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Intel doesn't have that much of natural room to expand. They completely missed the mobile, Moore law is slowing down, so their edge slowly erodes. They been ta

Intel doesn't have that much of natural room to expand. They completely missed the mobile, Moore law is slowing down, so their edge slowly erodes. They been talking about killing GPU many years. They been doing it both technical and non-so technical point. E.g. in 2011 Intel paid $1.5Bln to NVIDIA, because the Intel killed NVIDIA chipset business through not so fair licensing practice. Instead NVIDIA invested so much in the GPU computing ecosystem CUDA. For many early years it was niche, but quickly growing. However, they hit jackpot with deep learning. I wouldn't be surprised that majority of self-driving cars will have NVIDIA chip in it.

miloofcroton 10y ago
The only problem with Nvidia, if you look at the entire system, is that they rely on Intel's CPUs for most of the computer systems that they are a part of. Sure, they have their ARM core CPUs that have proven to be decent, but I don't see them blowing anyone out of the water with them. Furthermore, there is no interchanging GPUs, so the only people using Nvidia CPUs are the ones that buy into Nvidia's entire ecosystem, which is necessarily going to be fewer people/groups. AMD, on the other hand, while fighting Intel and Nvidia for the past decade and coming up short, may be at the horizon of a breakthrough. Only AMD seems ready to find the synergy between CPUs and GPUs. A Zen and Vega combination of architectures could essentially be an Intel i7 top of the line + an Nvidia GTX top of the line. Add some special sauce, and they could really do it. Nothing that Intel has done in a long time has been impressive, but Nvidia is on fire. AMD's CPUs may help them leap ahead instead of merely catching up (which Vega may do anyway).
- elcct 10y ago
  It is like every year one reads that this time AMD beats Intel or NVIDIA, but when it comes to "showing the goods", AMD products are not much more than eccentric room heaters.
  - geezerjay 10y ago
    > AMD products are not much more than eccentric room heaters. You can buy an "eccentric room heater" from AMD with 8 CPU cores for around 100€, which in some benchmarks runs equivalent to Intel's 900€ processors. Intel fanboys usually take jabs at AMD but they seldom back them up with evidence.
    - elcct 10y ago
      That probably only makes sense for people with low budget. If you really need performance, not only "in some benchmarks" then there is no alternative to Intel.
      - lgeek 10y ago
        > If you really need performance, not only "in some benchmarks" then there is no alternative to Intel. Different microarchitectures perform better on different workloads, nothing new here. AMD's CMT works very well on control / integer bound workloads. Their main disadvantage is that the Piledriver CPUs are 32nm and therefore lose on energy efficiency.
        geezerjay 10y ago
        Exactly. Speaking from experience, I've had the opportunity to run the same machine learning job on a 12-core Intel Xeon E5-2650 server and a workstation with a 8-core AMD FX 8350 which cost less than 400€ to put together, and the AMD FX 8350 workstation finished the job slightly faster (some minutes in a 2-hour job). Granted, it was only anecdotal evidence, but the Xeon server cost 5 times more than the AMD workstation and gets the same performance. Sometimes people need to pay attention to real-world performance, and price/performance ratios. Blindly parroting that Intel's offering is best is just idiocy, and one which is tied to a hefty price tag.
