> AMD is attempting to vertically integrate next year with their upcoming Pollara 400G NIC, which supports Ultra Ethernet, hopefully making AMD competitive with Nvidia.

Infiniband is an industry standard. It is weird to see the industry invent yet another standard to do effectively the same thing just because Nvidia is using it. This “Nvidia does things this way so let’s do it differently” mentality is hurting AMD:

  * Nvidia has a unified architecture so let’s split ours into RDNA and CDNA.
  * Nvidia has a unified driver, so let’s make a different driver for every platform.
  * Nvidia made a virtual ISA (PTX) for backward compatibility. Let’s avoid that.
  * Nvidia is implementing tensor cores. Let’s avoid those on RDNA. Then implement them on CDNA and call them matrix cores.
  * Nvidia is using Infiniband like the rest of the HPC community. Let’s use Ethernet.

I am sure people can find more examples. Also, they seem to have realized their mistake in splitting their architecture into RDNA and CDNA, since they are introducing UDNA in the future to unify them like Nvidia does.