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Comment by Rinzler89

19 days ago

CUDA was released to consumers in 2006. AMD had plenty of time to counteract that with their own well before the AI boom, especially since back then they now had both CPUs and GPUs under the same roof meaning they actually had an advantage on paper over Nvidia at the time.

It was even their initiative back then called Fusion, and because of that I though AMD would end up overtaking both Intel who could only do CPUs and Nvidia who could only do GPUs. Instead their APUs turned out to be just mediocre CPUs and GPUs at beast without ani killer apps/features, and so lost both markets and had to struggle to regain at least the CPU sector but mostly because Intel was complacent and incompetent on the architecture and manufacturing sides.

Also what does "oppty" from the title mean?

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Rinzler89

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dragontamer  19 days ago

AMD had plenty of OpenCL investments as well as C++Amp, which IMO is much cleaner than CUDA. The idea of a Microsoft-led revolution in GPU-compute isn't bad, especially coinciding with C++11 Lambda functions and whatnot.

That obviously didn't work out, but you can't say that AMD didn't do anything for those years. Especially as AMD was falling into bankruptcy at the time, it was clear that AMD needed to rely upon others to take on the risk of new APIs.

I'm still curious how Microsoft screwed the pooch here. Windows8 was seen as a failure, but I think I can safely say that C++AMP / ConcRT / etc. etc. were well designed APIs. AMD lost some momentum here, and had to do a CUDA-based API for ROCm moving forward a few years later.

  • est31  19 days ago

    I'm not sure why AMD has bet on Windows. The SFX industry has always been using Linux, and various Unixes before that. All the big clusters also run Linux. If they wanted to steal market share from Nvidia, then why also convince people to switch to Windows? Maybe their target customer was someone who has a workstation with one or two GPUs?

    • dragontamer  19 days ago

      The Linux bets were OpenCL 2.0 and later Vulkan.

      Remember that NVidia basically stalled out on OpenCL 1.2, purposefully to encourage CUDA adoption. AMD actually moved forward, though their OpenCL2.0 wasn't that good either... it at least existed.

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      AMD's APUs culminated in XBox One / PS4 APIs, which actually have a substantial market share in the console market.

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      Vulkan on Linux is working out pretty well today. I don't think anyone would have picked that as the strongest API 10 years ago. Remember that in 2010s, "Vulkan" was known as "AMD Mantle" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mantle_(API)).

      Even as AMD was going bankrupt in the early 2010s, they had plenty of software investments. Some of these investments (Mantle/Vulkan) even worked out.

      3 replies →

    • blihp  19 days ago

      The tweet thread makes it clear: AMD has consistently based future strategy on the past which is why they were so ill-prepared for every major non-PC trend this century in CPUs until Ryzen. (which was basically catching up + much better value than Intel) This also translates to their GPUs where they seem to have absolutely no consumer GPU vision beyond 'we want some of what nVidia's getting.' Their current strategy seems to be weaker hardware + weak compute drivers + a little cheaper than nVidia = success.

      4 replies →

    • JonChesterfield  17 days ago

      The windows stuff is fallout from graphics coming from games dev and that industry being mostly windows based. Not really a conscious bet on windows being a good idea for compute, just what the first set of graphics customers happened to be using years ago.

  • 42lux  19 days ago

    AMDs investment in OpenCL and RoCM before the FOMO of the last years was only for the checkbox they never showed real intend. Especially on consumer hardware...

  • pjmlp  19 days ago

    C++AMP was more a POC than anything else.

    The work on ConcRT and WinRT is on the genesis of C++ Co-routines, initially proposed by Microsoft to WG21.

    Anything else, Microsoft has always been more interested in doing compute via DirectX, aka DirectCompute.

    I will leave the WinRT/UWP rant for another day.

    • dragontamer  19 days ago

      > C++AMP was more a POC than anything else.

      Everything starts somewhere. I'd say C++Amp was better than OpenCL 2.0 ever got (since OpenCL2.0 is basically nonexistant), and if you were fine being on Windows-only, it was better than OpenCL1.2.

      Developer tooling was loads better on C++Amp than OpenCL ever got honestly, mostly because C++Amp leveraged DirectCompute.

      > Anything else, Microsoft has always been more interested in doing compute via DirectX, aka DirectCompute.

      Well yeah, but DirectCompute is in its own little language / world (much like OpenCL). Its HLSL, not C++ directly.

      What makes CUDA easier to use was that C++ integration. So C++Amp, which took true C++ Lambda functions and automagically compiled them into DirectCompute really made it easier to perform all these computations.

      I get that Microsoft is still investing into DirectCompute today, but Microsoft is missing out on some fundamental features of CUDA (ie: one source C++).

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      Well, C++AMP has been dead for a decade now, so not much use reminiscing now. But it could have been great IMO with more investment and confidence. Bring C++Amp to DirectX12 so that 64-bit was usable, then start building Thrust-like (CPU-side helper libraries that utilize GPUs) or CUB-like libraries (GPU-side helper libraries).

      > I will leave the WinRT/UWP rant for another day.

      Don't worry, I think everyone in the industry is universally frustrated at this!

      I'm just trying to remind people where AMD was during this period.

      2 replies →