> I love when outsiders throw around random-ass takes like this. Just curious: how'd you come up with this number? Is it backed by literally any thought/data/roadmap?

It's a multiple of what the TinyGrad ( https://tinygrad.org/#tinybox ) startup raised in capital. So $10-20m is absolutely reasonable, especially if you add an established HR with a hiring pipeline, established IT dept, offices, etc.

The multiplier is also easy to justify, given the stock price of NVidia and AMD.

> A quick reminder before you answer: whatever you think is actually involved in improving ROCm, unless you work on ROCm, you're almost certainly not considering an entire iceberg of complexity (runtime/driver/firmware).

Oh, I do. I've been following the OpenSource AMD driver development for the last 2 decades.

And I maintain that the total amount of investment that AMD needed to make to rival NVidia in the market cap, would have been around that number.

> Cutting to the chase: you're off by at least two orders of magnitude on your goofy estimate; the real numbers are probably closer to 200MM invested every year for 10 years.

For an entirely new company starting from scratch? Reasonable. But AMD is not a new company, and they already are doing most of the work needed.

200 mm/year gets you roughly 1000 engineers at 200k salary. Is that not enough to make rocm experience equal to cuda?

Considering that each kernel / kernel size is usually custom tuned on NVIDIA, I'd say no. Working in this field at several different companies, there are likely thousands of hand-tuned variations of a simple GEMM kernel. Each one required an engineer to look at specifically, even if they're all variations on a common theme.

As far as I know (and again, I work in the field of AI compilers), we're still a ways off from complete end-to-end generation of highly optimized kernels. If you want it to go fast, you need to write it by hand [1], and then test and validate.

Moreover, chip makers are constantly adding new features (Tensor Cores in NVIDIA for example), so the compiler is always playing catch up and at some point an engineer has to sit down (likely a team of them) and think 'what's the best way to exploit this hardware functionality for software performance?'. Then they have to test and validate that, and then either write a kernel, or attempt to put that know-how into a compiler.

Multiply this times the number of kernels in a typical suite, and... yeah.

And that was my point about herculean effort on modern chips. Assembly language isn't just the old 'Add register 1 and 2 and dump in R3' anymore. It's 'Use this instruction to access memory in this way, so that it's in a compatible format for the next instruction' and 'oh yeah, make sure your memory synchronization primitives are such that the whole thing is coherent'. Good luck!

Even going one step up into a higher-level language, you have to know how the kernel gets compiled to make it worthwhile. Again, it is trivial to write a correct opencl matrix multiply, but that's never going to be the highest performance. You have to know the hardware intimately. This is where having the software co-designed with hardware is very important. Basically, every AI chipmaker of any importance does this, including the startups, like Groq and Cerebras.

[1] A lot of kernels share basic patterns, so its not as hard as it sounds, but definitely requires engineering effort to get the design right.

> Considering that each kernel / kernel size is usually custom tuned on NVIDIA, I'd say no. Working in this field at several different companies, there are likely thousands of hand-tuned variations of a simple GEMM kernel. Each one required an engineer to look at specifically, even if they're all variations on a common theme.

Lol that's absolutely not true. What you're describing is literally impossible for any company that has more than one product family on the market since each product has different scratch sizes, number of vector registers, data types supported/emulated etc.

Outside of trade show demos, kernels are codegened. What is true is there are recurring "themes/patterns" that are handled by engineers for a class of products. Lately this is flash attention...

> Again, it is trivial to write a correct opencl matrix multiply, but that's never going to be the highest performance.

I guess you work at AMD. The reason AMD ships a whole bunch of binary kernels is not because someone tuned/designed each one but because AMD doesn't have a PTX/SASS equivalent. So each kernel has to be compiled at build time for each device (it's also why they can't have LTS support for architectures).

> outside of trade show demos, kernels are condegened. What is true is there are recurring "themes/patterns" that are handled by engineers for a class of products. Lately this is flash attention

I never said they weren't using code generation. I said that each one requires a manual tune. You will set various parameters, determine if the generated code does well enough and then if there's performance to squeeze out, you modify the code generator.

> I guess you work at AMD.

Close but not quite

> that each one requires a manual tune

Ya definitely not - everyone uses grid search or whatever latest BPO tuning strategy.

Oh right. Those require no engineering effort because I said so.

They require one person or team to engineer and then a whole bunch of people to use...? That doesn't resemble in the least what you were describing where each kernel is hand-tuned for each shape and device. But please do continue to insist you're still somehow right

Sigh. I use to be an engineering manager for a kernels team. I think I know what I'm talking about. Yes, each kernel is paid individual attention to even if many are basically the same and require little rework. It's a lot of work. Now I work as an ic in the same field . I don't need to insist I'm right because it's what I do all day

> I think I know what I'm talking about

I've refuted your claims point by point and all you can say is "trust me bro"? Cool but I think you do not in fact know what you're talking about.

I work in DB kernels, everything gets hand tuned as there is economic reason for hand tuning it. The expectation in many of these systems is that there are no wasted cycles. You can codegen a decent kernel, but then someone will find a better approach - do you want the slower version of the product, or the faster one?

You can see this in action with matrix math libraries, folks have been hand tuning those for decades at this point.

Your claim is that there are automated methods (which I mentioned in my original post) to manage the complexity. My claim is that it requires a large team of engineers working on it. I'm not really sure what you think you've refuted.

1000 engineers don’t automatically crank out 50x more code than 20 engineers. But GP is just saying there are a lot of subcomponents involved that each need major engineering effort dedicated to them.

I see it less as an engineering problem and more as a market problem. AMD stuff has existed, it’s the market that doesn’t see a point in it, and at this point, even feature parity or CUDA compatibility for that matter won’t make a huge dent. People will just keep using what they know and are recommended.

It’s more amazing to me that NVDA is so intensely inflated by this LLM hype wave. I find it genuinely scary to think about what’s going to happen when 95+% of AI slopware startups fold. Nvidia won’t be the only company financially impacted. Our entire economy runs on fads.

I appreciate this comment keeping us in line.

The vast majority of comments/responses on hn are worthless hot-takes, chest thumping, speculation like what I responded to. It's impossible to keep it in check because you to be "open-minded" and "steel man" and whatever. Any minute now dang will show up and reprimand for breaking one of the scriptural rules.