I was todays years old, when I found out that Lisa Su (CEO of AMD) and Jensen Huang (co-founder and CEO of NVIDIA) are relatives!
If you can't do a merge, it's good to have family onboard ;-)
> please don’t think of AMD as an x86 company, we are a computing company, and we will use the right compute engine for the right workload.<p>Love that quote.
It is good to mention the AMD's Steam Deck CPU [1] running in the Steam Deck [2] and not less important that the Steam Deck also has Linux (and KDE) incorporated [3].<p>[1] <a href="https://www.techpowerup.com/cpu-specs/steam-deck-cpu-lcd.c3397" rel="nofollow">https://www.techpowerup.com/cpu-specs/steam-deck-cpu-lcd.c33...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://store.steampowered.com/steamdeck" rel="nofollow">https://store.steampowered.com/steamdeck</a><p>[3] <a href="https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/671A-4453-E8D2-323C" rel="nofollow">https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/671A-4453-E8D2-32...</a>
I have endless admiration for Lisa Su, but lets be honest, the reason AMD and Nvidia are so big today is that Intel has had amazingly bad management since about 2003.<p>They massively botched the 32-bit to 64-bit transition....I did some work for the first Itanium, and everybody knew even before it came out that it would never show a profit. And they were contractually obligated to HP to not make 64-bit versions of the x86....so we just had to sit there and watch while AMD beat us to 1 Gigahertz, and had the 64-bit x86 market to itself....<p>When they fired Pat Gelsinger, their doom was sealed. Thank God they hired him back, but now they are in the same position AMD and Nvidia used to be in: Intel just has to wait for Nvidia and AMD to have bad management for two straight decades....
This article inspired me to check out the respective market caps for Intel and AMD. Hell of a turnaround! I remember the raging wars between the Pentiums and the Athlons. Intel won. The GPU wars between Nvidia and ATI; Nvidia won. Thereafter AMD, the supposed loser to Intel, absorbed ATI, the supposed loser to Nvidia. But I love that the story didn't end there. Look at what AMD did with Sony PlayStation (extensively discussed in this interview)...and that's without getting into the contemporary GPU AI revolution that's likely driving AMD's $250+ billion market cap. Epic!
And yet they still can't solve the problem of their GPU driver/software stack for ML being much worse than NVidia's. It seems like the first step is easy: pay more for engineers. AMD pays engineers significantly less than NVidia, and it's presumably quite hard to build a competitive software stack while paying so much less. You get what you pay for.
Omg. I know this is mostly marketing speaking, but this is her reply when asked about AMD's reticence to software:<p>> Well, let me be clear, there’s no reticence at all. [...] I think we’ve always believed in the importance of the hardware-software linkage and really, the key thing about software is, we’re supposed to make it easy for customers to use all of the incredible capability that we’re putting in these chips, there is complete clarity on that.<p>I'm baffled how clueless these CEOs sometimes seem about their own product. Like, do you even realize that this the reason why Nvidia is mopping the floor with your stuff? Have you ever talked to a developer who had to work with your drivers and stack? If you don't start massively investing on that side, Nvidia will keep dominating despite their outrageous pricing. I really want AMD to succeed here, but with management like that I'm not surprised that they can't keep up. Props to the interviewer for not letting her off the hook on this one after she almost dodged it.