        sqeaky 10y ago
        Every February I buy a new machine that is top of the line, mostly to reduce build times. I also compare it to my previous machines and see where I am at and how big my gains actually are. I was replacing a 2nd gen i7 (affectionately named MasslessC) with an AMD-FX 8350, which ought to be faster so I named it Tachyon. Both have a raid-1 of high performance SSDs (Linux Software RAID, bonnie++ had the throughput on both at more than 1.2GB/s), both maxed out the motherboard RAM (32gb in the intel and 64gb in the bulldozer with better timings on the RAM) and my 4.5 MLOC codebase took about 3 minutes and 50 seconds to build and Tachyon with her 8350 did it in 3:30. That was not acceptable gains.... I started by overclocking Tachyon and her 8350. But I could only add 200mhz even after exceeding what the community considered safe voltage bumps. until I learned about spread spectrum clocking. I disabled that and fixed all the cores at the same speed and I got it stable at 4.5ghz, 500mhz more than the "cap". 3:15 or so. Also my definition of stable is an hour in prime 95 not crashing, not exceeding 60c and then succeeding on all my benchmark tests. Well I decided I needed to do better than that, so I learned about CPU lapping. I got some static safe foam and mounted my the 8350 to it, and I got a small glass pane and mounted 1200 grit sandpaper to it. I did 50 strokes in each of the 4 directions to pull off the Nickel. With the rough copper exposed underneath I replaced the sandpaper with 1500 grit and did another 200 passes, then 2000 and 3000 grit each with 200 passes of 50 in the 4 directions. The top of that CPU was a copper mirror the likes of which Archimedes could use to set ablaze a thousand invading ships. I remounted it and managed to get to 4.6ghz with another voltage bump. This is because voltage bumps exponentially raise the temperature with respect clock speed. The extra cooling allow by removing the nickel allowed that heat to be wicked away just a little faster. Then I dropped $400 on a water cooling setup and got temperatures to not exceed 29c after 60 minutes of prime95. This was insane the largest pump, and extra 2 pints in the reservoir, careful calculations of the mineral content of the water so that as it aged silver was deposited inside my copper parts, simultaneously sterilizing the fluid. Every thing that touched the water was surgical grade polypropylene, 100% pure copper or the antimicrobial silver I added specifically in such a way that it would slowly be electrolyzed away. The water has been changed only once nothing has ever grown and it is an odd milky white that conducts heat marvelously (better than antifreeze in your car, unless you own a Lamborghini). Tachyon is now a marvel of liquid flow control with hoses and radiators showing that my aesthetic skills are lacking. This was the limit of Tachyon's CPU. Any further clock or voltage increase by the tiniest margins prevented a stable bootup of even a minimalistic custom kernel. My build times were down to 3:00 minutes plus or minus 2 seconds. I was satisfied, this $1,900 was worth the time of enjoyment I spent building it and the reduced build times. Fun, practical and the machine is stable to this day. This took me all the way to the following February and time to buy another machine. I decided to get a slim laptop with lower performance for the sake of mobility. So I bought a System 76 gazelle (or whatever African wildlife) pro, their i7 ultrabook. It was attempting to compete with the Macbook Air. It was less than 1.8cm thick and came with a mobile 4th gen i7 clocked a 1.6Ghz. It could clock itself all 4 up to 2.5Ghz or one core up to 4Ghz, and tends to idle around 600mhz. I bought 16Gb of ram and a mismatched pair of a Sata3 and M1 SSD on Newegg and raided them. Before deciding its name I benched it for shits and giggles. It built my codebase in 2:30, beating Tachyon and it's Bulldozer by 30 whole seconds, and with all the new changes to the codebase the 2nd gen i7, MasslessC, was up to 4 whole minutes. It beat my desktop soundly in every other test I threw at it save for GPU benchmarks and disk IO. Though it was within a few percent there. So the machine was dubbed Inflation (referring to the initial expansion of the Universe that occurred at many times the speed of light and any named tachyon I was aware of) cost about $1,400 grand total only the first $1,000 affecting the performance of builds. This year I bought their 6th gen i7 with desktop replacement. SleeperService is similarly maxed out the RAM and 4 disks of SSD nonsense. SleeperService's build times are well below 2 minutes, above 3 minutes on Inflation and nearly 4 minutes on Tachyon because of changes to use more templates and other costly compile time stuff. Intel is winning by leaps and bounds in every test and game I throw at it (there were many but this is already too long). I did everything I could to make Tachyon's Bulldozer fast but a slim and comparatively cheap notebook beat it on its first boot. I dub you a biased AMD fanboy by virtue of my comprehensive experimentation.
- fnord123 10y ago
  AMD is a red mage. No one uses red mages.
- saiya-jin 10y ago
  a lot of wishful thinking down those lines about a company that consistently fails to deliver better products than competition (not that it wouldn't be great for us all, just tired of seeing the same missed expectations for last 10 years at least)
- gcp 10y ago
  Sure, they have their ARM core CPUs that have proven to be decent, but I don't see them blowing anyone out of the water with them What? Their first iterations were somewhat meh (Tegra K1 with Denver 1 in the Nexus 9), but the latter iterations and reoriented focus (Jetson K1, K1 with A15s, Denver2) having been scoring some excellent design wins.
  - lgeek 10y ago
    NVIDIA had about 5 different generations of Tegra before the K1 [1]. The A15-based K1 (T124) came before the Denver-based K1 (T132) AFAIK. Both are very nice and a clear improvement over the previous generations. Denver is a bit inconsistent in its performance, but on average it dominates A15s and A57s. Nexus 9, however, has very poor thermal design and can only dissipate a small fraction of the heat output of the T132. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tegra https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tegra
    - jandrese 10y ago
      More to the point, those previous 5 generations were generally disappoting. Slow chips with decent but not mindblowing graphics, and extremely short support windows that left early adopters flapping in the breeze. Nvidia had quite a bit of ground to make up, but from what I've seen of their latest chips they made it. I think they're the fastest mobile chips you can buy this side of Apple's monsters.
