Comment by paulmd

it's also worth pointing out that you have abdicated driver support on those currently-sold Zen2/3 APUs with Vega as well... they are essentially legacy-support/security-update-only. And again, I'm sure you see it as "2017 hardware" but you launched hardware with it going into 2021 and that hardware is still for sale, and in fact you continue to sell quite a few Zen2/3 APUs in other markets as well.

if you want to get traction/start taking ground, you have to actually support the hardware that's in people's PCs, is what I'm saying. The "we support CDNA because it is a direct sale to big customers who pay us money to support it" is good for the books, but it leads to exactly this place you've found yourselves in terms of overall ecosystem. You will never take traction if you don't have the CUDA-style support model both for hardware support/compatibility and software support/compatibility.

it is telling that Intel, who is currently in equally-dire financial straits, is continuing to double-down on their software spending. At one point they were running -200% operating margins on the dGPU division, because they understand the importance. Apple understands that a functional runtime and a functional library/ecosystem are table stakes too. It literally, truly is just an AMD problem, which brings us back to the vision/locus-of-control problems with the leadership. You could definitely have done this instead of $12 billion of stock buybacks in 2021/2022 if you wanted to, if absolutely nothing else.

(and again, I disagree with the notion that every single other dollar was maximized and AMD could not have stretched themselves a dollar further in any other way - they just didn't want to do that for something that was seen as unimportant.)