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Comment by stefan_ | Hacker News Reader

I mean, all these smart people would rather pay NVIDIA all their money than make AMD viable. And yet they tell us its all MatMul.

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It's not their job to make AMD viable, it's AMD's job to make AMD viable. NVIDIA didn't get their position for free, they spent a decade refining CUDA and its tooling before GPU-based crypto and AI kicked off.

Both companies are doing pretty well. Why don't you think AMD is viable?

AMD's ROCm just isn't there yet compared to Nvidia's CUDA. I tried it on Linux with my AMD GPU and couldn't get things working. AFAIK on Windows it's even worse.

That entirely depends on what AMD device you look at: gaming GPUs are not well supported, but their instinct line of accelerators works just as well as cuda. keep in mind that, in contrast to Nvidia, AMD uses different architectures for compute and gaming (though they are changing that in the next generation)

The litimus test would be if you read in the news that Amazon, Microsoft, Google or Meta just bought billions in GPUs from AMD.

They are and have been buying AMD CPUs for a while now, which says something about AMD and Intel.

Microsoft and Meta are running customer facing LLM workloads on AMD's graphics cards. Oracle seems to like them too. Google is doing the TPU thing with Broadcom and Amazon seems to have decided to bet on Intel (in a presumably fatal move but time will tell). We'll find some more information on the order book in a couple of weeks at earnings.

I like that the narrative has changed from "AI only runs on Cuda" to "sure it runs fine on AMD if you must"

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