Submitted by twovests in technology

Zluda, RocM, ProRender, HIP, etc.

Nvidia GPUs are highly desirable because of a moat of APIs (specifically CUDA) which make it easy to run AI-stuff on Nvidia GPUs. I do Blender, and so I effectively need a Blender GPU. But AMD GPUs are effectively only good for gaming.

If AMD GPUs could do everything Nvidia GPUs could do, the stock would rise a lot. If I were AMD, that's what I would do, but I am not AMD and AMD is not doing it.

But this seems like such an obvious "get rich quick" scheme that it makes me wonder why nobody is doing it? Do any of the knowledgable Posters have any thoughts?

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devtesla wrote

So at the moment AMD is selling through as many graphics cards as they can make, so they don't specifically need this business. On a deeper level, for AMD all the silicon that goes into a consumer GPU is silicon that could have gone into a more profitable product. This is also true of nvidia tbh, but for AMD it's specifically their mobile products, consumer CPUs and enterprise CPUs.

So why does AMD make graphics cards at all? Shiping a high performance graphics architecture pays off down the product line, and eventually makes it into laptops, handhelds, and game consoles. I suspect this is why Intel is making graphics cards now, like I'd be shocked if there's any profit for them there at all but it could pay off in other products.

But yeah the bottom line is that the buyer is fucked. There's not a good reason for AMD to match nvidia on this type of spend (and it's gigantic, AMD does spend a lot and can barely handle gaming Lol. It's more than a dozen engineers!), so nvidia can charge what they want and screw over their partners as much as possible. I'm gonna hang onto my current parts for dear life.

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twovests OP wrote

Even if AMD would still sell all the GPUs they make, I still think the "invest in AMD and make it worth more by improving its libraries" is still an easy path to make a profit, right? If AMD GPUs could suddenly run all the models that Nvidia GPUs could do, then AMD stock would just be worth more?

This would fuck the buyer even more (making the GPU shortage even worse, I think) but I do like the idea of having a Linux machine with an AMD GPU in the next 10 years.

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devtesla wrote

I wouldn't link a stock price to anything real tbh

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twovests OP wrote

i mean, the chain here is still "AI" so it's not linked to anything real

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