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points by mickeyp 3 days ago | 0 comments

That says more about Intel's shambolic efforts than it does about AMD's road to damascus moment.

Honestly both of them have demonstrated that they have little interest in AI. Intel gave up on Optane right as (a much-improved successor) would've helped with MoE offsetting or even as a highly durable drive for KV caching.

AMD have... turned out some decent gaming graphics cards and fine server CPUs but little else.

People are out there solding SMDs on old Nvidia mining rig GPUs to use them for inference; their hardware is not depreciating at the normal rate you'd expect from GPUs. DGX spark is finally useful now that AI can write multi-machine inference tooling optimised to it. Where's AMD in all of this? Nowhere.

[–] AMDAnon 3 days ago

AMD is doing 5 day RTO for almost everyone with 3 months of notice in an obvious attempt to get people to quit before vesting their 5x stock grants.

The rule includes >90% of "remote" workers who have discovered they were classified as hybrid (a classification now eliminated) and their manager didn't make it official. Now, remote approvals are SVP level.

The issue is, AMD still pays significantly less than any company with an RTO mandate, even with the stock appreciation. And the stock has gone down 25% in the past few weeks so it's even less competitive. The typical engineer was not given an equity-weighted package, even L9 only 30% of your TC is in stock.

It's a recruiting bonanza right now and everyone's getting calls offering 50% pay bumps from 5-day office semi corps like Broadcom or Qualcomm. The better people are getting offers at Google or Apple for 3-day RTO for even greater TC bumps.

[–] mickeyp 3 days ago

I'm not surprised.

The board should've sacked the entire leadership team of Intel and AMD years and years ago.

The fact that you can sit through both a mining boom and now a generational AI boom and have little to show for it and still keep your job is a Yahoo!-level fumble.

[–] AMDAnon 3 days ago

They can't find new leaders! Sharon Zhou, VP who handles all our engagements with the frontier labs quit today to be an MTS at Anthropic. https://lnkd.in/p/g53S3-fG

Sharon was the AI Chief of Staff brought in through an acquihire, managed all the high-visibility external/internal AI engagements, reported directly into Lisa Su, and was being groomed to be Lisa's successor. Even with all that, she couldn't make it 2 years at AMD.

I don't see any way out of this hole. We can't fire our execs and promote internally because our internal directors/VPs are mostly non-technical. We've been trying to pull leadership in with acquihires but we've been losing them too. Best win was replacing Alan Lee w/ Anush Elangovan which finally got ROCm working but there's a massive re-org coming he might not survive.

[–] latchkey 3 days ago

Sharon was acqui-hired after Lamini failed to find product market fit, and she had to fire her co-founder Greg. Greg went to Tensorwave (another AMD play) and eventually quit there as well.

The way I look at it, AMD and others dumped $25m into a very early AI play that never was going to be successful. I don't fault them for trying.

There was no way she could even come close to successor of Lisa though. The grooming thing was a media play at best. Dr. Fei-Fei Li would be a heck of a lot more appropriate than Sharon.

Anush is excellent and turned around the software story. If he goes, the party is over.

[–] mickeyp 3 days ago

How sad.

I remember buying an AMD K6-2 back in the day as it was cheaper and better. I've dropped in and out of the AMD sphere depending on who was winning at the given moment.

Now they're both losing.

[–] NooneAtAll5 3 days ago

> our internal directors/VPs are mostly non-technical

why not start with trying to fix that?

[–] z3ratul163071 2 days ago

well, that explains everything.

unfortunately most us industry fell victim to this mba-ization of companies.

[–] georgeburdell 3 days ago

100% Lisa Su is a control freak and thought Zhou was a threat. Cult of personality CEOs do not generally end well for the company

[–] josh_frome 3 days ago

Jobs being the exception that proves the rule

[–] justsomehnguy 3 days ago

Jobs failed hard and was outed in the first place. And he didn't 'come back' he was quite literally bought in with NeXTSTEP. Don't forget $150M from Microsoft and the Office for Mac deal.

