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The New Intel: How Nvidia Went from Powering Video Games to Revolutionizing AI
- cs702 10y agoYes, Nvidia dominates in deep learning and AI, but the risk of disruption by Intel is much greater than a lot of non-technical people realize. Intel has to do only two things to start taking market share away from Nvidia in DL/AI quickly: 1. Add "good enough" functionality to its high-end processors. Intel is already working on that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12709220 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12709220 2. Contribute open-source code to the main branches of the most popular DL/AI frameworks (Tensorflow, Theano, Torch) so these frameworks support the new chip functionality "out of the box," without requiring any additional tweaking. This is not yet happening, but I'm hoping it will soon. Many DL/AI developers would be content with "good enough" performance out-of-the-box from CPUs if it means not having to pay extra for Nvidia cards or deal with Nvidia's proprietary drivers. It would be great for Nvidia to get real competition in this space.
- sonabinu 10y agoTrue but Nvidia has a first mover advantage which should not be discounted.
- arcanus 10y ago> It would be great for Nvidia to get real competition in this space. It seems obvious AMD will be a player, since they have similar hardware (GPUs) and with a proper port (using HCC, openCL, etc. ) for cuDNN should also have excellent performance for Tensorflow, Theano, etc. 'out of the box'.
- AlphaSite 10y agoTheir mixed GPU/CPU modules should be very interesting as well.
- frozenport 10y agoNo, they have inferior performance, and all the same issues as Nvidia- in addition to requiring a port.
- dharma1 10y agoinferior performance because of lack of performant DL libraries, like CuDNN, not because of the hardware itself
- dogma1138 10y agoIt's a mix of both, hardware is inferior for current use cases but current use cases are driven heavily by NVIDIA. NVIDIA knows how to do 2 things right; understanding that software matters, even more than hardware and deliver on that notion; and how manage developer relations. While AMD makes it easy to access information without NDA and sign ups NVIDIA blows it it if the water the moment you show even the slightest interest at signing up with them. NVIDIA at this point can probably spin off a pure consulting division for AI/ML and bring in more revenue than AMD in its entirety.
- arcanus 10y agoI liked some of this point except the end, which is not correct. > NVIDIA at this point can probably spin off a pure consulting division for AI/ML and bring in more revenue than AMD in its entirety AMD had $3.99 Billion in total revenue in 2015. Nvidia had 5 Billion. Perhaps you mean profit? Amd was operating at a loss and nvidia was very profitable.
- dogma1138 10y agoNVIDIA doesn't charge you for consulting services, they do expect you to buy pretty expensive hardware tho. They offer training and consulting services for "free" and paid services through their network of partners, to which NVIDIA provides services for free. If they spin off their in house knowledge and start charging for services and software instead of giving it out for "free", they might very well reach a 4bln $ a year revenue stream, that said a lot of people won't be happy about it...
- rasz_pl 10y agoNo, AMD doesnt do software suppport. In words of their own developer: >>We don't happen to have the resources to pay someone else to do that for us.
- spangry 10y agoYeah, that whole ongoing saga is very unfortunate. Also very illustrative. Reading between the lines, my take is that AMD senior management are a bunch of generic MBA types optimising for higher profit in the present (Windows gaming market) by stealing from the future (HPC & server segments + growing niches like ML ---> Linux and open standards, in other words). It makes zero sense for them to place increasingly large bets on proprietary drivers when they're clearly not the market incumbent.
- touristtam 10y agoIt sounds what was happening when AMD, ATi were still seperate entities.
- jackyinger 10y agoAlong these lines... For inference, do you really want to put a Tesla M4 in every server in your cloud when you're already paying $$$$ for CPUs?
- mastazi 10y agoDo you really want to put a Xeon Phi in every server in your cloud when you're already paying $$$$ for CPUs?
- boulos 10y agoI'll point out that this same argument applied to discrete GPUs when Intel tried to enter the market with Larrabee (before giving up and claiming that HPC was where it's at anyway). "This time is different" might apply here though, because training is "just" a lot of low precision matrix math. This requires a lot less new ecosystem / software for Intel (Intel has a long history in matrix math), so much like SSE, AVX, and now AVX-512 (or as I still call it LRBni) Intel can easily make some tweaks to at least get 70% of the gains.
