Comment by ChuckNorris89 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChuckNorris89 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I don't know why your painting Intel as some new entry GPU beginner here, but FYI, Intel had been making and selling integrated GPUs for over 20 years now, to the point they pretty much dominate the GPU market share in sheer numbers (most desktops and laptops, even older Macs, sold in the last 10-15 years are most likely gonna have an Intel chip with integrated graphics, regardless if it's used or not in favor of a discrete GPU).

Sure, their iGPU offerings were never competitive for gaming or complex tasks, but given it came for "free" with your CPU, it was good enough for most businesses and consumers and was a also a major boon during the GPU shortage where gamers who build systems with AMD chips were left unable to use their PC while those who went Intel could at least use their PC for some productivity and entertainment until they could buy a dGPU.

So it's not like they had to start absolutely from scratch here. In fact, Intel's latest integrated GPU architecture, Xe, was so good, it was beating the integrated Vega graphics AMD was shipping till the 6xxx series with RDNA2 in 2022, while also killing the demand for Nvidia's low end dGPUs for desktops (GT 1050) and mobile (MX350). Xe was also the first GPU on the market with AV1 decode support.

So given this, Intel is definitely not a failure in the GPU space, they're definitely doing some things right but they just can't box in the ring with "Ali" yet. Anyone thinking they can leapfrog Radeon and Nvidia at their first attempt would be foolish. Intel should take on the losses on the GPU division for a few more years and push through.

> So it's not like they had to start absolutely from scratch here

No, and actually in some respects that's not a good thing either. Their existing iGPU driver was designed with the assumption of GPU and CPU memory being pretty much fungible, and with the CPU being pretty "close" in terms of latency, just across the ringbus. It wasn't even PCIe attached, like how AMD does it, it was directly on the ringbus like another core.

Now you need to take that legacy codebase and refactor it to have a conception of where data lives and how computation needs to proceed in order to feed the GPU with the minimum number of trips across the bus. Is that easier than writing a clean driver from scratch, and pulling in specific bits that you need? ....

One of their recent bugs in raytracing was literally due to one line of code in an allocator that was missing a flag to allocate the space in GPU memory instead of CPU, a one-line change produced a 100x speedup in the raytracing performance.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Vulkan-RT-100x-Improve

It is most likely much easier to do what AMD did and go from discrete to integrated than the other way around... again, they don't have a tightly-coupled design like Intel did, their iGPU is literally just a pcie client that happens to be on the same die.

(also, AMD paid the penalty like 15 years ago... there were terascale based APUs, and the GCN driver was developed as a dGPU/iGPU hybrid architecture from day 1, they never had to backport GCN itself from dGPU, that was all done in the terascale days.)

I'd have to agree with GP here. It wasn't at all obvious for almost anyone that Intel can get so quickly to the level of performance Arc offers. After decades of bottom of the barrel iGPUs in a span of 2-3 years they went to decent iGPUs, and then decent dGPUs (according to those who touched them). That's quite an achievement in a market that all but solidified around the 1.5 incumbents.

> they went from decades of bottom of the barrel iGPUs

Hah, I remember the time I spent a week dodging the software renderer to figure out why my shader wasn't working on an intel iGPU -- turns out that someone at intel decided to implement "float" with an 8 bit float. Not 8 byte, 8 bit.

"Sure, we support floating point, what's the problem?"

They can use a 64k table in ROM for all 2-arg ops, and 256-entry tables for the rest!

> during the GPU shortage where gamers who build systems with AMD chips were left unable to use their PC

This comment baffles me, both AMD and Intel have CPUs with onboard graphics and those without. You even noted the integrated graphics a sentence later.

If anything, this is more evidence that AMD is following the Intel playbook by having that integrated CPU/ GPU architecture plan.

>This comment baffles me, both AMD and Intel have CPUs with onboard graphics and those without. You even noted the integrated graphics a sentence later

Why does it baffle you? AMD has only been selling desktop chips with integrated GPUs only for a few years now (they called them APUs), and their APUs were not that stellar at either the GPU or CPU part due to compromises on both parts.

Most of the successful Ryzen chips AMD was selling for the desktop were exclusively without integrated GPUs, to save die space and cost, which hurt PC builders during the GPU scalpocalipse, while on the other hand, Intel's almost entire CPU product range for desktops had integrated GPUs for over 10 years now, enabling PC builders to at least use their PCs until a dGPU could be available.

Sure, Intel sold some CPUs without iGPUs but those were very few SKUs in comparison. Similarly, but in reverse, AMD also sold some Ryzen CPUs with iGPUs(APUs), but those were very few SKUs as their CPUs were weaker than the non-iGPU SKUs, and their outdated Vega iGPUs were pretty weak even compared to Intel's Xe.

So that's the major difference between Intel and AMD that was a game changer for many: Intel shipped most of its chips with iGPUs for over a decade while AMD did not, meaning you always needed to buy a dGPU, and if you couldn't, like in the past ~2 years, well ... good luck, your new tower PC is now an expensive door stop.

Still baffled?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Accelerated_Processing_Uni... (introduced 2011)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Graphics_Technology (introduced 2010)

And AMD sold how many APUs for desktop relative to CPUs?

AMD CPUs with iGPUs are a very different product from their CPUs without, regardless of what the nomenclature might imply.

AMD's Zen 2 Apus were not made (widely) avaialble at retail, and Zen+ APUs only went to quad core. If you wanted 6 cores and an integrated GPU, you had to buy Intel or from Aliexpress or wait until August 2021 for Zen3 APUs to launch. The two 4650G chips I got in late 2020 work great, but having to call my card issuer to get them to turn off all fraud production for an hour so I can get an order in wasn't ideal.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com