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http://wccftech.com/amd-vega-10-gpu-milestone/

A bit of a shocker. I though and assumed the Canadian ATI guys were behind AMD's latest. What happened to the 'original' team? And if they're still there, what are they doing? Does AMD outsource all GPU development to China now? How the heck does a bunch of Chinese guys suddenly become good at GPU design? I mean, it's not easy; so many companies can't do it. Where did AMD suddenly get these people?

If that story is accurate, yeah that's very strange. What's left of the original ATI then? Just upper management?

Welp, AMD is a global corporation ... LinkedIn has people listing themselves as at AMD in may countries, top 4 are

3,474 USA
1,477 Canada
1,454 India
1,451 China

A quick drill down shows

1,604 in Austin
1,295 in Toronto, plus 44 in Ontario
574 in Hyderabad
501 in Bengaluru
349 in Shanghai City plus 265 in Shanghai Suburb.

Perhaps it's just parallel design teams, as Intel has (? in Austin and Israel?) ?

Topinio wrote:

Welp, AMD is a global corporation ... LinkedIn has people listing themselves as at AMD in may countries, top 4 are

3,474 USA
1,477 Canada
1,454 India
1,451 China

A quick drill down shows

1,604 in Austin
1,295 in Toronto, plus 44 in Ontario
574 in Hyderabad
501 in Bengaluru
349 in Shanghai City plus 265 in Shanghai Suburb.

Perhaps it's just parallel design teams, as Intel has (? in Austin and Israel?) ?

Given those headcount numbers, that seems plausible.

You'd probably be surprised how many multinational tech corps employ Indians and Chinese people - Intel, AMD and Nvidia included.

In fact, I've heard even NASA does employ a lot of people from Asia (by which I don't mean just East Asia).

For further fun facts, AMD's Kaveri and Kabini were designed in India, and Nvidia's Tegra has either a design or validation team here too (I'll have to dig up that email, don't exactly remember what it was).

Intel mainly has validation facilities but apparently some server chip got designed here too, many years ago.

If true it's sad in a way, losing our talent like that, soon this side of the globe won't be able to do anything anymore.

edit - I guess from Exec's view, oh well I get a bigger bonus muwahahaha

anotherengineer wrote:

If true it's sad in a way, losing our talent like that, soon this side of the globe won't be able to do anything anymore.

Sure you will, still plenty of talent there -- just looks to me like there's other talented people elsewhere, competing for the work.

Topinio wrote:

anotherengineer wrote:

If true it's sad in a way, losing our talent like that, soon this side of the globe won't be able to do anything anymore.

Sure you will, still plenty of talent there -- just looks to me like there's other talented people elsewhere, competing for the work.

It's hard to compete though, when my and everyone's electrical bill is the typical monthly wage in India or China. If execs keep sending all the normally decent paying jobs over seas, only thing left in North America will be minimum wage jobs, and we will be the new 2nd/3rd world countries. Albeit that's a worse case scenario. Well maybe civil war would be. Hopefully I won't be around by then though.

ronch wrote:

http://wccftech.com/amd-vega-10-gpu-milestone/

A bit of a shocker. I though and assumed the Canadian ATI guys were behind AMD's latest. What happened to the 'original' team? And if they're still there, what are they doing? Does AMD outsource all GPU development to China now? How the heck does a bunch of Chinese guys suddenly become good at GPU design? I mean, it's not easy; so many companies can't do it. Where did AMD suddenly get these people?

They probably thought "Hey, if china is going to steal our technology anyways, might as well move it there to begin with"

anotherengineer wrote:

It's hard to compete though, when my and everyone's electrical bill is the typical monthly wage in India or China. If execs keep sending all the normally decent paying jobs over seas, only thing left in North America will be minimum wage jobs, and we will be the new 2nd/3rd world countries. Albeit that's a worse case scenario. Well maybe civil war would be. Hopefully I won't be around by then though.

Oh, sure, but I don't think it's the executives' fault: they have no choice, really, we're just on the wrong side of history.

Probably a more stable environment there too, and I reckon we'll beat you to joining the third world: we're basically already at Facebook/office/dinner civil war here following the idiots' secession vote

It's not like the writing hasn't been on the wall for a good while now.

