No Intel ? Without them joining on board this might not be as useful.
nVidia would have loved to have a GPU with a QPI interconnect, but Intel wouldn't let them because they have their own GPU ambitions in Xeon Phi. So they came up with NvLink, which is kind-of PCIe but faster. They don't have any switch asics as yet so they are limited to fully connected topologies. Details on NvLink (without NDA) are scant, but I don't think it has the ability to be multi-node (it really is a bus).
Intel are now making Xeon Phi with on board Omnipath (more like Infiniband), which is curious.
If those gain widespread adoption, that leave little room for Mellanox's IB platform, hurts NVIDIA's sales of accelerator cards, and cuts AMD's and IBM's processors out of the picture entirely.
I note that Facebook and Intel are missing, which makes me wonder if they are off in a corner somewhere doing their own thing.
Inertia is a very strong decisive factor, especially when you need to make sure that 30+ year-old code still work like it's the case in HPC
Most code that works on Intel works on AMD. It's rare that it doesn't. The HPC vendor will have low risk on migration + get a bunch of competing accelerators at various price points for their problem. This is quite an incentive to move even if there would be stragglers.
The question is : are the DOD/DOE (or the chinese/european equivalent) going to risk millions for their next supercomputers on a new architecture or prefer good old intel ?
Especially when we know that the jump to exascale computation will only be possible if we get rid of the buses and have everything on the same chip (which is one direction taken by Intel).
My point is that the conclusion of the article "Intel has to come up with an answer..." is just plain wrong. This new architecture is an answer to intel new developments. We will have to wait to see what stick to the wall.
(disclaimer: I work for IBM, opinions my own)
In the end, that's also what is at stake, and the reason Intel might not be that interested. They will maybe see the light and see that they would have to steer the collaboration toward a more beneficial direction (for them), but at first, they will probably wait for it to gain momentum before deciding that they have to invest money to push the effort in the right direction (for them).
They have to be a threat for the established company to make a move. What nickpsecurity is saying by telling that they don't need Intel is that they are not yet a sufficient threat and that they are capable of becoming one.
If Intel were involved, then AMD would gain no strategic advantage.
So any HPC application that makes use of abstraction libraries for SIMD and GPGPU code can be easily moved to non-Intel processors.