Sounds like AMD might still be using the 'tesla roadster' strategy, of selling fewer, more lucrative contracts for the time being. Probably not that they don't care, just that for now, they have to focus.
That sounds reasonable on the surface, but cards don't cost a lot, and sending them out for free to leverage community interest for the open source stack could be extremely cost effective.
If they generate demand they can't keep up with (without messing up their strategy), it's entirely possible that negative perception would hurt then more than the 'don't care' perception they have now.
Even better, you can provide support for gaming cards and then the community pays you for them instead of you having to pay for it out of dev-rel budget.
And yet AMD is actively moving in the opposite direction and dropping support for older hardware from both their Windows driver, as well as from ROCm and their other compute software.
It's hard to overstate what a positive impact gaming card support and donations of hardware to educational institutions and other devrel have been for CUDA - those are the people who are writing the next 10 years of your software, that sells the actual enterprise hardware. And at this point it's not just "can't afford to support it", AMD is doing fine these days, they just don't want to. Kind of baffling.
GPGPU have been a thing for two decades, they should have had this solved years ago. Lets hope SYCL gets wide support, Intel seems to bet on it and there's a Cuda backend available. If AMD wants to make themselves irrelevant for anything but gaming and HPC that's their choice.
Years ago AMD was almost bankrupt and put everything into one last attempt at a CPU. Now AMD is hiring like crazy, and I hope they are able to catch up to their larger competitors in tooling and software.
Here's what I think they'll do for the near future. They can't build an all-encompassing library ecosystem that supports all the hardware, all the existing software, has really good tooling, etc. in a reasonable amount of time. In consumer they can mostly get away with just supporting Microsoft's APIs, which they already do pretty well. If they design a really good compute GPU, they probably won't be able to make enough of them. They can sell all of their production with a few big deals to important customers, and they can attach engineers to those deals to help support the specific needs of those customers. That is much more practical than trying to catch up to CUDA in its entirety. Basically, status quo.
As someone who isn't a big customer and who is mad at Nvidia I don't hope for this to happen, but it seems the most likely path.
I have friends here in the Austin area who have worked for AMD. From what I’ve heard from them, it’s not that AMD doesn’t care, it’s that AMD is clueless and hopelessly disorganized, and they’re constantly doing whatever they can to chase the latest supercomputing contract, to the exclusion of all else.
It’s a target-rich environment if you want to learn all the bad anti-patterns, so that you can avoid doing them in the rest of your career.
So, it’s not that they don’t care. It’s that they don’t have enough hours in the every-day-is-a-hair-on-fire-day that they would be capable of caring.
Yeah frankly it's a little misleading to frame this as "AMD won this", this is a gimmie contract to keep them in the game. The DoE is throwing gimmie contracts to Intel too for Xe and they haven't even produced a working product yet.
Their CPUs pretty much fall into the same boat too - is it justifiable to buy Intel CPUs right now for HPC applications, especially with AMD supporting AVX-512 with their Zen4 chips (which are the counterparts to the Sapphire Rapids DoE is buying)? Not really but their interests are in keeping Intel in the game, an AMD monoculture doesn't benefit anyone anymore than an Intel monoculture did.
Although of course this is not fab-related, it's the same basic strategy - the US wants as diverse and thriving a tech ecosystem as they can get in the west, and particularly in the US, to counterbalance a rising China. Not that China is anywhere close today, but in the 20-year timeframe it's a major concern.
https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm#amd-instinct-mi25-...
aka AMD doesn't care... they just want the supercomputer contracts where the customers are savvy enough to build their own very specific SW stack.