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Comment by sangnoir | Hacker News Reader

What exactly are they in denial about? They are aware that software is not a strength of theirs, so they partner with those who are great at it.

Would you say AMD is "shitting the bed" by not building it's own consoles too? You know AMD could build a kick-ass console since they are doing the heavy-lifting for the Playstation, and the XBox[1] , but AMD knows as much as anybody that they don't have the skills to wrangle studio relationships or figure out which games to finance. Instead, they lean hard in their HW skills and get Sony Entertainment/the Xbox division do what they do best.

1.and the Steam Deck, plus half a dozen Deck clones.

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There is probably one employee - either a direct report of Su's or maybe one of her grandchildren in the org chart - who needs to "get it". If they replaced that one manager with someone who sees graphics cards as a tool to accelerate linear algebra then AMD would be participating more effectively in a multi-trillion dollar market. They are so breathtakingly close to the minimum standards of competence on this one. We know from the specs that the cards they produce should be able to perform.

This is a case-specific example of failure, it doesn't generalise very well to other markets. AMD is really well positioned for this very specific opportunity of historic proportions and the only thing holding them back is a somewhat continuous stream of unforced failures when writing a high quality compute driver. It seems to be pretty close to one single team of people holding the company back although organisational issues tend to stem from a level or two higher than the team. This could be the most visible case of value destruction by a public company we'll see in our lifetimes.

Optimistically speaking maybe they've already found and sacked the individual responsible and we're just waiting for improvement. I'm buying Nvidia until that proves to be so.

It would go nowhere, games history is full of great hardware that died because they failed to have a profitable ecosystem.

Even Steam Deck is only a success, because it depends on Windows ecosystem, and the moment Microsoft decides it is enough, lets see how long it holds.

Steam Decks run on Arch Linux

As means to avoid paying for Windows licenses.

All the games that matter are Windows games running via Proton, as Valve has failed to actually build a GNU/Linux native games ecosystem, in spite of UNIX/POSIX underpinnings of Android NDK, PlayStation, the studios hardly bother.

The day Microsoft actually decides to challenge Proton, or do a netbooks move on handhelds with XBox OS/Windows, the SteamDeck will lose, just like the netboooks did.

Additionally, it is anyone's guess what will happen to Valve when Gabe steps down.

As a means of control

If they cared about control, they wouldn't depend on Windows ecosystem, rather foster GNU/Linux native games.

Everyone is quite curious what Microsoft will drop at CES 2025, and which OEMs will be on their side, it is going to be netbooks all over again.

They are literally fostering Linux games by selling and endorsing a platform where those games would be native as well as having native releases of their own games. They aren't gonna force any third-party devs to do the same, but they're showing that there is a market while also growing it.

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