Comment by paulmd

I mean, you say there was “just no money” but AMD signed a deal over three years ago to acquire Xilinx for $50b. They’ve been on an acquisition spree in fact. Just not anything related to gpgpu, because that wasn’t a priority.

Yes, after you spend all your money there’s nothing left. Just like after refusing the merger with nvidia and then spending all the cash buying ati there was nothing left. Times were very tough, ATI and consoles kept the company afloat after spending all their money overpaying for ATI put you there in the first place. Should have done the merger with nvidia and not depleted your cash imo.

More recently could easily have spent 0.5% of the money you spent on Xilinx and 10x’d your spend on GPGPU development for 10 years instead. That was 2020-2021 - it’s literally been 5+ years since things were good enough to spend $50 billion on a single acquisition.

You also spent $4b on stock buybacks in 2021... and $8 billion in 2022... and geohotz pointed out your runtime still crashed on the sample programs on officially-supported hardware/software in 2023, right?

Like the assertion that a single dime spent in any other fashion than the way it happened would have inevitably led to AMD going under while you spend an average of tens of billions of dollars a year on corporate acquisitions is silly. Maybe you legitimately believe that (and I have no doubt times were very very bad) but I suggest that you’re not seeing the forest for the trees there. Software has never been a priority and it suffered from the same deprioritizing as the dGPU division and Radeon generally (in the financial catastrophe in the wake of the ATI debacle). Raja said it all - gpus were going away, why spend money on any of it? You need some low end stuff for apus, they pulled the plug on everything else. And that was a rational, albeit shortsighted, decision to keep the company afloat. But that doesn’t mean it’s the only course which could have done that, that’s a fallacy/false logic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7aGC6Sp8zQ

I also frankly think there is a real concerning problem with AMD and locus-of-control, it's a very clear PTSD symptom both for the company and the fans. Some spat with Intel 20 years ago didn't make AMD spend nearly a hundred billion dollars on acquisitions and stock buybacks instead of $100m on software. Everything constantly has to tie back to someone else rather than decisions that are being made inside the company - you guys are so battered and broken that (a) you can't see that you're masters of your own destiny now, and (b) that times are different now and you both have money to spend now and need to spend it. You are the corporate equivalent of a grandma eating rotten food despite having an adequate savings/income, because that's how things were during the formative years for you. You have money now, stop eating rotten food, and stop insisting that eating rotten food is the only way to survive. Maybe 20 years ago, but not today.

I mean, it's literally been over 20 years now. At what point is it fair to expect AMD leadership to stand by their own decisions in their own right? Will we see decisions made in 2029 be justified with "but 25 years ago..."? 30 years? More? It's a problem with you guys: if the way you see it is nothing is ever your responsibility or fault, then why would you ever change course? Which is exactly what Lisa Su is saying there. I don't expect a deeply introspective postmortem of why they lost this one, but at least a "software is our priority going forward" would be important signaling to the market etc. Her answer isn't that, her answer is everything is going great and why stop when they're winning. Except they're not.