[–] LeFantome 2 days ago

NeXT software on lower end Apple hardware was a winning combination.

And the software ecosystem was already in place (even though everything had to be rewritten).

[–] cowlevel 3 days ago

He backed it up with actual product-building merit and enough (but not a lot of) reality-testing. His products were successful largely because of him. Too many copycats forget about the merit part of the equation.

[–] pjmlp 3 days ago

Not all products, NeXT was a major failure, with a few books telling the story how it all went down, only due to Apple's acquisition there was a moment that with Apple's remaining cash, and what was left of OpenSTEP, they managed to survive both companies.

Had Apple gone with Be instead, most likely all three companies would have gone bankrupt before 2000, and Pixar would be Jobs last successful company instead.

[–] amarcheschi 3 days ago

I can apply as a ceo if you accept master students. Having studied drama, I can definitely say I act better than pat gelsinger

[–] specialist 3 days ago

Sure, but do you have any missionary / evangelism experience?

[–] amarcheschi 3 days ago

Unfortunately no, but I can pray really hard maybe

[–] skew-aberration 3 days ago

You might be better qualified as a shareholder then

[–] z3ratul163071 2 days ago

"Even with all that, she couldn't make it 2 years at AMD." imagine how toxic and rotten the company must be from the inside

[–] chorsestudios 3 days ago

Ryzen series chips might not have been released if AMD's entire leadership team was sacked many years ago.

The heavy investments into HMB between SK Hynix & AMD might also not have happened. They went down this road before HMB demand popped off and it was a risky bet.

[–] throwaway85825 3 days ago

Rory Read doesn't get enough credit for saving AMD from bankrupty.

[–] kcb 3 days ago

What are we talking about in this thread. This post is literally about AMD revenue going wild during the AI boom.

[–] halJordan 3 days ago

Ok, I'm glad I'm not the crazy one. I wondered for a second lol

[–] ckastner 3 days ago

> This post is literally about AMD revenue going wild during the AI boom.

You mean going mild.

The $17bn that AMD is projecting to make mid-2026 is what NVIDIA was already making mid-2023.

Both companies were somewhat similar in revenue towards the end of 2022 (just before/around the ChatGPT launch), so it's not as if NVIDIA was already that far ahead in financial terms. But right around ChatGPT, NVIDIA went all-in on AI, for example by securing massive leading-edge capacity at TSMC, even outbidding Apple.

That's what the GP meant by "sitting out a generational AI boom".

[–] expedition32 2 days ago

And when the boom goes bust guess who will still be around chugging along?

[–] sofixa 3 days ago

Intel have gone through 3 leadership teams in 10ish years

[–] georgeburdell 3 days ago

They brought back some questionable former managers like the guy responsible for 14nm, Sanjay Natarajan, which was the first process to get stuck with a protracted period of low yields.

[–] mickeyp 3 days ago

Gosh, you're right. I thought it was just one.

[–] dingaling 3 days ago

"The fact that you can sit through both a mining boom and now a generational AI boom..."

It's not necessary for every company to 'revenue maxx' by jumping on every trend.

AMD made $3.5 billion in profit last year, money left over after all salaries were paid and all expenses were settled. It might be galling to this generation of avarists, but maybe that's enough?

'Doing a decent job' seems to have become seen as archaic these days, which explains much of how the stock market works. The line doesn't _have_ to keep going up faster and faster.

[–] kevin_thibedeau 3 days ago

AMD is also a hardware company with significantly more overhead than a software house that is swimming in margin.

[–] BobbyTables2 3 days ago

Even Yahoo has an AI and better search results than they did in the past…

I think Intel figured out way to be even worse…

[–] tiffanyh 3 days ago

Intel stock is down 49% in just the last month alone.

A lot of said gains have been erased.

