So basically, it will be two companies which own both the CPU and GPU stack (AMD/ATI and Nvidia/ARM) and intel will just sort of end up at the wayside. Not really what I expected.
If Intel can survive their current CPU manufacturing issues, manage to innovate on their design again, and manage to improve the Xe design in a couple generations, they might be in a good position in several years. I (as a layman) give them a 50/50 shot at recovering or just abandoning the desktop CPU and GPU market.
I know that these probably are solvable problems, but they left a pretty bad taste...
That is the thing with a lot of these side projects Intel is always working on. It would be great if they actually delivered good products, but they often spend billions acquiring these companies and developing these products only to turn out one or two broken products and then dump the whole project.
I think this time is different with Xe, but I can't blame anyone for looking at the past history and being dubious that Intel is in it for the long haul.
Being a only a year behind market leaders with your first product actually seems pretty impressive to me. Especially if that's at the (unreasonably priced) top of the line, and they have something competitive in the higher volume but less sexy down market segments.
The >= KNC products have all been "one generation behind" the competition. When the Intel Xe is released, Intel will have been trying to enter this market for about 30 years.
This market is more important now than ever before. I hope that they keep pushing and do not axe the Intel Xe after the first couple of generations only to realize 10 years later that they want to try again.
That's a heavy bet on ML and crypto(-currency? -graphy?). Has ML, so far, really made any industry-changing inroads in any industry? I'm not entirely discounting the value of ML or crypto, just questioning the premature hype train that exists in tech circles (especially HN).
Does the tech industry not count, or are you only considering industries that are typically slower moving?
Lots of people jump on any trend, it doesn't mean the hype is unjustified or that nobody is "moving the needle" with that trend. Recommendations (e-commerce, advertising, music, etc) have been pretty revolutionized by it.
I'd like to learn more about how they've been revolutionized by it. Any sources you could share?
C.f. Youtube's, Amazon and Netflix (products that bet BIG on recommendations) being incapable of recommending compelling material.
Well, yes that is the point. My theory is that the gaming market for GPUs is well understood. I don't think there are any lurking surprises on the number of new gamers buying high-end PCs (or mobile devices with hefty graphics capabilities) in the foreseeable future.
However, if one or more of the multitude of new start-ups entering the ML and crypto (-currency) space end up being the next Amazon/Google/Facebook then that would be both unforeseeable and unbelievably transformative. Maybe it won't happen (that is the risk) but my intuition suggests something is going to come out of that work.
I mean, it didn't work out for Sony when they threw a bunch of SPUs in the PS3. They went back to a traditional design for their next two consoles. So not every risk pans out!
TPUs are massively parallel Float16 engines - not really applicable to anything outside of ML.
It is (IIRC) a pretty fundamental part of self driving tech. I honestly think this is what drives a lot of Nvidia's valuation.
Same with machine vision. It's going to be everywhere — not just self-driving trucks (which, unlike cars, are going yo be big soon), but also security devices, warehouse automation, etc.
All this is normally run on vector / tensor processors, both in huge datacenters and on local beefy devices (where a stock built-in GPU alongside ARM cores is not cutting it).
This is a growing market with.a lot of potential.
Licensing CUDA could be quite a hassle, though. OpenCL is open but less widely used.
Hopefully some of those cryptocurrencies (until they get proof-of-stake fully worked out) move to memory-hard proof-of-work using Curve25519, Ring Learning With Errors (New Hope), and ChaCha20-Poly1309, so cryptocurrency accelerators can pull double-duty as quantum-resistant TLS accelerators.
I'm not necessarily meaning dedicated instructions, but things like vectorized add, xor, and shift/rotate instructions, at least 53 bit x 53 bit -> 106 bit integer multiplies (more likely 64 x 64 -> 128), and other somewhat generic operations that tend to be useful in modern cryptography.
It is also hardware that is similar to ML acceleration, it needs better integer and boolean (algebra, not branching) support, and has a stronger focus on memory access (that ML acceleration also needs, but gains less from). So how comes nobody even speak about this?
ML would benefit from both too, as would highly complex graphics and physics simulation. The cache pre-population is probably at odds with low latency graphics.
I always get a kick out of the sentiment toward Intel on HN.
Intel is booming financially. Things have never been better for them in that respect. They have every opportunity to fix their mess.
Intel has eight times (!) the operating income of Nvidia, with a smaller market cap.
Intel is one of the world's most profitable corporations. $26 billion in operating income the last four quarters. Their margins are extreme. Their sales are at an all-time high. Their latest quarterly report was stellar.
In just 2 1/2 years Intel has added a business the size of Nvidia and AMD combined.
