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Comment by ndneighbor | Hacker News Reader

I know it's not ideal, but I am really rooting for Intel's effort for graphics. From launch nearly a year ago to today, the driver team has been knocking out driver issues and slowly but surely trying to achieve parity with AMD and Nvidia. From what I hear, the team really going for broke on trying to get ML workloads fully supported. When Intel shipped a 16GB card at that price point, you knew that they were really trying, it would be cool if Battlemage (the next gen.) shipped with 32GB for larger models.

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> From what I hear, the team really going for broke on trying to get ML workloads fully supported.

I've been waiting on AMD to do that. Embarrassingly, it looks like Intel will get there faster than AMD.

Maybe Intel has less baggage and can target what they know people actually use?

My opinion is that Intel has excellent software culture compared to other hardware companies. It might be one reason.

I'm a loyal Intel customer because their stuff is, in general, straight up less janky and more practically reliable than AMD's stuff. I agree that Intel knows how to do software in ways that AMD simply doesn't.

I think you'll be in for Another Massive Disappointment (AMD).

The software/driver woes in their graphics division have been going on for years at this point with no clear path forward, just some statements about how they plan to fix it in the future (e.g. handling the geohot AMD rant back in June).

It's not just ML either - on the gaming side, some people swallow the Nvidia price premium for the better drivers.

Agreed, Nvidia's dominance is annoying.

I made irrational purchasing decisions in the past to support the underdog, likening it to using Firefox. Unfortunately with AMD you just get a worse product.

This space sorely needs more competition.

What's annoying is that things don't have to be this way. If our chipmakers like Apple, AMD and Intel were able to actually work together, we could make a proper GPGPU library that puts CUDA in the grave. Nvidia is betting on these companies being driven further apart though, and they just won't stop being proven right.

We need FAANG to put aside their differences to fund an alternative, or else FAANG will suffer the consequences.

for games I think the driver gap has narrowed quite a bit

Nvidia’s drivers are of horrid quality. They basically been break-fix-break-fix-break-fix on Destiny 2 and Sea of Thieves, with the broken version dropping a locked 144FPS PC to ~50FPS.

They seem to employ zero regression testing.

> I think you'll be in for Another Massive Disappointment (AMD).

Nah, I pretty much gave up on AMD when the 7000 series launch was imminent and still no ML real support for the 6000 series. Not that I was even expecting anything. With the way Intel Arc is coming along, any ML support for Radeon is just a bonus. I refuse to pay the Nvidia tax until it becomes clear there is no other option again. Nvidia just really rubbed me the wrong way with the latest generation.

But if Intel "wins", it means yet another instance of corporate consolidation, where a majority market holder of one markets (CPUs) destroys a whole different market (GPUs) by integrating and price dumping their products into the majority/monopoly market.

It'll be really hard to compete for AMD Radeon cards and nVidia itself against Intel if they aggresively price dump their GPUs and use typical megacorporation tactics to push out and destroy competition.

Why would you want that? Why not root for an independent GPU company? Where does this love for megaconglomerates consolidating whole markets come from?

> It'll be really hard to compete for AMD Radeon cards and nVidia itself against Intel if they aggresively price dump their GPUs and use typical megacorporation tactics to push out and destroy competition.

AMD's market cap has been higher than Intel's for the last year, and NVIDIA is more than seven times higher. Apple is twice again as big. Surely this logic goes the other way. It's Intel and AMD and ARM Ltd. that are at the mercy of the big players dumping their way to dominance.

But obviously that's not happening. The competitive landscape in this industry is just fine. More products means more innovation and lower prices and bigger markets. That's just capitalism 101, really.

> Where does this love for megaconglomerates consolidating whole markets come from?

Nowhere, because that's just a strawman. I'm sure people here would love to see a GPU startup launch a product. But we're talking about Arc in this thread, and that seems like a good product too.

Why do you think market cap has non-tangential relevancy here?

It is a common metric for the power of a corporation, since it is the amount of money their stock is worth in total. What do you propose instead?

It's a measure (probably the single best one) of the financial resources a company can bring to bear on a problem. The contention upthread was about "price dumping" and "megacorporation tactics", which surely implies that big companies can do bad things to smaller players with their bigger resources. And it turns out that Intel is a small player in this particular field, as it happens. The logic just doesn't work.

It's a mystery to me why graphics cards have hardwired RAM. For CPUs/motherboards RAM has been extensible for decades.

Yhe main reason is speed. For example DDR5 has a transfer rate of about 50GB/s. The GDDR6X used in GPUs has a transfer rate of about 1TB/s. Nvidia just announced H200 AI processors have HBM3e memory that they report can go as fast at 10TB/s.

Speed/signaling issues.

To me is a mystery that CPUs/motherboards still have extensible RAM, integrated RAM (if you don't skimp and go for cheap RAM) can be very fast - for example the Steam Deck has quad-channel 5500 MT/s LPDDR5, very console-like.

What is it that make extensible RAM inherently slower? Is it the connectors raised off the boards, adding physical distance to the traces that's the issue?

The mechanical connector layout forces sub-optimal signalling paths.

You're forced to make everything slower to make things consistent.

That being said, a more optimized connector, board layout and form factor could make large-capacity, lower-latency modules possible. Not sure for example if there is anything out there besides the Dell proposed CAMM form factor, and I don't remember that one being specifically promoted as "faster", mostly "smaller".

Do you have any thoughts on how OneAPI compares to the Nsight tools?

If anything to get a new competitor to shake things up. It's not good to have a literal family duopoly. Both CEOs are blood relatives.

They're distant cousins. Both from the same city, both moved to the US and crushed it, but both families were large and then had lots of kids.

This can be molded into a generational power grab thriller. Think Godfather trilogy, but both Su and Huang are sort of Sith lords.

The family started with nothing, multiplied and played the strategic long game to conquer the AI marked to enable Skynet.

But Intel are the Jedi hacker good guys.

Yes. This is exactly right.

It can be, as long as you are willing to take a slight detour from reality.

Lisa Su is CEO not owner of AMD. It's a public company. if you're implying she's not competing with Nvidia cause it's all in the family, well..... that's kinda out there.

> trying to achieve parity with AMD and Nvidia

Interesting to put AMD and Nvidia at the same level. From experience developing GPGPU applications they are not even close..

I mean, if Nvidia’s GPGPU performance was like 100 “units” and AMD’s was like 40 units….Intel was at 1 Unit. The gap was far larger.

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