Posted by rbanffy 4 days ago
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
why not start with trying to fix that?
unfortunately most us industry fell victim to this mba-ization of companies.
And the software ecosystem was already in place (even though everything had to be rewritten).
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.
Where NeXT went wrong is in being astronomically expensive, which drove its addressable market to nothing. This is the exact same mistake Jobs made with the Lisa. The significantly inferior Apple II platform was far more successful.
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.
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".
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.
I think Intel figured out way to be even worse…
A lot of said gains have been erased.
I'm sure they pay more than Intel ;-)
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.
Those cards are cheap because they're not really that amazing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Density. PCM is closer in bits-per-unit-area to Flash than to DRAM.
The actual problem is Intel was in such a bad position, they needed to shed weight, and Optane was not quick money.
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.
(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.)
SSDs are good, but an improved Optane would've been better.
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.
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?
Velocity is not enough, acceleration is not enough, we now require jerk to go up.
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.
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).
Intel finally has really great low power/budget answers, but still loses greatly to 3d cache chips on most workloads.
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.
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.
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
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?
that's quite a large market and their only competitor has moved on to greener pastures.
Great Hope and Crosby movie.
Ya'll sniff Apple farts like it's no tomorrow.
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...
> 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.
Eventually someone in the know bought the husk of Ovonyx and sued Intel.
Hardware security used to be a joke. Now verified boot, encrypted RAM, key storage in hardware security models and hardware and OS attestation are getting somewhere.
But if you're important enough of a target to a state actor they will magically have some workaround. For your average raid on your home they might actually work depending on the specific setup.
For really high threat models you want zero trust models with E2EE as well as staying anonymous so no one knows where the hardware (and the people which might be much more vulnerable) are located. Tor exists for a reason.
But surely intel services are smart enough to get people in there illegally.
Turns out it was a front for Russian intelligence. Even after the German government found out, the guy still somehow escaped to Russia. There’s a solid chance that Russia operatives have infiltrated the German government. They was even a big hack Russia’s state hackers did and a lot of information was leaked.
I bring this up because Hetzner was asking for my passport to buy a $10/m server. Simple opsec says to just pay a bit more and use DigitalOcean or some other VPS.
Wirecard were a German fintech, but didn't have big market penetration across Europe. They were a real company with real operations, but a decent part of its balance sheet was fake (supposedly it was in an Asian subsidiary, there was no money there). It wasn't a front for Russian intelligence, it's COO was a Russian operative (and nowadays runs a shadow intelligence agency from Moscow, using incompetent morons to try to kidnap journalists, or scheming to hire ISIS suicide bombers to blow them up); those connections only surfaced after the whole thing imploded. But the whole company was an actual real place with real operations and real non-russian intelligence employees. It's still not certain if the CEO knew about the COO for instance.
Read the FT series on the whole thing, their investigation started the collapse.
There are many good non-Hetzner European hosting companies, luckily.
Intel has been chasing higher and higher core counts which look good on spec sheets and dazzle in rarely utilized workloads, but said core counts do nothing to run the apps and games that most people actually use. I think getting dumped by Apple broke them, they're competing with Apple on paper and AMD is eating their lunch in reality.
They also stopped making 3D XPoint a year before AI would have bought all of it.
Sure, but its not like people were actively seeking that GPU, for long time it was the only option to get in a laptop that isn't 20 pounds and 18".
Micron wanted to sell the fab that manufactured 3D XPoint.
First it was virtualization instructions, then AVX stuff
I'm not joking. I'm running a Maxwell-era NVIDIA card, and on Linux it's one problem after another. I HATE NVIDIA's driver; it's one of the worst-made pieces of software I've ever seen.
I've personally had zero issues with NVIDIA on Linux on both Turing (20xx) and Blackwell (50xx).
The problem with NVIDIA is that its driver is an incredibly delicate component of its GPUs. With each new generation, the company implements—via software, through micro-routines—features that it failed to deliver in the hardware itself. If the driver were open—meaning one that the community could develop and maintain—I could continue using my GPU without any issues. Intel and AMD support the Mesa graphics stack, with full functionality. Why doesn’t NVIDIA?
I've been running AMD cards for over 15 years now and support has only gotten better over the years.
Your problem is with capitalism, and I'm with you, but what you should be pushing for is legislation that forces companies to publish detailed specs for obsolete hardware so open source enthusiasts can do the work. Call it an extended "right to repair" or whatever.
In the meantime, have you tried the Nouveau driver for your setup?
Or if Intel and AMD GPUs had to compete with Nvidia GPUs ... wait, they do, and they are absolutely losing.
Granted their rocm support was abysmal several years back and they lost my trust as a result. But nvidia is hardly any better and intel doesn't seem to be a viable alternative ...
Before the 10nm issues, they were making consistent IPC improvement every generation, and although core counts were pretty stagnant for consumers, they would add a couple cores every generation on top Xeon skus. Maybe they could have done bigger changes with more time between, but it was nice being able to expect new server CPUs every 12-18 months that were meaningfully better.
I don't think their node problems were anywhere near that simple. You also left out the part where AMD moved to chiplets while intel stubbornly remained monolithic for quite a while. And a whole list of other missteps.
Krzanich "optimized" the company for profit, by cutting out things he considered to be excess. Including a lot of their irreplaceable validation & verification talent, that AMD instantly snapped up. The lack of validation resources is directly responsible for the failures of many key Intel products during his tenure and later, because major bugs that could have been spotted earlier slipped through, and then resulted in horrible delays and even cancellations. He then spent the surplus of the company on 30 major acquisitions, of which only two were in any reasonable degree successful.
There are CEOs who have destroyed more value than Krzanich, but not many.
Intel stopped advancing in 2014-2015 for a long time. They flopped on the fabrication side, they stuck to the 2-4 core CPUs and charged an arm and a leg for anything with more than that. This gave AMD an opening with their cheap and yet still decently fast higher core count CPUs.
The OEM deals run extremely deep, and thunderbolt (an Intel standard) is a brutal feature to drop I think for many laptop makers.
In practice, every USB4 controller manufactured so far is certifiable and indeed with the 8840U generation AMD started certifying their SoC -- the only difference between the 7840U and the 8840U is slightly higher clock on the NPU and the TB4 certification. Compare https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PDF/ThinkPad/ThinkPad_T... to https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PDF/ThinkPad/ThinkPad_T...
or https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/ish_8110922-8110971-16 vs https://support.hp.com/lv-en/document/ish_10397818-10397862-...
There are models on AMD CPU with Thunderbolt[0]. Now a true 2-in-1 with a touch screen, AMD and Thunderbolt AND with 14"... unicorn I've never met.
[0] https://psref.lenovo.com/search/# select 'Platform Specifications' and add Thunderbolt and AMD separately.
Companies bending over and submitting to the AI/LLM/Datacenter hyperscalers at the expense of completely depleting all avenues for regular everyday people to have affordable access to basic computing (imho basically just another utility these days) is something that I hope people remember once the well dries and they try once again to sell us their RGB powered wares.
So... F Nvidia, F Micron and F all these money hungry asshole companies, including the weirdos thirsting for your sticks of ram.