<story><title>I was at AMD in the mid-late 2000s helping design CPU/APU/GPUs</title><url>https://twitter.com/mohapatrahemant/status/1809135345683841050</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>basilgohar</author><text>I love this insider view into this interesting point in computing history, especially about AMD. However, I was a little put off by the glorification of nVidia&amp;#x27;s shady practices and lock-in policies as key to their current leading position. While technically true, I dislike &amp;quot;ends justify the means&amp;quot;-style thinking.&lt;p&gt;All this as the OP glorifies AMD&amp;#x27;s engineering and grit-based culture to drive through all though tough missteps and missed opportunities.&lt;p&gt;To expand on that, I really do feel AMD has great engineering culture but they keep falling to the same traps. They do not invest strongly enough in software support nor vendor relationships. Neither of these necessitate the more evil monopolistic practices of vendor lock-in and proprietary, non-free (as in libre) software. If they can navigate that without turning evil, they&amp;#x27;d be a company for the ages.&lt;p&gt;And I can&amp;#x27;t close with mad respect to Dr. Lisa Su for her admirable leadership, itself bookworthy. Also, quick fact, she and Jensen are cousins!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gymbeaux</author><text>On the other hand, AMD was on the brink of bankruptcy and Lisa Su led them out of it and into a triple-digit share price. Most companies with that much debt and that little revenue would have gone bankrupt.&lt;p&gt;Lest we forget the Intel IPC advantages over comparable AMD CPUs was due to some shortcuts that exposed major vulnerabilities in Intel CPUs made from ~2011 to 2019. I’d be curious to see how a Spectre and Meltdown-patched Intel CPU fares against its AMD competitor &lt;i&gt;NOW&lt;/i&gt;. Some of the performance hits were &lt;i&gt;brutal&lt;/i&gt;- 20%+ in some workloads.&lt;p&gt;Nvidia was pushing AMD out of the GPU market back when GPUs were effectively only used for gaming and while GameWorks was predatory, you can’t really blame them for having the cooler-running, quieter, more energy-efficient GPUs going back to the Maxwell line (GTX 9x0). CUDA didn’t screw AMD until recently… but in 2014, people were picking Nvidia because the GPUs were considerably “better”. AMD had the best bang for buck back then, but you’d have more power consumption and heat output, and the drivers tended to be buggy. The bugs would be fixed, but it really sucked for people trying to play games on release day.</text></comment>
<story><title>I was at AMD in the mid-late 2000s helping design CPU/APU/GPUs</title><url>https://twitter.com/mohapatrahemant/status/1809135345683841050</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>basilgohar</author><text>I love this insider view into this interesting point in computing history, especially about AMD. However, I was a little put off by the glorification of nVidia&amp;#x27;s shady practices and lock-in policies as key to their current leading position. While technically true, I dislike &amp;quot;ends justify the means&amp;quot;-style thinking.&lt;p&gt;All this as the OP glorifies AMD&amp;#x27;s engineering and grit-based culture to drive through all though tough missteps and missed opportunities.&lt;p&gt;To expand on that, I really do feel AMD has great engineering culture but they keep falling to the same traps. They do not invest strongly enough in software support nor vendor relationships. Neither of these necessitate the more evil monopolistic practices of vendor lock-in and proprietary, non-free (as in libre) software. If they can navigate that without turning evil, they&amp;#x27;d be a company for the ages.&lt;p&gt;And I can&amp;#x27;t close with mad respect to Dr. Lisa Su for her admirable leadership, itself bookworthy. Also, quick fact, she and Jensen are cousins!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>belter</author><text>On the GPU area AMD lost, and will continue to lose to Nvidia, because they don&amp;#x27;t seem to get a grip on Software and Drivers. And that does not bode well for their long time CEO.</text></comment>