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- sgift 10y agoAlso: Intel learned many things with Larabee. Larabee may have been a failure in public perception, but for Intel it seems to have been a fruitful experience which still helps them. (Somewhere, I've read that they've won the contract for one of the next super computers based on their Knights Landing architecture)
- modeless 10y agoThere is zero chance that Intel can add "good enough" functionality to their CPUs without changing their memory architecture. A high end i7 might have 35 GB/s of memory bandwidth. Even the biggest, most ridiculously expensive ($6000) Xeons have only about 100 GB/s. Nvidia's GTX 1080 has 320 GB/s. Their P100 has 732 GB/s. The threat to Nvidia from Intel is in the Nervana chips they recently acquired. Those are presumably using HBM2 and could potentially beat GPUs for neural net training performance.
- bonzini 10y ago100 GB/s is the bandwidth of six DDR4 channels. Knights Landing has 500 GB/s of local memory bandwidth, plus the same 100 GB/s of a Xeon for DDR4. If future Xeons integrated RAM like Knights Landing does, this would make GPUs less interesting. But KNL can already be used as the main CPU, if I remember correctly.
- geezerjay 10y agoYou're ignoring the main factor: cost. Intel's offering costs as high as €4000 per processor, which come with a meager 8 cores. NVidia's offering sells, right now, for less than €1000 a pop.
- daemin 10y agoWhat about ongoing electricity costs? IIRC my graphics card chews up more power than my CPU.
- geezerjay 10y agoA delta of $3000 per component buys you a whole lot of electricity. Furthermore, the performance of each of NVidia's GPUs falls somewhere between 5 and 20 teraFLOPs. A Haswell Xeon gets you about half a teraFLOP for around 1/3 of the power consumption of a NVidia Tesla P100 GPU.
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- shas3 10y agoHow exactly Nvidia and ARM are competitors of Intel is an interesting question in itself. Nvidia and ARM are fabless and compete against a subset of Intel's IP and products. Intel may take multiple routes to reacting against superior competition without necessarily even making better GPGPUs.
- frozenport 10y ago>>This is not yet happening, but I'm hoping it will soon. Intel made massive gains promoting OpenCL, when they helped to redo OpenCV's umat infrastructure.
- chris11 10y agoIsn't some of the advantage coming from the fact that gpus are much better designed for massively parallel computations?
- dharma1 10y agoThe high end Intel CPUs like Xeon Phis that have enough compute muscle to get anywhere near NVidia GPU perf for deep learning are far too expensive to be able to replace them
- geezerjay 10y agoPrecisely. Intel is trying to compete with NVidia by offering inferior performance at a premium price. In massively parallel applications, cost is closely tied to performance. NVidia has both aspects secured very well. In fact, NVidia is already a prominent part in supplying components for the 3rd place in the Top500, Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Titan system, which mixes up AMD Opterons with NVIdia k20x GPUs.
- geezerjay 10y ago> Intel has to do only two things to start taking market share away from Nvidia in DL/AI quickly: ...except that Intel has been trying to do that for over a decade, and Intel has been failing repeatedly for over a decade. If that was as simple and easy as you lead to believe, Intel would've already done it by now. Except it didn't, because it can't.
- raverbashing 10y agoNo, there's no "Good Enough" it needs to be fast enough. Xeon Phi is their contender, but we'll have to see enough A high-end GPU is around 10x faster than your avg CPU https://www.nvidia.com/object/gpu-accelerated-applications-tensorflow-benchmarks.html https://www.nvidia.com/object/gpu-accelerated-applications-t...
- BoysenberryPi 10y agoI'm not really ready to call Nvidia the new Intel. Nvidia seems like such a volatile company and I have no idea why. I just feel like I could wake up tomorrow and they could be gone.
- okreallywtf 10y agoCare to elaborate? I don't follow them closely but they have seemed to be consistently on top of the GPU market for some time now, at least in the gamer/enthusiast market.
- mschuster91 10y agoJust look at how fast AMD fell. Everyone thought they 'd profit big time from Bitcoin... I remember that I couldn't buy an AMD GPU for weeks in any store in Munich, because everyone and their dog bought them as BTC mining rigs. And then, couple of months later? ASICs entered the field and prices for used AMD GPUs fell through the floor. The same can happen to NVIDIA, especially when Intel decides to launch something inside their CPUs that is "good enough" for many people.
