AI scramble
As it was in its decades-long microprocessor competition with Intel, AMD’s selling point is its skill in playing second fiddle to a larger rival that nobody wants to completely dominate the market.
Business abhors a true monopoly. AI is no different, which is why large tech platforms have carefully invested in their own AI chips even as they seem inclined to fill their datacenters with Nvidia hardware.
AMD finds itself in the same role once again in AI. Squeezed from both sides, the catch is that it has to demonstrate its competence. So far, it is keeping up. Its open-source ROCm tools, which rival Nvidia’s CUDA platform, have gained a modest following of sorts alongside advanced new hardware such as last December’s Instinct MI300 series datacenter GPUs.
However, judging by the most recent Top500 supercomputing list, Nvidia’s platform still has an almost unassailable position in high-end AI applications.
Why Silo AI?
