For some reason AMD's GPU division continues to be run, well, horribly. The CPU division is crushing it, but the GPU division is comically bad. During the great GPU shortage AMD had multiple opportunities to capture chunks of the market and secure market share, increasing the priority for developers to acknowledge and target AMD's GPUs. What did they do instead? Not a goddamn thing, they followed Nvidia's pricing and managed to sell jack shit (like seriously the RX 580 is still the first AMD card to show up on the steam hardware survey).
They're not going big enough dies at the top end to compete with nvidia for the halo, and they're refusing to undercut at the low end where nvidia's reputation for absurd pricing is at an all time high. AMD's GPU division is a clown show, it's impressively bad. Even though the hardware itself is fine they just can't stop either making terrible product launches, awful pricing strategies, or just brain dead software choices like shipping a feature that triggered anti-cheat, getting their customers predictably banned & angering game devs in the process
And relevant to this discussion Nvidia's refusal to add VRAM to their lower end cards is a prime opportunity for AMD to go after the lower-end compute / AI interested crowd who will become the next generation software devs. What are they doing with this? Well, they're not making ROCm available to basically anyone, that's apparently the winning strategy. ROCm 6.0 only supports the 7900 XTX and the... Radeon VII. The weird one-off Vega 20 refresh. Of all the random cards to support, why the hell would you pick that one???
I worked at a baremetal CDN with 60 pops and a few years ago we had to switch to AMD because of PCIE bandwidth over to our smartNICs and nvmeOF sort of things. We'd long hit limits on Intel before the Epyc stuff came out so we had to have more servers running than we wanted because we had to limit how much we did with one server to not hit the limits and cause everything to lock.
And we were excited, not a single apprehension. Epyc crushed the server market, everyone is using them. Well, it's going ARM now but Epyc will still be around awhile.
AMD fundamentally viewed/views GPUs as nothing more than a tool to make semicustom deals. Just like "xbox isn't the product, gamepass is the product" - well, for AMD "radeon isn't the product, semicustom is the product". The only thing they really need graphics for is APUs, and they don't need to beat the 4090, they just need to beat Xe-LP. They don't need raytracing, they don't need that "AI" crap (oops), just to run games at 720p/1080p.
They're happy to squeeze whatever they can out of Sony/MS's R&D spend, but they aren't going to invest heavily on their own. And now that there is an obvious money fountain occurring in AI/ML... that is starting to change.
It was always about the money, specifically the lack of it. AMD knew HSA-Library/OpenCL/etc sucked, they didn't care, especially when the money was better spent going after Intel instead of NVIDIA. Intel is dysfunctional and AMD had a chance to crack their marketshare, and that's where every penny they had went. And that's probably not a wrong business decision.
They're not going big enough dies at the top end to compete with nvidia for the halo, and they're refusing to undercut at the low end where nvidia's reputation for absurd pricing is at an all time high. AMD's GPU division is a clown show, it's impressively bad. Even though the hardware itself is fine they just can't stop either making terrible product launches, awful pricing strategies, or just brain dead software choices like shipping a feature that triggered anti-cheat, getting their customers predictably banned & angering game devs in the process
And relevant to this discussion Nvidia's refusal to add VRAM to their lower end cards is a prime opportunity for AMD to go after the lower-end compute / AI interested crowd who will become the next generation software devs. What are they doing with this? Well, they're not making ROCm available to basically anyone, that's apparently the winning strategy. ROCm 6.0 only supports the 7900 XTX and the... Radeon VII. The weird one-off Vega 20 refresh. Of all the random cards to support, why the hell would you pick that one???