- TillE 10y agoThe vast majority of Nvidia GPU sales are to gamers. Intel has been trying to build a "good enough" iGPU for years and years, with almost zero progress relative to their contemporary discrete GPUs. Even the best current GPUs can't handle the inevitable future high-res VR. This is going to be a stable business for a while yet.
- mschuster91 10y ago> Intel has been trying to build a "good enough" iGPU for years and years, with almost zero progress relative to their contemporary discrete GPUs. Intel hasn't had real pressure to innovate for years. They watched the battle and fall of NVIDIA/AMD, and in the meanwhile enjoyed good sales of CPUs for all the cloud computing. Now, they have intense pressure to innovate - as in the server space ARM is going to eat them up, due to the superior power efficiency, laptop/desktop sales are down (again, because a four-year old computer works just fine if you upgrade its RAM to accomodate Chrome). Intel needs something mind-blowing and that quick. And NVIDIA too, casual gamers are shifting to console (where AMD has quite a customer base) and mobile (where Samsung/Apple with ARM are in the lead). I haven't seen any performant Intel or NVIDIA mobile SoC solution yet.
- spangry 10y agoIf Nvidia are looking to supplant Intel, I think they key, weirdly, is i/o. In a sense, GPU acceleration of general purpose computation is just a specific case of the more general case of distributed computing (albeit the computers are extremely 'close'). For embarrassingly parallel workloads, i/o is not an issue; the data and computations can be batched, distributed and no further communication required (until you collect the results). But for mixed, semi-sequential/semi-parallel workloads, I/O becomes the bottleneck. Having to retrieve intermediate results, combine and then redistribute can eat up your gains from parallelisation. It will be interesting to see if Nvidia start pushing for a new standard to replace PCIe, and maybe invest in low-latency, high throughput networking R&D. Who knows? Maybe they'll just build some kind of networking functionality in to their GPUs directly, so data can be transferred NVRAM -> NVRAM without having to travel up and down the stack (until they need to interact with userspace; once on the way in and once on the way out). Given there are RDMA adapters that can manage ~20ns latency already, it would be interesting to see what could be achieved before we start pushing up against the laws of physics. Even at the physical layer, my understanding is that most networking fibre optics manage about 60% the speed of light. So, just to make a wild prediction: within the next year, Nvidia will acquire a HPC network adapter company (e.g. Mellanox).
- vomitcuddle 10y agoDoes Nvidia already have NVLink for this purpose?
- jsheard 10y agoThey do, but you can't run NVLink to the CPU unless you're using exotic IBM POWER8 systems. x86 systems like the DGX-1 can only run NVLink between the GPUs, and still rely on PCI-E for the CPU connection.
- jburgess777 10y agoNvidia already has high speed GPU-GPU links: http://www.nvidia.com/object/nvlink.html http://www.nvidia.com/object/nvlink.html
- deepnotderp 10y agoWell, people seem to forget that all it will take from Intel is to make an ASIC like Nervana's (hint, hint:which they acquired) and suddenly Nvidia's in serious trouble.
- pjscott 10y agoIntel plans to release their Nervana-based chip, which they're calling "Lake Crest", next year. http://www.forbes.com/sites/moorinsights/2016/11/21/intel-commits-to-nervana-roadmap-for-ai-first-new-architecture-in-decades/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/moorinsights/2016/11/21/intel-co...
- deepnotderp 10y agoThat has its own problems... Not allowed to tell you, don't ask me.
- johansch 10y agoThis is pure and utter bullshit. Their core market is by far gaming, as this PDF (that I found via NVidia IR) shows: http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/AMDA-1XAJD4/3411688990x0x917045/7D7AA043-67F6-4D04-A178-B87C3BAA2F0B/Rev_by_Mkt_Qtrly_Trend_Q317.pdf http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/AMDA-1XAJD4/341168899... Also: The level of their gross profit margin indicates that they are in fact a monopolist: http://marketrealist.com/2016/11/driving-nvidias-profit-margins-new-highs/ http://marketrealist.com/2016/11/driving-nvidias-profit-marg... (These are not the financials of company operating in a healthy, 20-year old industry - they are the financials of a company that after operates without meaningful opposition in a 20 year old business.)
