That is the confusing part say you need to hire 100 people at 1 mil. per year comp to get drivers to a good state. Thats 1/3 of their quarterly profit but would prob double the revenue in a few years.
From what I've heard they aren't offering competitive salaries, so introducing people at insane comps would probably destroy existing teams(if there was no salary bumps to match)/budgets (if there was). Doubt you can do much with new hires in 1 year in such environment, by the time you start seeing results it's probably too late to capitalize on this bubble.
More likely, they wait to see how the AI HW startups shake up and then acquire the ones that have anything worth paying for.
>From what I've heard they aren't offering competitive salaries
Seems like a common thing in hardware companies, they chronically underpay, which for some reason hardware/electrical engineers seem to accept, but that makes them a last-choice for competent software engineers, who have much better-paying options.
Even if they could make a fab, it would still be a logistical nightmare to scale from 1-1,000 users. Meanwhile, my SaaS company could have 100,000 users thanks to the cloud, and I wouldn't even have to get up from my desk.
Non-sequitor [1]. AMD not having a fab doesn't mean a EE can run a fab out of their garage.
It may be relatively easier for people to make new chips without needing AMD/Intel (see all of fang company making their own). But it's still companies with lots of money making new chips and not people in their garage.
It's not just drivers though. Nvidia has invested close to two decades into documentation, teaching materials, developer tooling and libraries for CUDA, plus all the work on gaining mindshare.
You could probably get 80% there by dedicating enough AMD developers to improving AMD support in existing AI frameworks and software, in parallel with improving drivers and whatever CUDA equivalent they are betting on right now. But it would need a massive concerted effort that few companies seem to be able to pull off (probably it's hard to align the company on the right goals)
NVidia is a semico and they pay much better than AMD: https://www.indeed.com/companies/compare/Amd-vs-Nvidia-b78a5... . That's a big part of why they're so far ahead now and their drivers are much better. If AMD wants to catch up to NVidia within a reasonable timeframe, they wouldn't just need to match it, they'd need to pay way better than NVidia to attract the best people.
