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Tristan23
Journeyman III

AMD fires 1400 (>10% of its staff)

Is this the reason why your drivers are getting worse and worse?

Sorry for you guys 😞

The easiest way for cost reduction is always to fire employees. Damn those short sighted managers that only think from one quarter to the next.

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Meteorhead
Challenger

I don't really think this would largely affect central developers. As I imagine there are roughly 4-8 people doing driver and runtime development (that relates to OpenCL, cause there are lots of other developer tools).

It would only take to double this amount (and come on, don't tell me it's so hard to find 8 capable developers). The benefit of overcoming this crap preconception of "AMD has the HW, NV has the SW" would be worth SOOOOOO much more on the market, than the salary of 8 programmers. This is the main reason people don't invest in AMD HW, because it is unreliable.

If managers are really this shortsighted, than this company will never become a real force on the market.

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+1

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Topic Title: AMD fires 1400 (>10% of its staff)
Topic Summary: Is this the reason why your drivers are getting worse and worse?

retrospective driver functionality degradation? That's a first.

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I have to disagree, the drivers are getting better, and in retrospective we are a long long way from the very first driver version.

I want to give some big thanks to the dev team for their hard work and some encouragement for the great work that is yet to come.

I guess that everyone is strict with you guys is because our expectations are very high.

Keep the good work!

 

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The funny thing is, that we know the developers are working their @ss off, the problem is that you can really feel it, that they are definately not even dozen people developing. AMD is having more-and-more architectures (K9-K10-VLIW5-VLIW4-Bulldozer-GCN) and it is practically impossible to keep compilers up to date, implement new features, test on all architectures/OS, optimize existing solutions, create tools, etc... with only a few developers.

To quote a classic: "Hell, it's about time" somebody realized higher up, that SW devel is going to be doomed this way. It is visible that developers are turning night into day to make things better, and I do pity them for this, but it's only natural that our pressure on them is so high, since we know that the HW is damned capable and competitive, it's just inaccessible due to SW lacks.

So yes, we are pissed, and it's those unfortunate few like Micah that take the blame, simply because they are the ones in touch with us.

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I think AMD has good quality drivers, in both Linux and Windows. I also love AMD graphics cards and very happy with OpenCL performance and support.

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Originally posted by: danielmv I think AMD has good quality drivers, in both Linux and Windows. I also love AMD graphics cards and very happy with OpenCL performance and support.

 

With OpenCL giving in some cases 20% of card performance, new driver bug each month  ( performance, bad optimizations, invalid code ), average bug fix time >6 months, I just have to ask: How much did they pay you to write this ?

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Originally posted by: danielmv I think AMD has good quality drivers, in both Linux and Windows. I also love AMD graphics cards and very happy with OpenCL performance and support.

 

 

Are you on drugs?!?! Or are you a manager working for AMD?

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AMD has no (more?) vision regarding GPU.

Maybe, some time ago, they were right to be proud of their reputation "we've got the hardware, they've (only) got the software".

But unfortunately, as soon as you want to promote GPU for HPC, if you've got the hardware without the software, or if you've only got some software able to expose 50% of your hardware capability, then you've got nothing. And this is were AMD si wrong.

OpenCL is a perfect example of 20-years old inefficient design that only makes senses (maybe) to promote interoperability between vendors. But those who want to stay in the HPC competition must provide a lower level SDK that expose hardware efficiency to users (OpenCL just being a wrapper above this lower level layer). By dropping CAL/IL support and not being able to provide a replacement, ADM did just demonstrate they didn't understand.

This is not just about hiring high skilled software developpers (well, maybe AMD is in trouble with that too,  I don't know), this is about having the right vision for the future and being able to implement it fast.

I'm sorry for Micah (or other AMD people here) that try to do their best: what I say is not against them.

Best regards,

Antoine.



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I would consider inappropiate to say someone else's job is easy, especially we are all in the same profession. But I would also say AMD guys should realize we are in the same boat: we have our software to release and our usual turds to deal with. I for one will be happy to sign up any beta program to test any software before they are released.

   

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I would consider inappropiate to say someone else's job is easy, especially we are all in the same profession. But I would also say AMD guys should realize we are in the same boat: we have our software to release and our usual turds to deal with. I for one will be happy to sign up any beta program to test any software before they are released.

   

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I'm just sorry for all the people who got fired. Let's hope they'll find new, maybe even better, jobs.

1400 people who won't be buying AMD HW anymore i guess.

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