If they can't utilize their current profit-printing position to recover, then they certainly deserve their tombstone. Nobody has ever had an easier opportunity to find their footing.
Their decades of more or less monopoly status has made them complacent, their revenue is high still because of this inertia built into the market that simply will not vanish.
The datacenter for example is still dominated by Xeon not because people like Xeon over Epyc but because there is not a easy migration path between the 2 platforms. If I was building a whole new server farm with all new VM's I would choose Epyc all day... but if I need to upgrade hosts in an existing farm with no down time well that will need to be Xeon then...
When it comes to desktops/laptops though, Lenovo's AMD line is attractive and suffers no such problems
And, yet, the writing was on the wall. Nokia was doomed once the smartphone era came. That's where Intel is today: AMD crushes them on the high-end general purpose CPUs. ARM crushes them on I/O performance and the low-end for general purpose CPUs. GPUs crush Intel in the middle, for special-purpose (mainly single-precision floating point) computing.
Right now, large portions of new computer sales, and an even larger portion of the high-margin cpu sales, come from cloud computing. AMD and ARM are stealing huge market share from Intel on that front. I don't see that momentum changing any time soon.
There's a reason that Intel has 8x the operating income of NVidia while having a smaller market cap. It's not because of where they are currently--it's where they are going. Stock market valuations are forward-looking, and the future doesn't look so bright for Intel.
Personally I won't be betting on or against Intel - it wouldn't shock me if they follow the Nokia route, it also wouldn't shock me if they come out with a new generation that puts them back on top within the next few years.
This sounds difficult to believe. Do you know a benchmark that shows this?
https://www.anandtech.com/show/15578/cloud-clash-amazon-grav...
The thing is, that's not "ARM" it's "ARM as implemented by AWS", they get to choose how many memory channels to add etc.
That could be a huge market with no cempetutors in sight
So was RIM in 2010. Profits are a trailing indicator. The PC market is really small compared to the mobile market and declining. While Apple only has 10% of the overall market, it has a much higher percentage of high end personal computers and Intel is about to lose Apple as a customer.
PCs also are having longer refresh cycles. What does “recovery” look like? PC sells going up? That’s not going to happen.
They still have the server market while that is probably growing, Amazon is pushing its own ARM processors hard and MS and Google can’t be too far behind.
The innovators and underdogs are always great to see, and they fuel our collective imagination, so it's no surprise that they dominate the HN front page. Of course, that mind-share dominance is in stark contrast to the well-entrenched money-printing machines they're trying to disrupt, who are happy to keep dominating their respective industries year after year instead.
Past performance. In spite of their earnings their stock plummeted on the 7nm news. It’s not just HN that is bearish.
The margins on those big Xeon chips have been so good that they ditched everything else, and painted themselves into a corner, sitting by the sidelines for the past 20 years as new markets emerged.
Just licensing the designs puts a company on a lower chipmaking tier with Qualcomm, Samsung, Apple, Huawei, etc.
NVIDIA Carmel is NVIDIA's own Arm v8.2-A design [0]. They only licence the architecture. The core is quite interesting, as it's doing dynamic recompilation for an underlying VLIW architecture.
However, NVIDIA Orin[1] (followup for Tegra Xavier) will use a Cortex-A78 core[2] (formerly Hercules) licenced from ARM.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Denver
[1] https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-introduces-drive-a....
[2] https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/arm_holdings/microarchitectures...
The original i740 was theoretically a capable card; although fairly hampered by being forced to use Main Memory for Textures. Intel eventually backed down from the graphics market back then, and instead continued to use the 740 as a basis for the integrated graphics in the i810/815 chipsets.
But, as GPUs became closer to what we saw as real GPUs, Intel continued to press on with the idea that keeping things done in the CPU was better for them (i.e. encouraging upgrades to higher end CPUs vs selling more lower margin graphics cards.)
You saw a similar pattern with the 845/855/865: Shaders were all done in software (Hey, it finally almost justified Netburst, right? ;)
And this pattern seems to continue with various forms of infighting between groups up to this day.
The other Consistent problem they have had is driver compatibility/capability.
But yes otherwise, nearly every Intel CPU has integrated graphics whereas only a few select AMD CPU's have integrated graphics (and AMD brands them as APU's not CPU's).
It seems that is changing somewhat with the 4000-series APUs, but guess what, those are only going to be sold to OEMs, not individuals.
It's all rather frustrating, since I'm still on an i7-4770k and wouldn't mind an upgrade.
4770k passmark: 7042 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-4770K...
Ryzen 5 3400G passmark: 9421 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Ryzen+5+3400G&i...
Intel Graphics 4600 (in 4770k): 649 https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu.php?gpu=Intel+HD+4600...
