Intel axes Nervana just two months after launch
fuse.wikichip.org
fuse.wikichip.org
But this is very intel: get psyched about a technology, dump billions into it for a few years, flake out. See: cloud services ca. 1997 and IoT ca. every 3 years since 2013.
That's what the article says. They had two lines that did basically the same thing, and axed one of them.
According to the article, the hardware on Nervana was better, but the software was worse.
Now they're doing drone shows and sports as incremental business attempts. Sometimes I think of Intel as a PR agency with a semiconductor fab in the backyard...
Pretty sure you can guess how well that worked. My suggestion, making the tacky 90's robot recite Cartman lines or otherwise swear in ridiculous ways, was... not exactly in alignment with the rest of our content strategy, you might say. And probably not what Intel had in mind. But I bet adoptions would have broken the two-digit barrier.
I think they have a tendency to ditch products prematurely. They enter markets that will take 10 years to mature and then cut their losses when the expected level of profit doesn't appear. They even do this to divisions that are actually turning a profit. Which goes over really badly with their customers.
Amazon was far from the first company to do cloud. For instance, Sun Microsystems pushed it in the 90s, and Loudcloud, I mean "Opsware" did it in 2003.
I think the difference was that Amazon committed to it for a loooooong time.
Hit the nail on the head! I worked for Intel nearly a decade ago. I was a full time employee for a few years. They saw Android and the Apple app store capturing mobile users and decided to dump $$$ into an app store for the PC (Intel AppUp). The effort lasted a few years before it crashed and burned HARD. During this time they also tried to spin up Meego/Moblin for mobile and tablet, then a partnership with Samsung to work on Tizen, and bought up McAffee.
The amount of money Intel flushes down the toilet with fruitless endeavors is sad, especially considering the number of people that end up jobless (like many of my good friends did) because of it.
I see as rich people who buy expensive things and let them rot because they forgot they bought them or so.
I have no idea how Intel could work their way into running an app store beyond "we have tech and market dudes, good enough right?"
It’s still software and besides the hardware which wasn’t much different from a standardized gaming PC, they worked on building the software platform and developer accessories. Something they happen to be pretty decent at...
Oh wait.. they did. And there's not.
The design of the UI and the design of the apps was like the first time using a brand new system where everything has been thoroughly thought through. It used touch very well to be as basic and straightforward as possible.
Lots of people really thought Windows Mobile was great (including here on HN). Meego was great too.
It doesn't matter.
The point is that it's unclear why Intel (a company that has failed at every consumer focused business they have ever tried) would have done better with Nokia than Microsoft did, given that MS has had considerable success in consumer markets, already had carrier relationships, had developer relationships etc etc).
A little less sarcasm and snark will probably leave room for absorbing what people are saying.
What? Not at all!
Nokia was screwed before Microsoft bought them. If they'd shipped Meego on phones two years earlier (start of 2009) they'd have had a chance, maybe.
At the time I thought Microsoft was Nokia's best hope (and Nokia was the best hope for Microsoft's mobile strategy).
I'm pushing back on the idea that Intel would have been some magic lifeline for them.
By consumer market, you mean PC market. They were tiny in mobile market. Its the reason they try to shove Nokia into its platform
Nokia already has they the dev relationship, carrier relationship, retail relationship. They dont need all that from microsoft. The only thing they need is money and strong leadership. Nokia was mismanaged into oblivion.
> It doesn't matter
No, it does matter. They were already one foot in the grave, but jumping ship into windows mobile is just the nail in the coffin.
Apple had revolutionized the category and was making over 90% of the profits, had all the apps and other ecosystem lock-in, the ipad on top of that, the highest user satisfaction, an avalanche of free publicity, almost all of the consumer mindshare, and a fleet of rapidly expanding and phenomenally popular stores for distribution. A brand new "well thought out os" with no apps simply wasn't going to make any kind of dent in Apple's market share.
Meanwhile the anti-Apple enthusiasts had been coalescing strongly around Android for several years. A bunch of big companies were fighting tooth and nail for the scraps and who won? The guys with the "most well thought out Android skin"? No. It was the guys who were by far the most ruthless and shameless competitors. That's what won between all the android handset makers, that's who won between Android makers and other "well thought out OS's" and imho that's who wins all hypothetical matchups as well if all you're bringing to the table is being cool and well thought out.
Now if Intel wanted to lose $5B a year and buy marketshare then yeah they could have done that but they would have never made back that money.
"Despite a limited release,[5] the N9 received widespread critical acclaim, with some describing it as Nokia's finest device to date. It was praised for both its software and hardware, including the MeeGo operating system, buttonless 'swipe' user interface, and its high-end features"
At launch, we know that the software are great. Hardware are great. But the management was abyssimal. Alot of internal politics, burning money, and ultimately, Meego was killed before it was borne into the world. The irony is that N9 was still a great revolutionary phone critically acclaimed, despite knowing its gonna be short lived.
