It's insane to me that AMD is not spending billions and billions trying to fix their software. Nvidia is the most valuable company in the world and AMD is the only one poised to compete.
They are, but the problem is that shifting an organization whose lifeblood is yearly hardware refreshes and chip innovation towards a ship-daily software culture is challenging. And software doesn’t “make money” the way hardware does so it can get deprioritized by executives. And vendors are lining up to write and even open source lots of software for your platform in exchange for pricing, preference, priority (great on paper but bad for long term quality). And your competitors will get ahead of you if you miss even a single hardware trend/innovation.
There was a podcast episode linked here a while ago about how the software industry in Japan never took off as it did in America and it was a similar conclusion. According to the host, the product being sold was hardware, and software was a means to fulfill and then conclude the contract. After that you want the customer to buy the new model, primarily for the hardware and software comes along for the ride.
It should be obvious by now though that there's symbiosis between software and hardware, and that support timescales are longer. Another angle is that it's more than just AMD's own software developers, also the developers making products for their customers who in turn buy AMD's if everyone works together to make them run well and it's those second developers they need to engage with in a way their efforts will be welcomed.
I worked at at a number of GPU vendors, and it felt like Nvidia was the only one that took software as an asset worth investing in, rather than as a cost center. Massively different culture.
