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Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled
- m-p-3 9y agoI'm wondering why Intel is withdrawing so much of their money from different projects like this and OpenStack. Maybe AMD is putting a lot of financial pressure on them, and they have to put more funds in R&D?
- agumonkey 9y agoI'd be surprised if Intel needs to withdraw things in such a hurry. Aren't they still wealthy ? they could take the blow for a while, then react. Also killing the IDF is not very developer / designer friendly. You're reducing the community vibe and life.
- puzzle 9y agoTo be fair, IDF was all over the place. I suspect I'm not the only one who felt that only a fraction of the talks were relevant to my interests. On the other hand, it was great for networking.
- leastangle 9y agoIsn't that how most larger conferences are?
- puzzle 9y agoTrue. That's the main reason, for example, that I didn't get a ticket to I/O. GCP Next had a lot more topics relevant to my interests, despite it having a more "commercial" or "salesy" feel to it. I/O seems to be mostly about Android and Firebase these days.
- ghaff 9y agoAs shows get bigger, there's a definite tendency for them to get more diffuse. There are a lot of economic incentives to grow, add a broader range of partners, etc. And before you know it they're about everything and nothing. Vendor shows have some natural resistance to getting too diffuse but there are still a lot of events I attend and I'll see some booth and think "What the heck are they doing here?"
- ghaff 9y agoI used to attend IDF regularly and, while larger shows are always a bit of a grab bag, I do think that it used to have a more coherent identity than it did the last time I went a few years ago. It probably doesn't help that a lot of IDF talks are very low-level so if you're not directly involved, you're likely to be completely uninterested.
- puzzle 9y agoTo give you an idea, last year you had talks about anything from silicon photonics, memory validation or Thunderbolt, all the way to indie games.
- rbanffy 9y agoThe food was OK ;-) Networking was great too, and lots of old friends to meet.
- puzzle 9y agoIt's not necessarily AMD or something new. Last year I was wondering why there was no party. In 2015, they had a big one, with a couple of trendy bands on stage. Somebody has probably been looking at return on investment for these events for at least a year or more.
- ksec 9y agoBut these money are tiny compared to the Impact they will/should get from AMD Ryzen. To remain price competitive with AMD Ryzen, Intel's Gross margin will likely take a dive from the current 60% to below 50% over the next few years. The Data Center Group represent 30% of the Revenue, and my guess it represent 60%+ of the profits. OpeX is increasing, R&D required for each node is increasing. They are not in Smartphone, they are not opening up their Fab. Basically their future looks pretty grim to me. They wont disappeared all of a sudden, they will likely have 3 to 5 years more time to figure it out. But, again none of this has to do with Intel withdrawing from so many project. I cant believe saving money from these event / project are the motives.
- joezydeco 9y agoWhy can't that be the motive? Panic makes companies like Intel execute lots of quick short-sighted changes in the hopes of turning the boat. Something like cancelling a developer's conference would totally fit this scenario.
- rgbrenner 9y agoI question how much pressure intel really feels from AMD. Intel: 60b in revenue, of which over 50b is from processors. AMD: 4b revenue. It's impossible tell what part of that is ATI and processors... since AMD mixes desktop cpus with ATI revenue; and mixes server cpus with embedded and soc revenue. So they're playing a bit of a game to hide their cpu sales. If we assume 1/2 is from cpus, that's 2B. Does Intel really feel pressure to reduce their prices because of a competitor that sells (perhaps) 1/25th of their revenue?
- rocqua 9y agoWell, anyone that's going to build their own PC in the near future is going to put Ryzen in there. The only hold Intel has over the desktop market comes from pre-build systems. Those are probably the majority, but if some of them start budging, that market might flip faster than you think.
- rgbrenner 9y agoThat remains to be seen. I just built a new PC and put an i7 in it. The Ryzen 1800x is more expensive than an i7-7700k, while having worse performance. Obviously AMD makes cheaper versions where that comparison doesn't hold.. but the advantage for AMD here isn't clear cut, and so there's no reason to believe there will be a mass migration to AMD. Besides I've heard this kind of rhetoric about AMDs cpus before.. and yet I've never seen the sort of switch like you're describing. If it were true that everyone was switching to Ryzen CPUs, they would be sold out everywhere and AMD would be talking about how to scale up by an order of magnitude to meet demand.. none of that has happened. AMD did a good job with Ryzen, and they'll probably post some great numbers next quarter... maybe they'll get to 5 or 6b over the next year... but Ryzen hasnt changed the selling proposition for AMD. It is still: in the low to mid end desktop processor market, AMD is cheaper and has similar performance.
- Akkuma 9y agoI'm not a Intel or AMD fanboy by any stretch (only ever built with Intel), but I don't know what benchmarks you've been reading and I've read a lot and you'll have to clarify what you mean by worse performance. In any multithreaded application the Ryzen 1600(x) are just as good if not better. The 1800x to 1700 are even more multithreaded performance and the 1700 is priced a little cheaper than 7700k and able to be OC to the same performance as the 1800x (the entire Ryzen lineup seems to be capable of the same OC, but also capped pretty heavily). The only place that is showing Intel winning are in single threaded scenarios and in gaming scenarios. The gaming scenarios are interesting as one of the more recent benchmarks I saw (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VvwWTQKCZs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VvwWTQKCZs) was showing in many cases the worse case FPS is better than the 7600k. Additionally, several games have received engine updates that seem to put Ryzen on par with Intel now.
- theandrewbailey 9y agoNo. Intel's R&D budget is larger than AMD's company-wide budget. If anything, Intel is moving to save face, and not because of finances.
