points by smallmancontrov 3 days ago | 0 comments
AMD's "datacenter HPC without consumer HPC" strategy was one of the biggest corporate whiffs in history. If AMD had taken consumer GPGPU seriously at any point in the decade leading up to LLM takeoff, they wouldn't have had to stand on the sidelines for years as NVDA charged 80% margin on matrix multiplication. They could have had 1/2 or even 1/1 market cap compared to NVDA. Instead, they have a tenth, and even that's largely grace in the forward looking estimations.
[–] Fr0styMatt88 3 days ago
[–] SR2Z 3 days ago
Ha! That was certainly a card you had to be an enthusiast to put up with, with its 500W TDP :)
I have many pleasant memories of keeping myself warm just by opening Witcher 3 on my R9 390.
[–] FuriouslyAdrift 3 days ago
It's less AMD not doing commercial GPGPU than nVidia completely staying out of the PC and server market. Remember AMD competes with both of them (nVidia and Intel) and is smaller than both.
AMDs revenue this quarter just passed Intels for the first time in history and they still are dominating in the HPC market which is fairly immune to the AI bubble (while also selling everything they can build at a high premium to AI datacenters).
AMDs margins on their Instinct datacenter GPUs is nearly as good as nVidia's. They just can't get contract volume at TSMC to make more because nVidia buys all of it.
I miss the old days when they released enthusiast products like the R9 295X2. Though that’s just the gaming enthusiast market in general declining (not that this happened organically though, it feels like a deliberate choice).