Comment by est31
22 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?
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.
Except neither AMD, nor Intel, or Google, ever delivered anything with OpenCL that could match CUDA tooling, libraries, or choice of programming languages.
Additionally their drivers were never great.
IIRC Mantle was co-developed by DICE, I think DICE may have even had the initial idea and done the prototyping.
Here's a video where John Carmack, Tim Sweeney, and Johan Andersson (from Dice) talks about AMD Mantle in 2013: https://youtu.be/MH2hjhcfWic?t=4975 Carmack is sceptical, Sweeney likes it but doesn't want yet another API.
And here's another video where Andersson talks about the motivation behind Mantle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KApdf4P2Iak
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.
I wonder if the lack of a "consumer GPU vision" is sort of a forced conclusion.
With ~15% of the market, it's going to be very difficult to pull the market in a direction you want, so you're forced to say "I can offer you what nVidia does, but cheaper"
AMD pulls the market with near 100% of consoles.
PC vs console is weird. They are different markets but you'd think the x86 based PS5 would have more pull these days.
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Ryzen wasn't "catching up". Ryzen was literally inventing the future. It was stubbornly insisting on shipping on chiplets on a fabric at a time where intel and nvidia were both insistent on monolithic as the right choice.
The GPUs aren't playing catch up either, They're the shared memory APU systems. widely celebrated as novel on the current Apple silicon and shipping in configuration since the playstation 4.
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.