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fjiowf parent
GeoHot isn't "lucky they even speak to" him, he's spot on about the issues and the utter incompetence of most middle management and what needs to be done if they want to compete in the GPU space.

And it's not because the problem is "that hard", it's because AMD doesn't have many skilled engineers like you mentioned at the end of your post (basically contradicting yourself!), and won't prioritize the right issues.

rchaud
Maybe George can volunteer as an unpaid intern, like he did for Twitter. He certainly solved their problems! /s
SilverBirch
Do you understand how these companies resource their customer service divisions? Because I do. They most likely have zero direct customer service for end customer support, you'd need to be purchasing >$100m of hardware to be getting direct engineering support. It's more likely that the person supporting him internally is getting funded by the Sales & Marketing budget than by support.

All George is really asking for is AMD to entirely reorient their business, change their sales and marketing strategy, hire in a cadre of extremely expensive software engineers and give up the entire margin they make on the chips. No big deal.

It's like... sure, it'd be great if they were suddenly a fantastic new company that operates differently, but we live in the real world here.

omeze
I think there’s an element here thats missing: companies can fund small tiger teams (a la skunkworks) if theres executive buy-in to solve specific targeted problems. A small elite unit of engineers with executive support and external partners can certainly make a difference, without reworking the entire company. I think geohotz has the expectation that AMD would try such a thing, as Ive seen and heard of it many times in industry (software or hardware).
SilverBirch
Tiger teams can work in some scenarios, but it seems unlikely that's going to work at AMD. The reason the driver is bad is a lot to do with the fact that the driver team have to basically make lemonade out of the lemons that the hardware team hand them. The hardware team have a difficult enough job just to get the hardware to work and they're where the core success of the business (traditionally) was seen. So the driver team have to do the best they can, but at the end of the day they can't independently solve the problem because they're downstream of the hardware. So yes, you could spend some money and get better engineering on the driver side, but there's a limit to how much you can do without re-prioritizing the hardware team to be more responsive to software requirements and at that point you're talking about full scale organisational change. Only a handful of companies can do that. Look at Gelsinger trying to change Intel - the stock market is not thanking him for his efforts, we're at the point where they're a legitimate acquisition target for Nvidia (ignoring anti-trust concerns)
red-iron-pine
* elite engineers are expensive

* tiger teams or specialist troubleshooters and project pushers are almost certainly already a thing in AMD

* their "this shit is on fire assign it to a tiger team" criteria may have absolutely nothing to do with Geohot's complaints. things like legal or compliance issues, Taiwan getting attacked by China, high rates of turnover on [specific team], or a problematic design may rank a lot higher than some rando who got headlines a few years back for some good cracks.

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