[–] dboreham 3 days ago

Interesting data point as a stock holder, thanks.

[–] BeetleB 3 days ago

> The issue is, AMD still pays significantly less than any company with an RTO mandate

I'm sure they pay more than Intel ;-)

[–] zdw 3 days ago

AMD has their Strix/Gorgon Halo as a competitor to DGX Spark, which is at least in the ballpark in terms of bandwidth, and being x86 has some compatibility benefits.

If you wanted a GPU with 32GB of memory for AI tasks, the AMD AI Pro R9700 was (up until about a month ago) reasonably priced at ~$1300. It's not a RTX 5090 in terms of bandwidth and compute, but for the price and being actually purchasable it's a reasonable pick.

[–] mickeyp 3 days ago

I like to think that if there are wins to be had, the market will price that in.

Those cards are cheap because they're not really that amazing.

[–] 0xc133 3 days ago

Yeah, about that. Those cards all have MSRPs that have moved north by over $500 since launch.

[–] ethbr1 3 days ago

It's interesting having a quantifiable number of how much AMD was underinvesting in decent software for their hardware.

[–] mickeyp 3 days ago

Meanwhile, the 5090...

[–] wmf 3 days ago

This is somewhat true. A lot of AMD hardware is underpriced at launch because ROCm doesn't work yet. Then once ROCm is working the price moves up to what it should be.

[–] mort96 3 days ago

I never understood why some fraction of technologists seem convinced that Optane was this amazing thing that would've been awesome if only Intel hadn't killed it.

It never made sense. It's slower than RAM, and what do I get for it? Persistence? I don't want persistent RAM, I like the ability to reboot to solve problems, and storing stuff on a non-volatile mediums has all sorts of legal implications which it's easier to avoid.

It's more expensive and has less storage than SSDs, even though the main downside of SSDs is their high price per gigabyte and relatively low capacities.

It's going in the wrong direction for both use cases. I guess it could have a very niche use case as a super fast persistent caching layer in front of spinning rust but that's kinda it.

[–] sethhochberg 3 days ago

Having a very low latency, durable write destination is a superpower for lots of database architectures (or things that share architectural details with databases, like some filesystems).

Optane had much lower latency than other types of durable storage, and also had very good endurance compared to NAND.

At a prior employer, we made extensive use of them as ZFS SLOG drives for large database servers. They made fsync very inexpensive.

[–] mickeyp 3 days ago

Yep. I use a P4800X for ZFS special vdev. It's a monster. The thing has write endurance for many petabytes of write. The queue depth alone make for fast small reads; and the architecture means sustained reads and writes are... sustained. Try that with a normal SSD/NVME.

[–] mort96 3 days ago

Yeah that's the fast persistent cache layer more or less

[–] CodesInChaos 3 days ago

And instead of upgrading latency from NVMe SSDs to Optane, we downgraded to EBS.

[–] amluto 3 days ago

Optane was cheaper than DRAM per bit.

If Intel had volume production of Optane and had been able to quickly reconfigure it to produce a device that could stream out model weights fast enough for inference or could have gotten a read-write device that could hold KV caches effectively, they could have made an absolute killing in the current market.

HBF is slowly going after the former market. I'm not sure flash has a great answer for the latter due to endurance issues.

I can't think of any company that is as good as Intel at having a technology that's ready or almost ready at or before the time that the market is ready for it and then completely failing to sell the product into the newly developed market.

[–] ksec 1 day ago

>Optane was cheaper than DRAM per bit.

Optane was cheaper than DRAM per bit when DRAM was expensive. It price / performance didn't make sense as soon as the DRAM cycle took its dive and DRAM price became cheaper / normal / losing money depending on how or who you see and asked.

[–] ethbr1 3 days ago

Google?

[–] a_conservative 3 days ago

The other answers are hinting at it, but Optane was fundamentally much much lower latency than NAND flash used in SSDs.