- cs702 10y agoNot quite the right conclusion. Many of Nvidia's "gaming" cards (e.g., higher-end GTX cards) are in fact used NOT for gaming but for deep learning by numerous AI researchers, developers, and startups with small budgets who buy them through retail channels.
- johansch 10y agoThat's indeed possible. But really, if you were to guesstimate the ratio of GPU usage between these items sold to consumers that end up being used by: a) AI/startups b) gamers what would you guess? My guess is somewhere between 1:50 and and 1:500.
- smallnamespace 10y agoThe difference is that AI/startup users may buy hundreds of GPUs at once.
- bonzini 10y agoI think he is already including that in his 1:50 or 1:500 ratio.
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- vegabook 10y agoJust like this fawning article, a very optimistic scenario for Nvidia is in the market pricing of its stock. Nvidia trades at a 45 trailing PE vs Intel's 15. It's valuation therefore assumes at least 3x more growth than Intel. In a market which it seems literally everybody is trying to target. For example, Qualcomm, (trailing PE 14), just announced a 48-core ARM server processor with vector capabilities for launch H217. And if AMD is allowed to be purchased, and properly funded, by an Asian (or other) entity (already has licencing agreements in place in China), the space could get very crowded for NVDA. I wouldn't be so sure that the comparison to the 40-year behemoth of silicon, which extracted quasi-monopoly profits for 35 of them, is yet valid.
- logicallee 10y ago[I've withdrawn this (joke) comment. It had read as below the line.] -- This is totally normal for companies to do. In the 1920s Nvidia made car carborateurs. In the 1820s they made horsebuggy whips. In the 1700s they made ships of the line, which they had made going back to the 15th century. It's little known fact that the Niña, the Pinta and Santa María (Columbus's three ships) were powered by NVidia sails. yawn.
- rgbrenner 10y ago? nvidia was founded in 1993
- logicallee 10y agoit was a joke, and if it were upvoted I wanted to keep it but if it was downvoted erase it. I guess I didn't do well but due to your reply I can't erase it now. nintendo really was a playing-card company foudned in the 19th century though.
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- jonahrd 10y agoAnd Nokia used to make rubber boots and elevator cables!
- agumonkey 10y agoIt's funny when you think about NVIDIA erratic debut (NV1, SEGA). Then the constant progress to the top of the GPU field. I remember how quickly pro CAD graphic cards became obsolete market-wise (ES, wildcat) when Transform and Lighting was implemented. Now "AI", car vision, HPC .... really "funny". Thanks to y'all Quakeheads I guess. And Crysis.
- Keyframe 10y agoE&S, 3dlabs... I do not miss those at all!
- agumonkey 10y agoI could never afford one, they were only luxury icons to me. Were they complete scams or just overpriced ?
- Keyframe 10y agoAt the time they were the only game in town if you wanted OpenGL to run decent(ish) on Windows. It was still a time when you could buy an SGI. Drivers were a mess and price was steep. They weren't a scam, their products just felt lazy-done. Luckily, 'gamer' cards came quickly to OpenGL land.
- agumonkey 10y agoI remember the weird span when 3DS tried to work with vendors with the heidi interface.
- stefantalpalaru 10y agonon-paywalled link: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwje0aaIgu3QAhUBnxQKHacFAQwQFggoMAI&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.forbes.com%2Fsites%2Faarontilley%2F2016%2F11%2F30%2Fnvidia-deep-learning-ai-intel%2F&usg=AFQjCNFGcF9I_0uRQq4qwUsQv_SlO_5fwg https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...
- boxerab 10y agoPuff piece. Yes, Nvidia dominates at the moment, but as many have said, this could easily change with a resurgent AMD. They have made all the right moves, IMHO, since Lisa Su took over: 0. Finally paying attention to software part of equation : hardware for compute has always been very good 1. drivers are now excellent 2. whole line of GCN devices (since 2012) are supported and still optimized, unlike notorious Nvidia nerfing of older cards 3. Has x86 license - if Zen is a success, can build high-bandwidth fabric between CPU and GPU, unmatchable by nVidia except on exotic Power8 arch. 4. new project focusing on HPC on Linux 5. they keep pushing OpenCL, which will win over Nvidia-only CUDA 6. New tools to semi-automatically port CUDA code to run on their hardware. Well, here's hoping AMD gives them a run for their money in 2016 </fanboy> 6.
