since they will still have a market in games and therefore may well continue to exist, but it will still be looked back on as a colossal mistake.
Same with Toyota ignoring electric cars.
I'm not an investor, but I still have stakes in the sense that Nvidia has no significant competition in the machine learning space, and that sucks. GPU prices are sky high and there's nobody else to turn to if there's something about Nvidia you just don't like or if they decide to screw us.
Also, ignoring is a strong word: I’m staring at a little << $1000, silent 53 watt mini-PC with an AMD SoC. It has an NPU comparable to an M1. In a few months, with the ryzen 9000 series, NPUs for devices of its class will bump from 16 tops to 50 tops.
I’m pretty sure the linux taint bit is off, and everything just worked out of the box.
* https://www.levels.fyi/companies/amd/salaries/software-engin...
* https://www.levels.fyi/companies/nvidia/salaries/software-en...
And it's probably better now. Nvidia was paying much more long before, also their stock growing attracts even more talent.
Rumor is that ML engineers (that AMD really needs) are expensive; and AMD doesn't want to give them more money than the rest of the SWEs they have (for pissing off the existing SWEs). So AMD is caught in a bind: can't pay to get top MLE talent and can't just sit by and watch NVDA eat its lunch.
Culturally, none of these companies were happy to pay anyone except the tip, top "distinguished" engineers more than 300K. AMD seems to be stuck in this mentality, just as IBM is.
And that's why creative destruction is essential for technological progress. It's common for organizations to get stuck in stable-but-suboptimal social equilibria: everyone knows there's a problem but nobody can fix it. The only way out is to make a new organization and let the old one die.
This isn't being caught in a bind. This is, if true, just making a poor decision. Nothing is really preventing them from paying more for specialized work.
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/jensen-huang-and-lisa-su-f...
If they are found colluding due to nepotism, both will get a very swift revocation of business licence and a huge prison term. Remember they are just one step of kinship away from presumed collusion.