AMD middle managers accused of diverting multiple engineers to ATOM inference engine project with almost no customers

Odaily News: SemiAnalysis posted on X that AMD middle managers are spending the time of more than 20 engineers trying to expand their sphere of influence and secure promotions through a useless side project called the "ATOM Inference Engine," rather than allocating those resources to inference engines actually being used by real customers like Meta and xAI, such as SGLang and vLLM.

SemiAnalysis said that dozens of AMD engineers, including principal engineers and AMD Fellows, have privately contacted the firm, stating that due to internal office politics at AMD and support from some middle managers, they are unable to discuss their concerns internally. Middle managers are consuming the time of more than 20 full-time engineers to develop this side project with almost no customers, and the engineers involved are all "10x engineers" who should have been dedicated to developing customer-facing inference engines like vLLM and SGLang.

SemiAnalysis said that middle managers will likely respond by pointing to the only customer using the project in a production environment—Alibaba, based on Qwen—but further investigation shows that this is merely a limited deployment of ATOM by Alibaba's enterprise business unit, not the main business unit behind Qwen.

SemiAnalysis stated that AMD management has diverted resources and limited internal GPU R&D clusters away from engineers supporting production-grade inference engines such as vLLM and SGLang, instead using them to expand their own influence and engage in office politics, showing a profound lack of respect for AMD engineers.