How effective has this been in the past, though? Everyone kind of did their hedging about switching to ARM because Intel wanted too much money, but Intel still seems to be the default on every cloud provider. AMD kind of came back out of nowhere and kept x86_64 viable, which seems to be more helpful to Intel than hurtful.
Basically, the only proven strategy is to wait for AMD to blow up the competition on their own accord. Even then, "hey no need to rewrite your code, you could always buy a compatible chip from AMD" doesn't seem that bad for Intel. But, maybe Nvidia has better IP protections here, and AMD can't introduce a drop-in replacement, so app developers have to "either or" Nvidia/AMD.
At the risk of eating my words later: AMD will never be competitive with Nvidia. They don't have the money, the talent, or the strategy. They haven't had a competitive architecture at the top end (i.e. enterprise level) since the ATI days. The only way they could take over AI at this point is if Jensen leaves and the new CEO does an Intel and fails for fifteen years straight.
Right, and Zen (I'm assuming you mean Zen) was great--but it succeeded only because Intel did nothing for years and put themselves in a position to fail. If Intel had tried to improve their products instead of firing their senior engineers and spending the R&D money on stock buybacks, it wouldn't have worked.
We can see this in action: RDNA has delivered Zen-level improvements (actually, more) to AMD's GPUs for several years and generations now. It's been a great turnaround technically, but it hasn't helped, because Nvidia isn't resting on their laurels and posted bigger improvements, every generation. That's what makes the situation difficult. There's nothing AMD can do to catch up unless Nvidia starts making mistakes.
They already are. The artificial limits on vram have significantly crippled pretty much the entire generation (on the consumer side).
On the AI side, rocm is rapidly catching up, though it’s nowhere near parity and I suspect Apple may take the consumer performance lead for a while in this area.
Intel is… trying. They tried to enter as the value supplier but also wanted too much for what they were selling. The software stack has improved exponentially however, and battlemage might make them a true value offering. With any luck, they’ll set amd and nvidia’s buns to the fire and the consumer will win.
Because the entire 4xxx generation has been an incredible disappointment, and amd pricing is still whack. Though the 7800xt is the first reasonably priced card to come out since the 1080, and has enough vram to have decent staying power and handle the average model.
I keep hearing conflicting accounts of ROCm. It is deprecated or abandoned, or it is going to be (maybe, someday) the thing that lets AMD compete with CUDA. Yet the current hardware to buy if you're training LLMs or running diffusion-based models is Nvidia hardware with CUDA cores or tensor hardware. Very little of the LLM software out in the wild runs on anything other than CUDA, though some is now targeting Metal (Apple Silicon).
Is ROCm abandonware? Is it AMD's platform to compete? I'm rooting for AMD, and I'm buying their CPUs, but I'm pairing them with Nvidia GPUs for ML work.
Basically, the only proven strategy is to wait for AMD to blow up the competition on their own accord. Even then, "hey no need to rewrite your code, you could always buy a compatible chip from AMD" doesn't seem that bad for Intel. But, maybe Nvidia has better IP protections here, and AMD can't introduce a drop-in replacement, so app developers have to "either or" Nvidia/AMD.