> hope they're in it for the long haul with Xe
Hope aside, is there any reason to believe this time is different, and that Intel is serious about GPUs?
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"
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 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.
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.