I wouldnt have been so bitter about it if N9/Meego was not great.
(Typed from a Sailfish OS running Xperia X. :-) )
Actually it was only Nokia Mobile that was bought and after how everything went Nokia Siemens Networks, got enough money to buy Siemens part back, become the current owner of Bell Labs and via the HMD agreement, one of the best Android OEMs.
In what concerns Windows, although it lost on the phones, it is winning on the tablet space via 2-1 hybrid/convertible laptops against Android and ChromeOS tablets.
And most PDA like industrial deployments are still mostly Windows based.
Platform fails without them, though.
Announce a platform, intending for it to fail? Big fish like Intel are masters at this now.
Literally the first sentence of the second paragraph in the article (that you read, right?)
> The announcement itself isn’t very surprising. In mid December the company announced its acquisition Habana Labs for approximately $2 billion.
I worked on OpenStack for a few years. Take this with a grain of salt, but I heard that Intel funded a great deal of it... quietly.
Basically they wanted to promote OpenStack, but at the same time they didn't want to piss off companies competing with it.
1. It's not 100TFLOPs - you need fp32 to accumulate dot product, at which point you're getting much less. But even if you do 16/16, there's no way you'll really get near the roof of that roofline model.
2. Each V100 is $7K
3. 4x V100s not only cost as much as a decent car, but require a specialized chassis and a specialized PSU: they're 300W _sustained_ each (substantially more in momentary power consumption), and require a powerful external fan to cool them properly.
I want 400TFLOPs of bfloat16 dot product / convolution bandwidth under my desk, in a reasonably quiet, sub-1KW power envelope.
4) maybe get a cluster of Jetsons?
Here is anandtech showing almost 100TFLOPS, and they didn't every try hard to tune it:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/12170/nvidia-titan-v-preview-...
Google's TPUs, Tesla's whatever those are etc. Bet on them!
NOT on whatever Intel or IBM or AMD or Arm are doing this field. Heck, even Nvidia will probably start loosing at this game in the long run. The field is too dynamic and volatile, companies need to "eat their own dogfood" by integrating vertically hardware + software, before pushing hardware to sell to others too. This is not the old game of general purpose hardware anymore...
Second, most companies that want to deploy AI cannot afford to build their own custom hardware. Even most carmakers partner with Mobileye or NVIDIA.
These big companies also have research teams whose job it is to stay on the ball, research and develop AI techniques and influence how the hardware has to change.
As for eating your own dog food, I think NVIDIA does just that with their autonomous driving software stack, robotics kit, devtechs for customers and library optimization/porting.
With sufficient focus, funding and execution I think AMD and Intel can reach a similar spot.
That said, my hunch is that the legacy and compatibility that the general purpose hardware makers have to carry forward will become a problem. But until that happens (I.e. specialized HW delivers better bang/$) in a 2-10 years, they will likely figure out how to alleviate that and/or develop more specialized hardware.
I'm not surprised companies like Ford have continued to push out dates
- MKL-DNN (rebranded DNNL) is unique and has no equivalent in the ARM space. It even supports OpenCL
- OpenCV
- MKL
- PlaidML and NGraph follow the current trend of deep learning compilers
- They had Nervana Neon as a deep learning framework which I'm pretty sure contributed to Nervana acquisition as at the time it was even faster for convolution than Nvidia CuDNN.
I'm really looking forward to their Xe GPU. Also I expect them to leverage MLIR or contribute heavily to the linear algebra dialect -> LLVM IR optimization passes.
Hope aside, is there any reason to believe this time is different, and that Intel is serious about GPUs?
To paraphrase the common saying, "Insanity is trusting Intel over and over again with new products, and expecting different results"
If you go speak to IBM and you have an interesting app you can get time on a POWER9 server to see how well it runs.
Any work you put in to optimizing your code for the Cell would be completely thrown out if you brought it to another POWER architecture. At that point you might as well have hopped over to x86, ARM, CUDA, Xeon Phi, the Connection Machine, whatever.
The guys in charge now? Who the fuck knows. They seem good at making immense amounts of cash from yesterday's defacto monopoly, not so much at setting up tomorrow's.
Not really. GPGPU is not an existential threat to Intel, even now neither Nvidia or AMD are hurting Intel much. But TSMC is an existential threat, even with the recent rumours of splitting up Intel Fabs, it is all too late.
This leaves nVidia in a great position to commoditize their compliments, offering high performance ARM CPUs (like Amazon is offering) for a tiny margin just to fuck with Intel. And it really would. Versions with nVidia GPUs in the cache hierarchy (HBM) are just the icing on the cake.
