What a shit article. Doesn't explain the software situation. While CUDA is the most popular, a lot of frameworks do support AMD chips.

Naji said the firm has also “developed the broadest ecosystem” of developers and software.

“And so it's just so much easier to … build an application, build an AI model on top of those chips,” he said.

Because its competitors care about Not Invented Here instead of building common industry standards.

A comically bad "article".

Expounding, Nvidia has very deeply engrained itself in educational and research institutions. People learning GPU compute are being taught CUDA and Nvidia hardware. Researchers have access to farms of Nvidia chips.

AMD has basically gone the "build it and they will come" attitude, and the results to match.

It's literally the most surface level take. Does not even mention what CUDA is or AMD's efforts to run it

https://www.xda-developers.com/nvidia-cuda-amd-zluda/

But it is no longer funded by AMD or Intel

AMD GPUs are still supported by frameworks like PyTorch

PyTorch on ROCm — ROCm installation (Linux)

Installing PyTorch for ROCm

(rocm.docs.amd.com)

While Nvidia might be the fastest, they are not always the cheapest option, especially if you rent it in the cloud. When I last checked, it was cheaper to rent AMD GPUs

Corporate consolidation and monopoly/oligopoly is usually why.

How to create a successful GPU company in 2025:

• Step 1: build a time machine and go back 30 years

Well, Intel tried with OneApi. As for AMD they go 5 minutes between every time they shoot themselves in the foot. It's unbelievable to watch.

Intel tried with OpenAPI because ROCm was not invented here.

AMD has basically gone the “build it and they will come” attitude

Except they didn't.

They repeatedly fumble the software with little mistakes (looking at you, Flash Attention). They price the MI300X, W7900, and any high VRAM GPU through the roof, when they have every reason to be more competitive and undercut Nvidia. They have sad, incomplete software efforts divorced from what devs are actually doing, like their quantization framework or some inexplicably bad LLMs they trained themself. I think Strix Halo is the only GPU compute thing they did half right recently, and they still screwed that up.

They give no one any reason to give them a chance, and wonder why no one comes. Lisa Su could fix this with literally like three phone calls (remove VRAM restrictions on their OEMs, cut pro card prices, fix stupid small bugs in ROCM), but she doesn't. It's inexplicable.

What do i do before I did that?

Have rich parents, pale skin, etc.

No that comes afterwards

That's basically what I said in so many words.
AMD is doing its own thing, if you want what Nvidia offers you're gonna have to build it yourself.
WRT pricing, I'm pretty sure AMD is typically a fraction of the price of Nvidia hardware on the enterprise side, from what I've read, but companies that have made that leap have been unhappy since AMD's GPU enterprise offerings were so unreliable.

The biggest culprit from what I can gather is that AMD's GPU firmware/software side is basically still ATI camped up in Markham, divorced from the rest of the company in Austin that is doing great work with their CPU-side.

People like youz starts snoopin' around askin' questions tends to fall outta windows, y'know what I'm sayin'?

WRT pricing, I’m pretty sure AMD is typically a fraction of the price of Nvidia hardware on the enterprise side

I'm not as sure about this, but seems like AMD is taking a fat margin on the MI300X (and its sucessor?), and kinda ignoring the performance penalty. It's easy to say "build it yourself!" but the reality is very few can, or will, do this, and will simply try to deploy vllm or vanilla TRL or something as best they can (and run into the same issues everyone does).

The 'enthusiast' side where all the university students and tinkerer devs reside is totally screwed up though. AMD is mirroring Nvidia's VRAM cartel pricing when they have absolutely no reason to. It's completely bonkers. AMD would be in a totally different place right now if they had sold 40GB/48GB 7900s for an extra $200 (instead of price matching an A6000).

The biggest culprit from what I can gather is that AMD’s GPU firmware/software side is basically still ATI camped up in Markham, divorced from the rest of the company in Austin that is doing great work with their CPU-side.

Yeah, it does seem divorced from the CPU division. But a lot of the badness comes from business decisions, even when the silicon is quite good, and some of that must be from Austin.

At first I was going to say there is ATI.
Then I realized I hadn't heard about ATI in a while and looked up what happened to it.
Then I realized... I'm old.

The ‘enthusiast’ side where all the university students and tinkerer devs reside is totally screwed up though. AMD is mirroring Nvidia’s VRAM cartel pricing when they have absolutely no reason to. It’s completely bonkers. AMD would be in a totally different place right now if they had sold 40GB/48GB 7900s for an extra $200 (instead of price matching an A6000).

Eh, the biggest issue here is that most (post-secondary) students probably just have a laptop for whatever small GPGPU learning they're doing, which is overwhelmingly dominated by Nvidia. For grad students they'll have access to the institution resources, which is also dominated by Nvidia (this has been a concerted effort).

Only a few that explicitly pursue AMD hardware will end up with it, but that also requires significant foundational work for the effort. So the easiest path for research is throw students at CUDA and Nvidia hardware.

Basically, Nvidia has entrenched itself in the research/educational space, and that space is slow moving (Java is still the de facto CS standard, with only slow movements to Python happening at some universities), so I don't see much changing, unless AMD decides it's very hungry and wants to chase the market.

Lower VRAM prices could help, but the truth is people and intuitions are willing to pay more (obviously) for plug and play.