Do you expect them to be able to capitalize on the AI fad so much (and quickly enough!) that it's worth dropping the ball on projects they're now doing well in? Or perhaps continue investing into the part of the market where they're doing much better than nVidia?
They very much plan to compete in this space, and hope to ship $3.5B of these chips in the next year. Small compared to Nvidia's revenues of $59B (includes both consumer and data centre), but AMD hopes to match them. It's too big a market to ignore, and they have the hardware chops to match Nvidia. What they lack is software, and it's unclear if they'll ever figure that out.
The margins on supercompute-related sales are very high. Simplifying, but you can basically take a consumer chip, unlock a few things, add more memory capacity, relicense, and your margin goes up by a huge factor.
So, again, it's not at all clear that AMD being in the compute GPU game is the automatic win for them in the future. There's plenty of companies that killed themselves trying to run after big profitable new fad markets (see: Nokia and Windows Phone, and many other cases).
So let's examine that - does AMD actually have a good shot of taking a significant chunk of market that will offset them not investing in some other market?
the hardware is already good enough, people would be happy to use it and accept that's it's not quite as optimized for DL as Nvidia.
people would even accept that the software is not as optimized as CUDA, I think, as long as it is correct and reasonably fast.
the problem is just that every time i've tried it, it's been a pain in the ass to install and there are always weird bugs and crashes. I don't think it's hubris to say that they could fix these sorts of problems if they had the will.
It's a pure business decision based on simple math.
If the estimated revenues from selling to the underserved market are higher than the cost of funding the project (they probably are, considering the obscene margins from NVIDIA), then it's a no-brainer.
Read an article about it recently, but when trying to remember the details / find it again just now I'm not seeing it. :(
In rational world their stock price would collapse if they don’t focus on it and are unable to deliver anything competitive in the upcoming year or two
> of the market where they're doing much better than nVidia?
So the market that’s hardly growing, Nvidia is not competing in and Intel still has bigger market share and is catching up performance wise? AMD’s valuation is this highly only because they are seen as the only company that could directly compete with Nvidia in the data center GPU market.
Nvidia could always just half their prices one day, and wipe out every non-state-funded competitor. But Nvidia prefers to collect their extreme margins and funnel it into even more R&D in AI.
You’re right about that but it seems that it’s pretty clear that not being in the compute GPU game is an automatic loss for them (look at their recent revenue growth in the past quarter and two by in each sector)
The big issue for Intel is pretty similar to that of AMD; everything is made for CUDA, and Intel has to either build their own solutions or convince people to build support for Intel. While I'm working on learning AI and plan to use an Nvidia card, its pretty the progress Intel has made in the last couple of years since introducing their first GPU to market has been pretty wild, and I think it really give AMD pause.