- dogma1138 10y ago0. Finally paying attention to software part of equation : hardware for compute has always been very good By now supporting porting CUDA "natively", still no real answers to the datacenter CUDA features like DMA, proper virtualization, and networking. 1. drivers are now excellent The Crimson driver suite is a step in the right direction, if only every 6 months they didn't had a release that actually physically damages cards. 2. whole line of GCN devices (since 2012) are supported and still optimized, unlike notorious Nvidia nerfing of older cards Yes that's an admirable feat, but then again not one really cares about 5 year old hardware for either gaming or ML 3. Has x86 license - if Zen is a success, can build high-bandwidth fabric between CPU and GPU, unmatchable by nVidia except on exotic Power8 arch. NVIDIA also has the x86 license it's more limited and AMD (w/ Intel) did bash them when they tried to add x86 interoperability to their HPC parts but NVIDIA has a very very large IP portfolio. 4. new project focusing on HPC on Linux AMD has a new project every 2 years, they tend to not die, CUDA on Linux is excellent it's also the recommended platform. 5. they keep pushing OpenCL, which will win over Nvidia-only CUDA OpenCL performance on NVIDIA GPU's is still better, and OpenCL will beat CUDA has been touted for nearly 10 years now... 6. New tools to semi-automatically port CUDA code to run on their hardware. With still pretty poor results in many cases, and it only works if you use the most basic use cases under CUDA and this was the bare minimum they had to do so people would even look at AMD hardware at large scales these days since virtually every high performing library is written in CUDA simply because it offered a better solution and NVIDIA actually provides whatcha call it - ah right support... Well, here's hoping AMD gives them a run for their money in 2016 </fanboy> 6.
- j1vms 10y ago> "I always think we're 30 days from going out of business," Huang says. "That's never changed. It's not a fear of failure. It's really a fear of feeling complacent, and I don't ever want that to settle in." I dunno where this company is going next or even if it will be around (independently) in 10 years, but if that's really the attitude of its CEO, then at least today it's definitely in good hands.
- bitmapbrother 10y agoWhen AMD acquired ATI a lot of people speculated that Intel would acquire Nvidia. It never happened. What followed was a disastrous series of acquisitions from Intel that never really amounted to much with McAfee being the worst of the lot.
- ksec 10y agoSlightly off Nvidia and thinking Intel for a bit. Where is Intel heading? I dont see Intel gaining a foot in the AI / ML market. Not Knight XXX. And all these supposedly weapon such as next gen AVX, Nervana aren't coming any time soon. And Nvidia knows full well, the same thing about GPU and AI/ML isn't in the silicon, it is in the drivers and library. So not only this is a huge first mover and mature software advantage, the AI / ML is difference in gaming, where the human cost of Nvidia AI/ML knowledge is significantly more then what the Hardware is worth, which is next to nothing when compared to those salary. So in the next 2 - 3 years, I dont see Intel getting much from Nvidia. They failed Mobile. Windows 10 is now slowing working towards ARM. It leaves them with 1), a shrinking, or downtrend PC market. 2) Their Server CPU market with heavy margin which will finally be getting a lots of competition from AMD Zen x86 and Qualcomm ARM Server Chip. Zen Server chip is highly unlikely to be competitive against intel in performance. But there are lots of margin for AMD to attack. It means a lot of pressure from Intel to lower price. A lot of ARM Server will be coming in the next few years. Not low end blade, but powerful Xeon like chips. I have always been skeptical of this, but it seems ARM, which is owned by Softbank, whom is also the largest shareholder of Alibaba, whom also operate a gigantic Cloud infrastructure, are All in on this. This is not saying Intel will die in 5 years time. They are likely to be around for decades after, but i dont see where they could grow and head.
- crb002 10y agoVon Neuman bottleneck is ripe for disruption. Ultra low power processors in memory, a few 3ghz cores, and a fat matrix multiply ASIC.