FWIW, Intel has been pushing towards launching a dedicated discrete GPU platform. If/when they recover, this would place us in having three distinct CPU/GPU companies.
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).
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!
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.
C.f. Youtube's, Amazon and Netflix (products that bet BIG on recommendations) being incapable of recommending compelling material.
I'd like to learn more about how they've been revolutionized by it. Any sources you could share?
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.
It is (IIRC) a pretty fundamental part of self driving tech. I honestly think this is what drives a lot of Nvidia's valuation.
TPUs are massively parallel Float16 engines - not really applicable to anything outside of ML.
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.
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.
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 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.
I know that these probably are solvable problems, but they left a pretty bad taste...