AMD opens a design center on China in 2007 or 2008 I think. What did everyone think they ever doing? Sitting on their behinds all day doing nothing?

ronch wrote:

A bit of a shocker. I though and assumed the Canadian ATI guys were behind AMD's latest. What happened to the 'original' team?

Think apple scabbed up quite a few of them for their inter-connects. Probably from the chipset dept thro.
ATI were getting good at chipsets at that time-even Intel was using them.........................

Just sayin': Remember when Toyota started having a large rash of recalls a few years ago? One could argue that all started/happened when/because they moved much of their design to China. Moving any cohesive group/activity to another country, especially if done to save money, is bound to have some growing pains.

Is it possible Polaris is priced aggressively partly because it was designed in China at lower cost?

ronch wrote:

Is it possible Polaris is priced aggressively partly because it was designed in China at lower cost?

I'd be willing to bet AMD would rather have a better card for which they could charge more. It didn't work out very well for them when they tried to beat Intel on CPU price/performance (while ignoring important stuff like TCO (eg, power, chipsets, etc.)).

Or if it had anything to do with the validation failure rumors??

ronch wrote:

http://wccftech.com/amd-vega-10-gpu-milestone/

A bit of a shocker. I though and assumed the Canadian ATI guys were behind AMD's latest. What happened to the 'original' team? And if they're still there, what are they doing? Does AMD outsource all GPU development to China now? How the heck does a bunch of Chinese guys suddenly become good at GPU design? I mean, it's not easy; so many companies can't do it. Where did AMD suddenly get these people?

Whether it was designed entirely in Shanghai or in North America there would have been a tonne of Chinese (ethnic or nationals) working on it. When I was an EE student in the late 80's in Australia about 1/3 of my classmates were south-east Asian (ethnic Chinese) in origin. More recently, as China has prospered and allowed its citizens to travel it is Chinese citizens studying engineering at uni. And then you look at PhD level where they're a majority. Then look in most software development houses. High level software development and electronics engineering is plain hard work and requires a high intelligence, focus and dedication. Maths is really, really hard. It's no place for mushy "creatives" and hipsters hanging out in coffee shops dreaming up the next "mash up". No wonder Chinese dominate in high tech.

ronch wrote:

Is it possible Polaris is priced aggressively partly because it was designed in China at lower cost?

Unless they missed their clocks targets by a massive amount I don't see how this part could ever have been AMD aiming at the high end.

AMD focused heavily on reducing power usage over their previous gen, and any Clockspeed improvements are likely due to the process.

Before any news of Nvidia performance was unveiled, at AMD's capascian event they unveiled one specific slide:
http://images.anandtech.com/galleries/4772/Capsaicin%20Presented%20by%20AMD%20Radeon_FINAL_APPROVED-page-013.jpg?_ga=1.209474962.1676581657.1461250297
As far as I know, this was made before GP104 even taped out. But Polaris 10 was taped out. AMD may have been aiming to introduce it at a higher price, but I don't think more than $250.

Note: starting with [url] and ending with [/quote] does not do much besides look silly.

Pancake wrote:

"mash up"

Until recently, the "mash up" folks were comfortable buying/hiring the low-end 'grunt' math. Increasingly the technical dominates within a predefined space. Jobs is long dead; the Woz has morphed into a lovable emeritus character. But, the money is in expanding the 'space' to something new, which so far, has been the domain of the 'hipsters'.

Edit: I.e., it's a step function. A very few Hipsters get to build/define the next step. Technicians/mathematicians bring everyone else up to that step.

MarkG509 wrote:

Pancake wrote:

"mash up"

Until recently, the "mash up" folks were comfortable buying/hiring the low-end 'grunt' math. Increasingly the technical dominates within a predefined space. Jobs is long dead; the Woz has morphed into a lovable emeritus character. But, the money is in expanding the 'space' to something new, which so far, has been the domain of the 'hipsters'.

I'm not even sure what half you wrote means but the discussion is about the people who design stuff like GPUs and CPUs. The super-clever geniuses. These are the hardcore geeks and would be horrified at being identified as shallow "hipsters".

Pancake wrote:

I'm not even sure what half you wrote means but the discussion is about the people who design stuff like GPUs and CPUs. The super-clever geniuses. These are the hardcore geeks and would be horrified at being identified as shallow "hipsters".

