alt Hacker News> ...one of the truly baffling things from either their team or AMDs team, is how much the workstation grade AMD r9700 has been ignored.
It makes a huge amount of sense after considering AMD's approach to graphics cards from around 2010 to 2025. They just didn't see graphics cards as viable compute platform and many who made the mistake of believing that good specs would translate into in-practice performance got badly burned. I'd have been involved in the AI boom but for an expensive AMD graphics card, I'm not going to forget that for a while.
George Hotz was interesting as a public example, but I think his story probably repeated a few times outside the public eye. People tried to make AMD work and ended up the worse for it.
People who had an interest in using AMD cards to get things done are probably by and large waiting for a new generation of hopefuls to prove this time is different. The mutterings out of AMD are promising, but that isn't persuasive enough given the scale of the failures.
GCN was such a promising compute architecture, AMD even pioneered stuff like async compute and compute shader heavy rendering pipelines, only to never seriously go beyond that on consumer gear.
I agree with your assessment that the story of supporting the competition, only to get burned, has repeated many times with AMD outside the public eye. It's why I don't put much stock in claims that things work great as long as specific flags are used.