Has Anyone Considered AMD As An Alternative To Intel/Nvidia?

In discussions with multiple startup video analytic manufacturers in the last 6-9 months, the feedback I received is AMD is focusing R&D and partnerships on low power, efficiency and mobile device development, and not AI/neural network analytics support.

Is there a specific new AMD hardware family you are interested in?

Don't ever mention that again. I have a good amount wrapped up in Nvidia stock and I need surveillance to make up for the lost bitcoin mining sales. ;-)

Going to start looking closely at AMD for VMS server and workstation due in part to the way speculative execution vulnerabilities are being handled by Intel.

I know that AMD and many ARM CPU's have this problem as well. 

AMD seems to impose less of a performance penalty for running with spectre and meltdown mitigations. This is likely more relevant to us on the VMS server which we run as a KVM virtual machine guest.

On the workstation our VMS client seems more CPU bound and doesn't really harness GPU the resources  provided by GTX10xx or 20XX cards.

AI/NN is still kind of a toss up as its hard to understand if big expensive GPU cards will soon face meaning competition from purpose built low power/cost devices.

Sometimes, but I rather stick with my Secom Access Control System....going to release some cool AI very soon.

In my experience, there is no difference cpu pound for pound if your VMS does not use the GPU. AMD acceleration is available for roughly the amount of pixels supported by the output header. Stark contrast to intel gpus. AMD acceleration has not yet been natively supported by ffmpeg at my last check, however, AMD supports a great AMF SDK in tandem with ffmpeg, although I'm unaware of any VMS package uptake on the framework as yet.