      - gcp 10y ago
        Tegra2 was notoriously one of the few ARMv7 chips without NEON. I actually agree that Denver 1 in the K1 is really fast, but it's not scored many designs wins, perhaps exactly because of the thermal restraints. The A15 based design seems to have less of that problem.
- dagw 10y ago
  The only problem with Nvidia, if you look at the entire system, is that they rely on Intel's CPUs for most of the computer systems that they are a part of. Sure, Intel is part of every Nvidia system, but they're becoming a smaller and smaller part in dollar amounts. It's not uncommon that the GPUs in a CUDA setup costs 4-10 times as much as the CPUs. And at the end of the day it's much easier to replace Intel CPUs with AMD CPUs in a system, than it is to replace Nvida GPUs with AMD GPUs. Plus Nvidia feels a lot closer to come up with a CPU good enough to replace Intel in these systems than Intel is at coming up with something to replace Nvidia.
  - goalieca 10y ago
    Nvidia makes a pretty mean arm soc. I'm curious to see where this goes. Is there any precedent for arm in the server room?
- frozenport 10y ago
  AMD has been trying to find a synergy between CPUs and GPUs for over a decade. Heck they were the ones who bought ATI! They've been unable to deliver because "a synergy" between GPU and CPU doesn't mean very much. In the best case, the architecture will be able to avoid memory copies, but although inconvenient, existing applications have been able to pipeline host-device/device-host memory copies, effectively negating the problem. Even on this limited promise, AMD hasn't been able to deliver.
  - geezerjay 10y ago
    > They've been unable to deliver because "a synergy" between GPU and CPU doesn't mean very much. Contrary to what you may believe, that "synergy" does mean a lot, considering that one of the worlds fastest supercomputers does run on Opterons and NVIDIA Tesla cards. The thing is, high-performance computing is a niche market. Yet typical consumer hardware needs aren't CPU-driven, but GPU driven. Computer games don't take advantage (or need) multi-core CPUs, thus AMD's bet on the 6-core and 8-core AMD FX line didn't paid off as it was expected. Yet, everyone needs a good GPU to run games, and the "synergy" between that the CPU delivers and the GPU processes ends up being the bottleneck in consumer hardware.
    - frozenport 10y ago
      Except you haven't told me what synergy means. Also the cpus mentioned have fused FP units, meaning their cores are more comparable to Intel's hyperthreads. They often failed to perform at i5 levels, and any small performance increase was offset by higher energy consumption.

miloofcroton 10y ago

The only problem with Nvidia, if you look at the entire system, is that they rely on Intel's CPUs for most of the computer systems that they are a part of. Sure, they have their ARM core CPUs that have proven to be decent, but I don't see them blowing anyone out of the water with them. Furthermore, there is no interchanging GPUs, so the only people using Nvidia CPUs are the ones that buy into Nvidia's entire ecosystem, which is necessarily going to be fewer people/groups. AMD, on the other hand, while fighting Intel and Nvidia for the past decade and coming up short, may be at the horizon of a breakthrough. Only AMD seems ready to find the synergy between CPUs and GPUs. A Zen and Vega combination of architectures could essentially be an Intel i7 top of the line + an Nvidia GTX top of the line. Add some special sauce, and they could really do it. Nothing that Intel has done in a long time has been impressive, but Nvidia is on fire. AMD's CPUs may help them leap ahead instead of merely catching up (which Vega may do anyway).

elcct 10y ago
It is like every year one reads that this time AMD beats Intel or NVIDIA, but when it comes to "showing the goods", AMD products are not much more than eccentric room heaters.
- geezerjay 10y ago
  > AMD products are not much more than eccentric room heaters. You can buy an "eccentric room heater" from AMD with 8 CPU cores for around 100€, which in some benchmarks runs equivalent to Intel's 900€ processors. Intel fanboys usually take jabs at AMD but they seldom back them up with evidence.
  - elcct 10y ago
    That probably only makes sense for people with low budget. If you really need performance, not only "in some benchmarks" then there is no alternative to Intel.
    - lgeek 10y ago
      > If you really need performance, not only "in some benchmarks" then there is no alternative to Intel. Different microarchitectures perform better on different workloads, nothing new here. AMD's CMT works very well on control / integer bound workloads. Their main disadvantage is that the Piledriver CPUs are 32nm and therefore lose on energy efficiency.
