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You seem bullish on ARM and dismissive of Intel or AMD, not sure why. NVIDIA is certainly ruling the roost because of CUDA+deep learning, but advantages in chi

by arcanus 10y ago

You seem bullish on ARM and dismissive of Intel or AMD, not sure why. NVIDIA is certainly ruling the roost because of CUDA+deep learning, but advantages in chips don't tend to last, and I do not see why this time would be any different. Could be a very interesting few years in the space.

dogma1138 10y ago
I'm not dismissive of Intel, just currently the smaller scale HPC market is focused on GPU's. And in the GPU market as far as compute goes NVIDIA is the champion. Intel is great but their current HPC/X86 offerings aren't that great. Xeon Phi and the Xeon SOC's might eventually come out swinging, but currently they aren't. AMD on the GPU side is pretty stagnant it has almost no answer to the Tesla based servers, and on the software side NVIDIA's software stack which includes CUDA is simply better. On the CPU side we need to see where Zen leads, but even then AMD will have a competitor to the traditional Xeon platform rather than HPC. ARM is probably more scalable especially since you can easily create semi-custom SOC's for HPC and put a lot of pretty powerful and considerably smaller cores in a server. Intel may get to that point with the Xeon products but it is not there yet.
- semi-extrinsic 10y ago
  I think you're only seeing a small part of the smaller scale HPC market, probably the deep learning or computational chemistry? If you go ask people working on car aerodynamics or geophysics or reservoir modelling for the oil industry, they're mostly all CPU cluster users still.
  - gnufx 10y ago
    It's not even right for computational chemistry, let alone all the other things you run on a typical university system, say. (I don't see why the size of the system is relevant, and obviously some GPU capacity may be sensible.)
jdietrich 10y ago
As the giant in the room, Intel has further to fall. Intel's market cap is more double that of AMD, ARM and Nvidia combined. Intel's real competitors are TSMC and GlobalFoundries, who are architecture agnostic. TSMC's market cap is ~90% of Intel's; GF are private, but they're probably in the same ballpark. Intel is in a unique (and uniquely challenging) position as both an IP and fab company. This vertical integration has proved highly profitable for Intel, but it is also highly risky. Their recent decision to start manufacturing ARM chips points at this uncertain future - diversification is a high priority if they are to reliably recoup the costs of <10nm fabs. The desktop market that Intel dominate is dying a slow death. Intel has failed miserably in the mobile market and are under threat on several fronts in the server and HPC market. x86 has been a tremendous asset for Intel, but it could easily become a hindrance. Intel is really two very different businesses (IP and fab) that are shackled together.
pjmlp 10y ago
Tooling and supported languages also play a big role in CUDA's adoption.

by arcanus 10y ago

dogma1138 10y ago

I'm not dismissive of Intel, just currently the smaller scale HPC market is focused on GPU's. And in the GPU market as far as compute goes NVIDIA is the champion. Intel is great but their current HPC/X86 offerings aren't that great. Xeon Phi and the Xeon SOC's might eventually come out swinging, but currently they aren't. AMD on the GPU side is pretty stagnant it has almost no answer to the Tesla based servers, and on the software side NVIDIA's software stack which includes CUDA is simply better. On the CPU side we need to see where Zen leads, but even then AMD will have a competitor to the traditional Xeon platform rather than HPC. ARM is probably more scalable especially since you can easily create semi-custom SOC's for HPC and put a lot of pretty powerful and considerably smaller cores in a server. Intel may get to that point with the Xeon products but it is not there yet.

semi-extrinsic 10y ago
I think you're only seeing a small part of the smaller scale HPC market, probably the deep learning or computational chemistry? If you go ask people working on car aerodynamics or geophysics or reservoir modelling for the oil industry, they're mostly all CPU cluster users still.
- gnufx 10y ago
  It's not even right for computational chemistry, let alone all the other things you run on a typical university system, say. (I don't see why the size of the system is relevant, and obviously some GPU capacity may be sensible.)

jdietrich 10y ago

As the giant in the room, Intel has further to fall. Intel's market cap is more double that of AMD, ARM and Nvidia combined. Intel's real competitors are TSMC and GlobalFoundries, who are architecture agnostic. TSMC's market cap is ~90% of Intel's; GF are private, but they're probably in the same ballpark. Intel is in a unique (and uniquely challenging) position as both an IP and fab company. This vertical integration has proved highly profitable for Intel, but it is also highly risky. Their recent decision to start manufacturing ARM chips points at this uncertain future - diversification is a high priority if they are to reliably recoup the costs of <10nm fabs. The desktop market that Intel dominate is dying a slow death. Intel has failed miserably in the mobile market and are under threat on several fronts in the server and HPC market. x86 has been a tremendous asset for Intel, but it could easily become a hindrance. Intel is really two very different businesses (IP and fab) that are shackled together.

pjmlp 10y ago

Tooling and supported languages also play a big role in CUDA's adoption.