Perhaps different terminology. I was thinking the process was "concept, high-level architecture, micro-architecture, design, timing, verification and fab", and that the Hipsters you mentioned do concept through (at most) high-level architecture (bar napkin drawing stuff), while all the hard math happens in the micro-architecture through verification steps.

MarkG509 wrote:

it's a step function. A very few Hipsters get to build/define the next step. Technicians/mathematicians bring everyone else up to that step.

I love the analogy to a step function, I am reminded of Kuhnian "normal science" vs. scientific revolution. That's why I'm not surprised about Polaris and Vega designs from China: In the Western tradition, you see a true fusion of theory and practice, but in the East it's practice, practice, practice, practice, practice...

Wonders wrote:

I am reminded of Kuhnian "normal science" vs. scientific revolution.

A friend is embroiled in such a battle with his management. I sent him an email with the results of my best (as JBI calls it) google-fu on Kuhn. Thanks! (He doesn't believe/listen to me, but maybe Kuhn will have better success.)

MarkG509 wrote:

Pancake wrote:

I'm not even sure what half you wrote means but the discussion is about the people who design stuff like GPUs and CPUs. The super-clever geniuses. These are the hardcore geeks and would be horrified at being identified as shallow "hipsters".

Perhaps different terminology. I was thinking the process was "concept, high-level architecture, micro-architecture, design, timing, verification and fab", and that the Hipsters you mentioned do concept through (at most) high-level architecture (bar napkin drawing stuff), while all the hard math happens in the micro-architecture through verification steps.

This is really fascinating conversation. I'm a complete rationalist, reductionist science and maths geek and live in the land of bits, bytes and algorithms. You're almost like an alien to me! Incredible!

MarkG509 wrote:

Pancake wrote:

I'm not even sure what half you wrote means but the discussion is about the people who design stuff like GPUs and CPUs. The super-clever geniuses. These are the hardcore geeks and would be horrified at being identified as shallow "hipsters".

Perhaps different terminology. I was thinking the process was "concept, high-level architecture, micro-architecture, design, timing, verification and fab", and that the Hipsters you mentioned do concept through (at most) high-level architecture (bar napkin drawing stuff), while all the hard math happens in the micro-architecture through verification steps.

My impression from the two pieces anandtech did on the RV770 and the not-RV870 is that the engineers are still calling the high level design. Many of the people doing it might not work directly on much of it, but they will be engineers who partially engage in management.

the book by someone who worked on the Cell/Xexon CPUs for the PS3/Xbox360 clearly has it that way.

It is hard to do a realistic high level design without a pretty good understanding of the topic.

ronch wrote:

http://wccftech.com/amd-vega-10-gpu-milestone/

A bit of a shocker. I though and assumed the Canadian ATI guys were behind AMD's latest. What happened to the 'original' team? And if they're still there, what are they doing?

Some went to Qualcomm along with the mobile GPU department, Apple picked up some, Nvidia, Intel and probably ARM and ImaginationTech picked up a few.

Does AMD outsource all GPU development to China now? How the heck does a bunch of Chinese guys suddenly become good at GPU design? I mean, it's not easy; so many companies can't do it. Where did AMD suddenly get these people?

AMD opened, a R&D center in 2006. They've probably worked on CPUs, APUs, memory controllers and derivative GPUs before. 8-9 years is plenty of time to get people experienced.

What's the surprise?

I found this downright fascinating. The situation seems high-stakes enough for AMD that you don't think they'd have anyone but their best guys designing the GPUs right now. This stuff is expensive enough that you don't really think they'd have the funds to have multiple teams in different parts of the world all working on the same thing. You would think that their main GPU parts would be developed in the HQ, the main structure, where they always have been.

So, is Markham designing what comes much later, after GCN? Possibly to be sold under a name other than AMD? It was also a bit surprising to me that Raja would sort, I don't know, snub the Markham complex that way. Was it done to take the focus off Markham? Did they know they might have a problem with this power thing? Could it be internal politics of some kind? I used to think it was Sunnyvale vs. Markham. Is it Sunnyvale vs. Raja vs. Markham?

Intrigue. I somebody writes a book about Bulldozer. I'd buy it. I'd get dressed up as a microchip and camp out outside the bookstore for it.

Notice he says "deliver", not design... perhaps the logical design comes from the old ATI guys, and then China does the physical layout work?

Intel's Pentium M was designed in Israel. These are multinational corporations, I'm not convinced there's much to it.