SSDs use lots of tricks to hide this latency (using RAM). However, when the data is super critical, you can't just throw some data in RAM and hope that it gets written out.

Enterprise flash drives have battery backups and keep the system alive for a moment to flush out the writes, but Optane doesn't need special tricks to get this sort of durability, it just has it. The Optane can keep accepting writes, eventually the RAM of the SSD is filled, and then the write performance falls off a cliff. However, if your workload gives the storage device a breather to write out to flash, you wouldn't notice the difference.

If you have a large stream of critical data flowing in that has to be stored and can't be lost- Optane suddenly looks way better than SSDs

[–] addaon 3 days ago

> what do I get for it? Persistence?

Density. PCM is closer in bits-per-unit-area to Flash than to DRAM.

[–] mort96 3 days ago

Yeah but that doesn't help if it's too slow to use as DRAM

[–] addaon 3 days ago

It's another level in the hierarchy. DRAM is too slow to use as SRAM, but it's denser, so it has a place. Flash is too slow to use as DRAM (or PCM), but it's denser, so it has a place. Spinning rust. Tapes. Adding another layer between DRAM and Flash to take advantage of its unique trade-offs is not only reasonable, it's exactly what we always do.

[–] LtdJorge 3 days ago

Very low latency, extreme durability, super high IOPS. It's SLC without the problems of SLC. The problem is it was a bit early, the interfaces never were fast enough (x4 3.0), and software that could have benefitted from massive amounts of it greatly, came out too late for it.

The actual problem is Intel was in such a bad position, they needed to shed weight, and Optane was not quick money.

[–] mort96 3 days ago

In a DIMM slot though?

[–] lp92 3 days ago

Optane was available as PCIe cards and NVME. I have one of the PCIE 1.2TB drives as my OS drive.

[–] newsclues 3 days ago

Optane had multiple form factors and could have adopted modern connections.

[–] Silagi 3 days ago

Huh. I wrote a whole thing here about serving a niche in serving local LLMs, but turns out, any niche it could have served is probably better served (per dollar) by either more RAM or modern SSDs.

There's an argument to be made for the persistent memory being a cheaper substitute for more RAM, but imo the gap isn't big enough to justify it when considered as a % of the rest of the system you're building around it and the performance tradeoff.

Important reminder to check your biases. I was sure Optane had missed its mark by dropping out just before LLMs became a primary use case for high $ systems.

[–] AlotOfReading 3 days ago

There was a version of optane (optane DC?) that plugged into DIMM slots and cost less than RAM, with possible higher capacities. That would be a useful tradeoff had it kept up the advantage.

[–] amluto 3 days ago

Intel had multiple false starts on getting their platform ready for these devices to be used in a sensible manner. I have one of these false starts in a closet somewhere, and I did some kernel dev work for it. It was an incredible mess.

(I didn't actually have an Intel DIMM module -- I had a different vendor's. But fundamentally there needed to be a clean way to get data from software into the durable memory domain, and there wasn't. There also needed to be a clean way to talk to the module to get health information and to configure it to the extent it was configurable, and that didn't exist either. I wrote the kernel driver for the latter and submitted it upstream, and it probably could have gotten merged if Intel had assisted with the gnarly bits involving coordination with platform thermal firmware that shared the same SMBUS lines, but they didn't.)

[–] Silagi 3 days ago

That's the persistent memory modules; they were roughly half the price per GB compared to DDR4 from my quick research, but substantially higher memory latency, which would significantly affect usage as a KV cache, which would probably be their primary use case since SSDs beat it in raw data throughput. Who knows how it would have developed over the years since it was discontinued, but my gut reaction to the numbers said you'd rather just invest in more RAM based on the numbers I saw.

[–] epolanski 3 days ago

You can have very large MoE models run on small amounts of ram (or vram), if you can transfer the experts you need on the fly from ram to disk.

SSDs are good, but an improved Optane would've been better.