      - geezerjay 10y ago
        Exactly. Speaking from experience, I've had the opportunity to run the same machine learning job on a 12-core Intel Xeon E5-2650 server and a workstation with a 8-core AMD FX 8350 which cost less than 400€ to put together, and the AMD FX 8350 workstation finished the job slightly faster (some minutes in a 2-hour job). Granted, it was only anecdotal evidence, but the Xeon server cost 5 times more than the AMD workstation and gets the same performance. Sometimes people need to pay attention to real-world performance, and price/performance ratios. Blindly parroting that Intel's offering is best is just idiocy, and one which is tied to a hefty price tag.
        sqeaky 10y ago
        Every February I buy a new machine that is top of the line, mostly to reduce build times. I also compare it to my previous machines and see where I am at and how big my gains actually are. I was replacing a 2nd gen i7 (affectionately named MasslessC) with an AMD-FX 8350, which ought to be faster so I named it Tachyon. Both have a raid-1 of high performance SSDs (Linux Software RAID, bonnie++ had the throughput on both at more than 1.2GB/s), both maxed out the motherboard RAM (32gb in the intel and 64gb in the bulldozer with better timings on the RAM) and my 4.5 MLOC codebase took about 3 minutes and 50 seconds to build and Tachyon with her 8350 did it in 3:30. That was not acceptable gains.... I started by overclocking Tachyon and her 8350. But I could only add 200mhz even after exceeding what the community considered safe voltage bumps. until I learned about spread spectrum clocking. I disabled that and fixed all the cores at the same speed and I got it stable at 4.5ghz, 500mhz more than the "cap". 3:15 or so. Also my definition of stable is an hour in prime 95 not crashing, not exceeding 60c and then succeeding on all my benchmark tests. Well I decided I needed to do better than that, so I learned about CPU lapping. I got some static safe foam and mounted my the 8350 to it, and I got a small glass pane and mounted 1200 grit sandpaper to it. I did 50 strokes in each of the 4 directions to pull off the Nickel. With the rough copper exposed underneath I replaced the sandpaper with 1500 grit and did another 200 passes, then 2000 and 3000 grit each with 200 passes of 50 in the 4 directions. The top of that CPU was a copper mirror the likes of which Archimedes could use to set ablaze a thousand invading ships. I remounted it and managed to get to 4.6ghz with another voltage bump. This is because voltage bumps exponentially raise the temperature with respect clock speed. The extra cooling allow by removing the nickel allowed that heat to be wicked away just a little faster. Then I dropped $400 on a water cooling setup and got temperatures to not exceed 29c after 60 minutes of prime95. This was insane the largest pump, and extra 2 pints in the reservoir, careful calculations of the mineral content of the water so that as it aged silver was deposited inside my copper parts, simultaneously sterilizing the fluid. Every thing that touched the water was surgical grade polypropylene, 100% pure copper or the antimicrobial silver I added specifically in such a way that it would slowly be electrolyzed away. The water has been changed only once nothing has ever grown and it is an odd milky white that conducts heat marvelously (better than antifreeze in your car, unless you own a Lamborghini). Tachyon is now a marvel of liquid flow control with hoses and radiators showing that my aesthetic skills are lacking. This was the limit of Tachyon's CPU. Any further clock or voltage increase by the tiniest margins prevented a stable bootup of even a minimalistic custom kernel. My build times were down to 3:00 minutes plus or minus 2 seconds. I was satisfied, this $1,900 was worth the time of enjoyment I spent building it and the reduced build times. Fun, practical and the machine is stable to this day. This took me all the way to the following February and time to buy another machine. I decided to get a slim laptop with lower performance for the sake of mobility. So I bought a System 76 gazelle (or whatever African wildlife) pro, their i7 ultrabook. It was attempting to compete with the Macbook Air. It was less than 1.8cm thick and came with a mobile 4th gen i7 clocked a 1.6Ghz. It could clock itself all 4 up to 2.5Ghz or one core up to 4Ghz, and tends to idle around 600mhz. I bought 16Gb of ram and a mismatched pair of a Sata3 and M1 SSD on Newegg and raided them. Before deciding its name I benched it for shits and giggles. It built my codebase in 2:30, beating Tachyon and it's Bulldozer by 30 whole seconds, and with all the new changes to the codebase the 2nd gen i7, MasslessC, was up to 4 whole minutes. It beat my desktop soundly in every other test I threw at it save for GPU benchmarks and disk IO. Though it was within a few percent there. So the machine was dubbed Inflation (referring to the initial expansion of the Universe that occurred at many times the speed of light and any named tachyon I was aware of) cost about $1,400 grand total only the first $1,000 affecting the performance of builds. This year I bought their 6th gen i7 with desktop replacement. SleeperService is similarly maxed out the RAM and 4 disks of SSD nonsense. SleeperService's build times are well below 2 minutes, above 3 minutes on Inflation and nearly 4 minutes on Tachyon because of changes to use more templates and other costly compile time stuff. Intel is winning by leaps and bounds in every test and game I throw at it (there were many but this is already too long). I did everything I could to make Tachyon's Bulldozer fast but a slim and comparatively cheap notebook beat it on its first boot. I dub you a biased AMD fanboy by virtue of my comprehensive experimentation.