Intel smartly got out of the memory business because it didn't want to join a race to the bottom fabbing commodity transistors, but there's a good chance that's in their not so distant future.
And yeah, TSMC is a pretty big threat too... I was ignoring 10nm as part of this, because we don't have any data yet as to whether it represents a permanent shift in Intel's ability to compete on fabrication. I personally doubt that. But it is possible.
Well said.
I think it is natural for Intel to start making dGPU to replace popular mainstream mobile GPU such as nVidia MX250. And that's what Intel's new DG1 starts from.
[1]: https://www.anandtech.com/show/15213/the-microsoft-surface-l...
The coming Ryzen Mobile with Zen 2 and Power Optimised Vega will do far better.
The problem in the GPU space is that so far Intel has always under delivered in tooling and performance.
I guess at least one can be happy that by being the underdog they play nice with FOSS community, as it tends to happen.
Now I want to get one, or a Phi or something from that era.
Intel was going to release Larrabee, their GPU based on x86, in 2010 but cancelled it because of poor performance.
All of Intel's integrated GPUs are adequate for desktop use and light gaming but they have poor performance compared to any Nvidia or AMD GPU. I don't know what you would call their internal instruction set.
We will see how Intel's new Xe GPU does. I'm predicting that they will cancel it in 2 years because of poor performance.
Likewise with 16 bit game consoles with their sprite engines.
For example, the P4610 is a great deal for a mixed-use drive.
Otherwise, Intel SSDs have quite a bit of share in the datacenter space. If you haven't seen them before, that's likely because you're not an enterprise customer.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/412158/global-market-sha...
https://blocksandfiles.com/2019/06/03/ssd-revenue-and-shipme...
I sold over 2 million dollars worth of Intel SSDs to Amazon customers in the span of a week once. Intel was running an extremely nebulously defined promo for 'new' customers where resellers could get 90% off disty price on enterprise SSD.
I uploaded all the eligibles SKUs to amazon at like 15% off list, wrote up some really gross python scripts to manage orders between amazon and synnex and to submit the deal registrations, and then hit my 6 months sales quota in an afternoon.
The double bonus was 6 months later when I then registered for all the backend spiffs. The backend rebate on some of this stuff sometimes exceeded 10% of list price. To date it's the only deal I've ever put together that had more than 100% gross margin.
For the kind of executives that stay at a company like Intel, the only thing they care about is the company’s stock price, and they’ll do anything to keep it high, even if it’s at the expense of what quite literally is destroying or directly hemorrhaging in the long term to the company itself. It’s how you end up with crazy situations like this.
Lets say there's two solutions that would solve my end users problem equally well. Both have list prices of 10K, both have normal disty cost of 7K, but brand X is running a promo where I get a 50% off front end discount from disty, but brand y is not.
Now I call the customer up and let them know that not only is brand X the best solution, but because of my great relationship with brand x I've secured them a 20% discount off list.
So now the customer is getting what they need cheaper and I've got more margin in the deal, which is what my commision is calculated out of.
So essentially when vendors do this they're not trying to make things cheaper for the customer to increase demand, they're trying to make sure that their products put the most money in sales people's pockets so that sales people will push their stuff the hardest.
Though on this specific occasion I was following the letter (or lack thereof) of the promotion, but certainly not the spirit. Grabbing existing demand vs generating new demand.
So maybe not as strong anymore?
(Someone else already mentioned SSD.)
* Intel GPU. Work quite well on Linux for the past 10 years (albeit not ace 3D performance due to hardware limitations)
* Intel WLAN. Work great on Linux. They even worked in a time where almost no other FOSS drivers for WLAN were around.
* Intel LAN. Work great on Linux. Great performance.
I'm not at all a fan of Intel. Their x86-64 CPUs are overpriced compared to AMD's Ryzen and Threadripper. But the above three? I would not run away from these; on the contrary.
Intel GPU started with i740 (a stand-alone AGP card), which is the last stand-alone GPU they made... and that was 1998 or so.
Their networking chipsets were a result of Intel's own x86 motherboard business, especially in the server arena. Intel also bought out companies in the late 90s/early 2000s to build their stand-alone network appliance business (routers, firewalls, SSL accelerators, etc) only to prompt kill that off when x86 started stumbling thanks to the P4 and AMD's competition.
Yes, Nervana looks much sexier, but I'd expect Habana to be more useful/usable overall.
Yeah "barely more complex than NUMA" was a slight exaggeration and only meant in comparison to the other ;-) Judging by the architecurial differences layed out in the link, Habana is still hard-as-hell to develop a toolchain for; but Nervana is the kind of stuff that can drive people insane.
I thought it was vapor ware. I went to their party where they talk about it and it was underwhelming. They did not give any number comparison to Nvidia and such.