[–] cowlevel 3 days ago

Seems halfway between SSD and RAM just like SSD is halfway between RAM and HDD. There's no fixed number of tiers in the storage hierarchy.

[–] SR2Z 3 days ago

IIRC when it came out it was faster than the SSDs you could buy. It never really got that much better and then SSD mostly caught up.

[–] fc417fc802 3 days ago

More like they stopped investing in improving that tech so flash eventually caught up on throughput. It didn't catch up on latency and has never even entered the ballpark when it comes to endurance.

[–] Havoc 3 days ago

It's mostly not competitive by virtue of being old, but for specific use cases it still stomps the latest Gen5 nvme drives. Specifically on things that need low latency and fast QD1 performance.

Think metadata in a ZFS array or database writes.

Also crazy endurance - often an order of magnitude beyond even enterprise nvmes.

...and because the things are basically un-killable thanks to endurance you can safely pick up 2nd hand used ones.

So they're a neat trick if used in precisely the right application. Hence:

>some fraction of technologists

>would've been awesome if only Intel hadn't killed it.

Maybe - it would presumably have improved further for niche cases, but doubt it would have conquered mainstream markets.

[–] LoganDark 3 days ago

Sometimes, things are just cool.

[–] vivaldi_bt 3 days ago

It somewhat (maybe) had sense for HDD caching but I don't think HDDs in 2026 are used in cases where separate cache is needed.

[–] monk_grilla 3 days ago

Why must every company pivot to squeeze what they can out of every tech trend at the expense of everything else they do?

AMD makes excellent CPUs and GPUs, I'm ecstatic with the products I have purchased from them, and they are now beating their biggest competitor and profiting billions every year. What more do you want? Isn't this enough for a company in 2026?

[–] hnav 3 days ago

Obviously the whole semi industry must pivot to massively parallel matmul. Billions are now the equivalent of millions. You make trillions or no shot of a seat at the table once the winners are decided.

[–] Levitating 3 days ago

Not a publicly traded one no.

[–] monk_grilla 3 days ago

It is like the line that investors want to go up has moved another derivative down.

Velocity is not enough, acceleration is not enough, we now require jerk to go up.

[–] FuriouslyAdrift 3 days ago

AMD has an entire division dominating in HPC and #2 close behind nVidia in datacenters with extremely good margins. Over half their revenue is from those segments. Not a lot comes from consumer devices right now. That's why they did so well against Intel right now. Intel is the one that is failing in those markets.

[–] ksec 3 days ago

>That says more about Intel's shambolic efforts than it does about AMD's road to damascus moment.

This actually say more about Intel's heroic efforts in defending its turf.

I seriously doubt Intel has anything countering Instinct AI accelerators in terms of revenue slice. Which means despite Instinct AI accelerators having extra revenue, AMD's CPU sales is barely on par with Intel in Server Market.

We are talking about EPYC Zen 5 here and early Zen 6 revenue in late 2026. I have been banging on about the progress of AMD in server market for 5+ years. ( Edit: A quick search turns out to be 6 years [1] )

Given the price / performance AMD has had and Intel's perfect storm moment, 50% is all AMD manage to capture. I have been suggesting AMD being far too conservative with their capacity planning and has been leaving money on the table before even the AI craze on CPUs. Their sales team in Enterprise has not had the impact Intel managed. This is decades of relationship management Intel has had and utilised to the maximum.

At this rate I seriously doubt AMD will be able to compete when Intel is healed and back on their feet. ( But then Intel are well known to do stupid stuff so I guess it cancels out )

I hope Zen 6 will have more to show for. Right now it is not good enough on the CPU side. And on the GPU side not anywhere close to competing against Nvidia.

And this is speaking as someone who used to own ATI Rage 3D and bought AMD's stock at below $3.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23164306

[–] sofixa 3 days ago

> Where's AMD in all of this? Nowhere.

