That says more about Intel's shambolic efforts than it does about AMD's road to damascus moment.

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.

AMD is doing 5 day RTO for almost everyone with 3 months of notice in an obvious attempt to get people to quit before vesting their 5x stock grants.

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.

For what it's worth, AMD is very actively pushing GPU hardware, particularly towards the hyperscalers. From what I've seen, they're really focusing in on the large quantity end users (your OpenAI, Meta, etc. types), presumably because they'll have the technical expertise and willingness to collaborate with them on issues as long as the GPUs are cheap enough.

Why must every company pivot to squeeze what they can out of every tech trend at the expense of everything else they do?

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?

AMD has their Strix/Gorgon Halo as a competitor to DGX Spark, which is at least in the ballpark in terms of bandwidth, and being x86 has some compatibility benefits.

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.

I never understood why some fraction of technologists seem convinced that Optane was this amazing thing that would've been awesome if only Intel hadn't killed it.

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.

AMD has an entire division dominating in HPC and #2 close behind nVidia in datacenters with extremely good margins. Over half their revenue is from those segments. Not a lot comes from consumer devices right now. That's why they did so well against Intel right now. Intel is the one that is failing in those markets.

Not to forget AMDs dominance in performance per dollar in CPUs of any variety up until very recently on basically all fronts. Consumer, handheld/low power, server, you name it.

Intel finally has really great low power/budget answers, but still loses greatly to 3d cache chips on most workloads.

Persistent memory will be back, it's just too compelling to give up on, and thanks to the research industry it spawned we have a pretty good idea of how to build systems that effectively exploit it. I can't wait until every DB can use pmem to achieve the holy grail of low-latency transactional durability (which is impossible today even with NVMe).

> That says more about Intel's shambolic efforts

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?

AND GPUs are competitive on a price/performance standpoint. Their software stack is where they fall behind.

AMD Instinct sells like hot cakes. EPYC for AI servers sells like hot cakes. Optane was killed much earlier than KV caching or MoE became somewhat relevant. ???

Huh? Instinct is basically the only real alternative to Nvidia in the market. And they have the only real rack scale competition with Helios. This revenue is not because of gaming gpus and server cpus. This literally is AMDs road to damascus moment with data center GPUs.

>AMD have... turned out some decent gaming graphics cards

that's quite a large market and their only competitor has moved on to greener pastures.

What's more interesting to me is how blisteringly evident it is that GPUs depreciate a lot slower than the analysts assumed. But Nvidia GPUs depreciate slowly because a lot of thought and resources were dedicated into building that ecosystem.

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...

> Where's AMD in all of this? Nowhere.

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).

Doesn't Intel have near cutting edge fabs tho? Even if their own AI chips aren't great, aren't they getting contracts to make Nvidia and Apple chips?

"road to damascus"

Great Hope and Crosby movie.

>Honestly both of them have demonstrated that they have little interest in AI. Awesome? Maybe this means supply wont be ruined and I'll be able to buy CPUs.

> Optane

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.

Intel pirated Optane and bailed when they got caught, seemed unrelated to AI, just Intel being Intel.

Ahh TIL! I used ChatGPT to find out what your "..road to damascus moment." expression meant, it was quite complimentary to you;

> 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.