AMD isn't overfit to graphics. AMD's GPUs were friendly to general purpose compute well before Nvidia was. Hardware-wise anyway. AMD's memory access system and resource binding model was well ahead of Nvidia for a long time. When Nvidia was stuffing resource descriptors into special palettes with addressing limits, AMD was fully bindless under the hood. Everything was just one big address space, descriptors and data.
Nvidia 15 years ago was overfit to graphics. Nvidia just made smarter choices, sold more hardware and re-invested their winnings into software and improving their hardware. Now they're just as good at GPGPU with a stronger software stack.
AMD has struggled to be anything other than a follower in the market and has suffered quite a lot as a result. Even in graphics. Mesh shaders in DX12 was the result of NVIDIA dictating a new execution model that was very favorable to their new hardware while AMD had already had a similar (but not perfectly compatible) system since the Vega called primitive shaders.
1. Both AMD and NVIDIA have "tensorcore" ISA instructions (ie real silicon/data-path, not emulation) which have zero use case in graphics
2. Ain't no one playing video games on MI300/H100 etc and the ISA/architecture reflects that
> but for graphics they are very solid.
Hmmm I wonder if AMD's overfit-to-graphics architectural design choices are a source of friction as they now transition to serving the ML compute market... Hmmm I wonder if they're actively undoing some of these choices...