BREAKING NEWS: AMD middle managers are wasting over 20+ engineers’ time trying to grow their fiefdoms & get promotions on a useless side project called their “ATOM Inference Engine,” instead of spending that effort on inference engines that actual customers like Meta/xAI actually use, such as SGLang/vLLM.

Dozens of AMD engineers, including principal engineers and AMD Fellows, have reached out to us privately about how, due to office politics and backing from a subset of middle managers at AMD, they are prevented from talking internally about their concerns over middle management wasting 20+ full-time engineers’ time on a side project with basically no customers. The engineers on this side project are 10x engineers and instead should be working on customer engines like vLLM/SGLang.

The middle managers will try to cope by referencing the singular customer that uses it in prod, Alibaba on Qwen, but when digging deeper, it is just a side-business enterprise unit deploying ATOM in a limited capacity instead of the main Qwen business unit.

It is incredibly disrespectful to AMD engineers for AMD management to pull resources & limited internal GPU R&D dev clusters away from engineers supporting customers on production engines like vLLM/SGLang to spend them on growing their fiefdoms & playing office politics.