fnord123 10y ago
AMD is a red mage. No one uses red mages.
saiya-jin 10y ago
a lot of wishful thinking down those lines about a company that consistently fails to deliver better products than competition (not that it wouldn't be great for us all, just tired of seeing the same missed expectations for last 10 years at least)
gcp 10y ago
Sure, they have their ARM core CPUs that have proven to be decent, but I don't see them blowing anyone out of the water with them What? Their first iterations were somewhat meh (Tegra K1 with Denver 1 in the Nexus 9), but the latter iterations and reoriented focus (Jetson K1, K1 with A15s, Denver2) having been scoring some excellent design wins.
- lgeek 10y ago
  NVIDIA had about 5 different generations of Tegra before the K1 [1]. The A15-based K1 (T124) came before the Denver-based K1 (T132) AFAIK. Both are very nice and a clear improvement over the previous generations. Denver is a bit inconsistent in its performance, but on average it dominates A15s and A57s. Nexus 9, however, has very poor thermal design and can only dissipate a small fraction of the heat output of the T132. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tegra https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tegra
  - jandrese 10y ago
    More to the point, those previous 5 generations were generally disappoting. Slow chips with decent but not mindblowing graphics, and extremely short support windows that left early adopters flapping in the breeze. Nvidia had quite a bit of ground to make up, but from what I've seen of their latest chips they made it. I think they're the fastest mobile chips you can buy this side of Apple's monsters.
    - gcp 10y ago
      Tegra2 was notoriously one of the few ARMv7 chips without NEON. I actually agree that Denver 1 in the K1 is really fast, but it's not scored many designs wins, perhaps exactly because of the thermal restraints. The A15 based design seems to have less of that problem.
dagw 10y ago
The only problem with Nvidia, if you look at the entire system, is that they rely on Intel's CPUs for most of the computer systems that they are a part of. Sure, Intel is part of every Nvidia system, but they're becoming a smaller and smaller part in dollar amounts. It's not uncommon that the GPUs in a CUDA setup costs 4-10 times as much as the CPUs. And at the end of the day it's much easier to replace Intel CPUs with AMD CPUs in a system, than it is to replace Nvida GPUs with AMD GPUs. Plus Nvidia feels a lot closer to come up with a CPU good enough to replace Intel in these systems than Intel is at coming up with something to replace Nvidia.
- goalieca 10y ago
  Nvidia makes a pretty mean arm soc. I'm curious to see where this goes. Is there any precedent for arm in the server room?
frozenport 10y ago
AMD has been trying to find a synergy between CPUs and GPUs for over a decade. Heck they were the ones who bought ATI! They've been unable to deliver because "a synergy" between GPU and CPU doesn't mean very much. In the best case, the architecture will be able to avoid memory copies, but although inconvenient, existing applications have been able to pipeline host-device/device-host memory copies, effectively negating the problem. Even on this limited promise, AMD hasn't been able to deliver.
- geezerjay 10y ago
  > They've been unable to deliver because "a synergy" between GPU and CPU doesn't mean very much. Contrary to what you may believe, that "synergy" does mean a lot, considering that one of the worlds fastest supercomputers does run on Opterons and NVIDIA Tesla cards. The thing is, high-performance computing is a niche market. Yet typical consumer hardware needs aren't CPU-driven, but GPU driven. Computer games don't take advantage (or need) multi-core CPUs, thus AMD's bet on the 6-core and 8-core AMD FX line didn't paid off as it was expected. Yet, everyone needs a good GPU to run games, and the "synergy" between that the CPU delivers and the GPU processes ends up being the bottleneck in consumer hardware.
  - frozenport 10y ago
    Except you haven't told me what synergy means. Also the cpus mentioned have fused FP units, meaning their cores are more comparable to Intel's hyperthreads. They often failed to perform at i5 levels, and any small performance increase was offset by higher energy consumption.