They're around, selling AMD Strix Halo (up to 128GB unified memory) on the low, equivalent to DGX Spark, level; and MI* chips for enterprise AI inference.

The problem they have and they've always had is that everyone uses CUDA. ROCm works, but everyone's toolchain is CUDA exclusive or CUDA first, so it's much harder to use AMD hardware.

Using higher level tooling (vLLM, llama.cpp) I have DGX Spark comparable performance for 1/3 the price (but without the same software out of the box experience nor the clustering network options).

[–] pachouli-please 3 days ago

Not to forget AMDs dominance in performance per dollar in CPUs of any variety up until very recently on basically all fronts. Consumer, handheld/low power, server, you name it.

Intel finally has really great low power/budget answers, but still loses greatly to 3d cache chips on most workloads.

[–] adgjlsfhk1 3 days ago

Intel's newest gen is a pretty clear favorite for laptops (especially with their better wifi/bluetooth/USB chipsets). Outside of laptop though, Intel has nothing compelling.

[–] pachouli-please 3 days ago

Totally. That's what I was vaguely (from mobile, sorry) trying to give them credit for. Their latest low power stuff is genuinely good, and their iGPUs are catching up fast.

[–] Twirrim 3 days ago

For what it's worth, AMD is very actively pushing GPU hardware, particularly towards the hyperscalers. From what I've seen, they're really focusing in on the large quantity end users (your OpenAI, Meta, etc. types), presumably because they'll have the technical expertise and willingness to collaborate with them on issues as long as the GPUs are cheap enough.

[–] senderista 3 days ago

Persistent memory will be back, it's just too compelling to give up on, and thanks to the research industry it spawned we have a pretty good idea of how to build systems that effectively exploit it. I can't wait until every DB can use pmem to achieve the holy grail of low-latency transactional durability (which is impossible today even with NVMe).

[–] esseph 3 days ago

> Optane

Optane really died before LLMs went big. I was at an enterprise using a TON of them, often for SAP HANA workloads.

> AMD have... turned out some decent gaming graphics cards and fine server CPUs but little else.

I'm on a AMD desktop, using an AMD gpu, next to a gaming console using an AMD CPU and GPU, making large DC purchasing decisions where intel hasn't even shown up as a factor.

[–] glitchc 3 days ago

AND GPUs are competitive on a price/performance standpoint. Their software stack is where they fall behind.

[–] rubiquity 3 days ago

And they are making great progress on the software side. ROCm 10 is significantly better than 7.x

[–] alfiopuglisi 3 days ago

Honest question, couldn't one just ask Claude to make a better driver for it? And reimplement pytorch on top of that or something?

[–] pachouli-please 3 days ago

The community is basically doing this now with the kickflips in driver/rocm/etc "stuff". It's gotten so good and well-embraced that even AMD is backing some of these community efforts.

[–] mpreda 3 days ago

Do you have some pointers to these efforts, please?

[–] aclmakes 3 days ago

halogen. made by a user, one of the early, best model serving things for a strixhalo. amd community engaging person saw it was well liked, and sent that developer 2 strix halos to help them develop it further.

ive seen that same amd community manager engage on reddit and actively pull in changes into lemonade server, for better ways to serve up models best on the strixhalo hardware. so they're accepting community help where it helps.

[–] f6v 3 days ago

Is there something wrong with PyTorch? I’ve heard people complain a lot about their GPUs. I’ve only used MI250x in an HPC, but PyTorch worked fine.

[–] p_l 3 days ago

It's due to ROCm, think equivalent of CUDA lower level drivers, which is well problematic.

There's huge upswing in using Vulkan Compute which works across NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel (and even others), and which is apparently much easier and stable to run on AMD

[–] kcb 3 days ago

Huh? Instinct is basically the only real alternative to Nvidia in the market. And they have the only real rack scale competition with Helios. This revenue is not because of gaming gpus and server cpus. This literally is AMDs road to damascus moment with data center GPUs.

