Vega Thread

[SickBeast]

I'm not so sure.  GPU's may be simple in principle to design, but if you aren't careful they end up like the last few generations of AMD GPU's - large, hot power hungry and useless compared to the competition.

The serious GPU market shook out to two players faster than the CPU market did if you think about it.  If GPU's were so straight forward and easy there ought to be more players left standing.

Good engineers just don't want to work for AMD.  If Al Bundy were an engineer he'd work for them......

I don't think GPUs are simple to design in any way.

That is why I think AMD could succeed with the right hires. Engineers are labor just like anyone else, they're just "rock star/pro athlete" type labor. There are not many who can do the job at the level they do it.

As such, they are for sale. You think a guy making $5m working for NVIDIA wouldn't take $10m to work for AMD?

Also, like rock stars and athletes, there is always a pool of people who want that $5m salary who haven't proved themselves yet who can be hired much cheaper and may be the next rock star chip designer.

And there are people at NVIDIA/intel/Qualcomm/Samsung/Apple who didn't get promotions and might be willing to jump for raise or promotion.

Last, there are no "Al Bundys" in microchip design. If a person can do that job at any level they are far above you and I intellectually.

GStan, you and I are the "Al Bundys" of the tech world. Designing GPUs is basically magic to oafs like us.

There are good engineers and there are bad engineers. For whatever reason AMD just hasn't been able to attract top level talent for some time now. Actually I would go so far as to say that they have been completely devoid of talent. GCN has been out for a long time now and it could be argued that Kepler was superior right from the get go. Kepler was certainly more efficient with less power consumption. We have really seen little to no improvement since GCN, only refinements. That doesn't require top end talent, that requires "grunt" engineering. The top creative minds are the ones that design and create the groundbreaking new GPUs. AMD has not created anything groundbreaking in a very long time. Actually their last truly groundbreaking GPU was the Radeon 9700 Pro which you mindlessly railed against for years at ATF. The X800 Pro was also excellent but it was largely derived from R300.

I'm really not too sure what AMD can do at this point. nVidia seems to have a lock on the top end talent right now. They are just killing it. It's going to reach a point of desperation for AMD.