We started the business last year, as a proof of concept before MI300x was even released. After a lot of work to build the necessary relationships, we got a box of MI300x, deployed it into our data center, and immediately onboarded a very large customer.
Now that we've completed that PoC phase of the business, we just closed many millions in additional funding that will go purchase many more GPUs. Thanks to our hard work and excellent investors, it is actually happening!
While we wait for more GPUs, we are donating time on the box to anyone who'd like to run benchmarks [0] and publish unbiased blog posts (with repeatable source code). Our hope is that once people see how well these perform, they will consider porting/running their code on our systems.
If they don't perform we will be transparent about that as well. I'll have a good set of data to bring back to AMD/SMCI to try to resolve any issues. My guess is that AMD will take that a lot more seriously than someone trying to make consumer hardware work, in an enterprise setting. This isn't a knock on George's ambitions, nor the need for AMD to make consumer products work better with ROCm/AI. I just feel that AMD has limited resources today and they have to focus on one thing first, which is what they are clearly doing in their responses to him.
We can save the debate about whether AMD can walk and chew gum at the same time :)
The important part is that you’re a (potentially very big) part of the solution: if can get serious adoption via a stemless experience, that’s a major win for free, fair, functioning markets via robust competition sparingly but well-refereed. You’ve won a fan and evangelist at the conceptual level, and I’m sure you’ll be hearing from me about wanting to make sure the stuff I’m moonlighting on supports the platform well, at which time I’d happily do an unbiased write up: I’ve got a bias for functioning markets, not one particular vendor.
Thanks for the productive dialog and the fan support. Greatly appreciated!
> We can save the debate about whether AMD can walk and chew gum at the same time :)
It is a huge risk for my business, so it is something that I'm taking very seriously. In a past life, I've run a lot of consumer AMD GPUs, I'm well aware of their positives, and negatives. My feeling is that George didn't factor this risk into his business, and then went into panic mode when he ran into issues. This is exactly why I'm going the "enterprise" route first.
> I’ve got a bias for functioning markets, not one particular vendor.
I strongly concur with this, which is why AMD won't be our only offering. I'd love to get other hardware (including, but not limited to, Nvidia and all others). That said, we're just focused on starting with creating functioning markets first.
We started the business last year, as a proof of concept before MI300x was even released. After a lot of work to build the necessary relationships, we got a box of MI300x, deployed it into our data center, and immediately onboarded a very large customer.
Now that we've completed that PoC phase of the business, we just closed many millions in additional funding that will go purchase many more GPUs. Thanks to our hard work and excellent investors, it is actually happening!
While we wait for more GPUs, we are donating time on the box to anyone who'd like to run benchmarks [0] and publish unbiased blog posts (with repeatable source code). Our hope is that once people see how well these perform, they will consider porting/running their code on our systems.
If they don't perform we will be transparent about that as well. I'll have a good set of data to bring back to AMD/SMCI to try to resolve any issues. My guess is that AMD will take that a lot more seriously than someone trying to make consumer hardware work, in an enterprise setting. This isn't a knock on George's ambitions, nor the need for AMD to make consumer products work better with ROCm/AI. I just feel that AMD has limited resources today and they have to focus on one thing first, which is what they are clearly doing in their responses to him.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1bpgrdf/wanted_...