[–] redanddead 3 days ago

> That says more about Intel's shambolic efforts

I was going to say… everybody even government is coming together to make intel work but it’s in shambles

Haven’t they benefited a lot from the chips act?

[–] LtdJorge 3 days ago

AMD Instinct sells like hot cakes. EPYC for AI servers sells like hot cakes. Optane was killed much earlier than KV caching or MoE became somewhat relevant. ???

[–] kcb 3 days ago

Everything I've read so far just has me believe 75% of the comments didn't even open the article.

[–] AnimalMuppet 3 days ago

You could be right, and not just for this one article.

[–] mortsnort 3 days ago

Doesn't Intel have near cutting edge fabs tho? Even if their own AI chips aren't great, aren't they getting contracts to make Nvidia and Apple chips?

[–] prcrstntr 3 days ago

Chicken and Egg problem when everyone else is on TSMC

[–] platevoltage 3 days ago

Even Intel uses TSMC for the stuff their fabs can't handle.

[–] vlyan 3 days ago

>AMD have... turned out some decent gaming graphics cards

that's quite a large market and their only competitor has moved on to greener pastures.

[–] LtdJorge 3 days ago

It's a very small market, and really low margin compared to AI/datacenter. DC GPUs are 90% margin, and bought by the millions.

[–] vlyan 2 days ago

it's only a small market in the clown world funded by the infinite money printer. it is the world we live in, yes, but it won't last forever.

[–] LtdJorge 2 days ago

Even if there was no AI, GPUs have always been a small market. I've been gaming on PC from the start, but there's actually not that many of us as we might think.

[–] SirFatty 3 days ago

"road to damascus"

Great Hope and Crosby movie.

[–] everdrive 3 days ago

>Honestly both of them have demonstrated that they have little interest in AI. Awesome? Maybe this means supply wont be ruined and I'll be able to buy CPUs.

[–] cyanydeez 2 days ago

uh, what? the AMD 395+ strix halo would have been a huge success if the price of ram wasn't gouged to hell by the cartel. Even their 192GB version would have a better story in the same.

Ya'll sniff Apple farts like it's no tomorrow.

[–] LogicFailsMe 3 days ago

What's more interesting to me is how blisteringly evident it is that GPUs depreciate a lot slower than the analysts assumed. But Nvidia GPUs depreciate slowly because a lot of thought and resources were dedicated into building that ecosystem.

AMD has always been an also ran in this space and it shows to this day, but the true believers cannot be dissuaded of their faith so whatevs.

I honestly think Nvidia needs a worthy nemesis right now more than ever and I wish it existed but I don't think it does... Yet...

[–] jojogeo 3 days ago

Ahh TIL! I used ChatGPT to find out what your "..road to damascus moment." expression meant, it was quite complimentary to you;

> And honestly, "Intel's shambolic efforts" alongside "AMD's Road to Damascus moment" is rather delicious phrasing. The author has managed to deliver quite a sophisticated insult in a single sentence.

[–] bobmcnamara 3 days ago

Intel pirated Optane and bailed when they got caught, seemed unrelated to AI, just Intel being Intel.

[–] trynumber9 3 days ago

What? They co-developed Optane with Micron and Micron gave up on it before Intel did.

[–] bobmcnamara 2 days ago

Intel and micron licensed the 3D XPoint nonvolatile memory cell from Ovshinsky/Ovonyx, then bled them dry by delaying royalties, eventually stopping payment altogether until they went under.

Eventually someone in the know bought the husk of Ovonyx and sued Intel.

[–] LtdJorge 3 days ago

Intel sold it to Micron, tho

[–] trynumber9 3 days ago

Micron bought IM Flash after development was ceased. But they stopped selling Xpoint products before Intel stopped selling Optane.

[–] bobmcnamara 2 days ago

Inten never bought it from Ovonyx, so how could they sell it?