RX Vega 11 (in 3400G): 2106 https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu.php?gpu=Radeon+RX+Veg...
So relative to 4770k, 3400G has a 33% faster CPU, and 3.25x the GPU.
Right. That's not a significant upgrade IMO. I'm not even sure it would be worth it if it merely required a CPU swap. Since it actually requires a new motherboard, it's not even close to worth it.
A real upgrade would be to a 3900X (passmark: 32861), or at the very last, a 3600 (passmark: 17828). But those require a discrete GPU.
The 4700G looks like it would more or less suffice (passmark: unknown, ~18k?) , but it won't be sold to individuals, only OEMs.
> 3.25x the GPU.
As far as I can tell, I've never run into any limits of the 4770K's iGPU, so I don't think this matters. Running dual 1920x1200 monitors.
Maybe I should review AMD's GPU offerings again. Do you happen to know anything about this? Last time I was looking for (fanless + dirt cheap + dual display), and couldn't find anything that fit all 3. However... I didn't ask the question, does the fan run all the time, or only under heavy load?
Also, with lots of games reportedly working on Linux these days, maybe I should replace "dirt cheap" with "reasonably cheap."
But the reality is that vast majority of business desktops and laptop don't need anything better than what Intel offers.
If AMD gains share in that segment (and it looks like they are), it will IMO be because of finally having a better CPU, not because of a better GPU.
Even with the acquisition of ARM, I don't see Nvidia any better off than Intel at this moment as far as CPU/GPU stack goes. Frankly, I would think AMD would be the one to end up by the wayside since they still are weak on the software side.
Right now I have a fairly decent GPU in my Macbook which I've hardly used. Very little supports it, because it's not nVidia. I can't use it for AI training, for example. Sure, it might work ok for some games, but Macbooks aren't really for gaming, and nVidia has captured that market nicely anyway.
Things can change; maybe Intel's software stack will be incredible. I don't know. But they have quite a hill to climb before they reach that summit.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/951537/worldwide-average...
https://wccftech.com/iphone-11-cuts-into-apples-average-sell...
The iPhone 7 was discontinued September 2019. You might have found some on clearance after that.
nvidia has a huge market, people buy their stuff because it's fast and there's software support for everything from AAA games to scientific/engineering modelling to ML.
intel took far, far too long to come up wiht a viable graphics ecosystem to ever be successful.
Given this is about their third attempt at releasing a high performance gpu, I think skepticism is warranted until they’re actually selling something to the general public.
Apple seems to be.
I was about to write how that’s a special case, but then I remembered that Microsoft is also making their own chips for Surface products.
If this does happen I think Intel will not sweat it because it will be only Apple. Apple has no interest in selling CPUs. They want to be able to make severe changes (cut the fat) between revisions and not have people crying about having to update their architecture to support it.
Apple was a founding member of AIM (Apple, IBM, Motorola) for PowerPC. (As rumour has it, after DEC refused to go for a higher-volume lower-margin Alpha AXP derivative when Apple came knocking for an m68k replacement, Apple then asked IBM for a higher-volume lower-margin POWER derivative, leading to AIM and PowerPC.) As far as I know, only Acorn had a role in founding/spinning off ARM.
On the other hand, I would be very surprised is Apple wasn't smart enough to get a very-long-term/perpetual license on the ARM instruction set before investing heavily in custom core design.
"In the late 1980s, Apple Computer and VLSI Technology started working with Acorn on newer versions of the Arm core. In 1990, Acorn spun off the design team into a new company named Advanced RISC Machines Ltd."
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-11-28-fi-4993-s...
" Apple has invested about $3 million (roughly 1.5 million pounds) for a 30% interest in the company, dubbed Advanced Risc Machines Ltd. (ARM), but the exact ownership stake of VLSI and Acorn was not disclosed. "
Apple and a bunch of others also have a "Arm architectural licence" which IIRC cannot be taken back.
They could theoretically simply stop licensing ARM to Broadcom, although that might invoke some anti-trust suits.
What? As far as I know the only connection between Broadcom and Acorn is that they employed Sophie Wilson.
And I'd hardly call Intel focused on one use-case. They seem to have their hands in all sorts of random-as-heck product lines like IoT devices and such, most of which rarely see much long-term support.
I think that effort in particular (about 5 years ago for me) was a warning sign about Intel -- they didn't internalize that your smart water meter would have a chip beefy enough very soon to connect to a cellular or other long range network and just hit a cloud endpoint.
Edit: ok Duopoly, but still... kinda insane that only 2 companies in the world do it.
And almost all competent non-CUDA platforms (e.g. Google TPUs, Tesla's secret in-house hardware) haven't been open-sourced, or even sold to consumers, which further enables the NVIDIA monopoly.