- kensai 9y agoI think it's better for them. The IDF was used to showcase new products. If they have no new significant products to show, it's better not to summon anyone instead of getting the flak for introducing only minor evolutions as it has happened in the past few years with the (dying?) tick-tock model.
- pkaye 9y agoI'm guessing these yearly conferences will fade away as Moore's Law falls apart and Intel and others will have a harder time coming up with something new to showcase every year. No longer can you rely on process shrinks to innovate.
- komali2 9y agoPeople always talk about Moore's Law falling apart, and it seems like people didn't see it coming. I mean, I didn't, I'm just a guy that reads a lot of scifi. But I always assumed whiz-bang mathematicians had already figured out, I dunno, the threshold at which a processor can be nanosized, or like how big a processor could become before the distances became too great that due to the speed of light further computational advancement wasn't possible. I mean, I know nothing about this stuff, like I said, I just read a lot of scifi and have a high opinion of all the smart folk researching this stuff. Would love to learn more.
- ghaff 9y ago>People always talk about Moore's Law falling apart, and it seems like people didn't see it coming. First of all, let's be more precise. In this context, what people mean by the "end of Moore's Law" is the slowdown and, soon, probable end of CMOS process scaling. The issue is that CMOS process scaling has been such an incredible engine for performance that just getting those kinds of performance increases in other ways isn't easy. I wrote a bit about this a year ago. http://bitmason.blogspot.com/2016/01/beyond-general-purpose-in-servers.html http://bitmason.blogspot.com/2016/01/beyond-general-purpose-... To answer your question, people did see this coming. There were disagreements about how far down you could economically drive feature sizes so there has been debate about exact dates. But pretty much no one thought CMOS features could be made arbitrarily small.
- spb 9y ago> But pretty much no one thought CMOS features could be made arbitrarily small. Pretty much no one qualified, maybe. There are lots of laymen (including many True Believers in The Singularity) who operate under the impression that it's a fixed law of nature.
- SadWebDeveloper 9y agoInteresting move after "AMD Rizen" was launched, wonder how this is going to be viewed on the stock market.
- alayne 9y agoAMD has had cheaper/slower processors for many years. Is something different about Ryzen?
- joshmn 9y agoQuite a bit.
- ksec 9y agoCheaper and MUCH slower, Lower Pref / Watts. Ryzen close the gap and offer better value for money.
- uep 9y agoIs that the case? From the benchmarks I've seen, they're not slower. They might be slower for single-core video game performance, but you need to spend over $1000 on Intel to compete with the $500 Ryzen on workstation performance. I imagine most companies care more about workstation performance.
- my123 9y agoPower efficiency of the Ryzen 7 1700 is just massive. And it even has ECC at those prices...
- my123 9y agoYes, the Naples 32 cores/64 threads powerhouse is what's dangerous to Intel, especially at its performance level. (datacenter is where Intel probably makes most of its profits, and Naples is eating right into that market)
- alayne 9y ago
- matt_wulfeck 9y agoFrom what I gather online, intel is entering into an exestential crisis as homegrown chips and GPUs are replacing CPUs in the battle for tomorrow's data center. All of the interesting research from Google and others all have one thing in common: a custom asic processor.
- puzzle 9y agoYou forgot that Intel bought Nervana Systems last year, right before IDF. They develop custom ASIC processors for machine learning.
- mtgx 9y agoWhich doesn't necessarily mean anything for Intel's future in machine learning. Intel bought an ARM chip maker before, too, and because of internal conflict of interest with the x86 group, it ended-up killing the ARM division. Will the same happen to other non-x86 groups? Who knows. But we also see that even Intel's previous "accelerator" divisions have moved focus to being "CPU-driven" as well (Xeon Phi), so we have that data point. I also remember some of the articles from a decade ago that were sure Intel's "might" would help it succeed in the mobile market. I'm not entirely sure if it's as bad for Intel in the machine learning market, because right now there's pretty much only one competitor rather than many. It's usually much easier to be second in a market than the 5th, as some customers would inevitably get some raw deals from the incumbent, and they'll want an alternative. But if the machine learning market starts becoming entrenched around GPUs, that second player may end-up being AMD, which I think will have decent alternatives to Nvidia's training and inference GPUs in a year or two (mainly for 2019 with 7nm Navi, though).
- jacquesm 9y agoXeon Phi was a nice idea without much in terms of support or distribution. I tried getting one through various sources, they were advertised just about everywhere and even at huge discounts but actually getting one has so far proved to be impossible. And it still remains to be seen how useful it would have been, whereas a $600 GPU can be dropped into your computer and put to work in about half an hour. The hardest part is the driver installation and NVIDIA's dumb 'sign up before you download' strategy.
- pmarreck 9y agoI for one am not terribly upset that the Intel hegemony's time has run out
- coldtea 9y agoWho said their hegemony has run out? The fact that AMD put out some also-run processors?
- pmarreck 9y agoThe writing is on the wall. From ARM to incredibly powerful emerging GPU's to interest in custom ASIC, the Intel instruction set's days are numbered
- chrisseaton 9y agoDo you think general purpose applications are all going to run on GPUs or ASICs in the future? I wouldn't think so.
- coldtea 9y agoI don't care what GPU my mobile phone runs. It's fast enough, I'm ok with it. I also don't care about servers. I'm not a dev-ops/admin person. On my laptop/desktop, where I DO care, I don't see Intel going away anytime soon. Even if we switched to some ARM devices, it would be a regression (if not for anything else, for having to run most Windows/MacOS stuff under some kind of Rosetta-like interpreter for many years). Besides, as soon as ARM CPUs approach the limits of various manufacturing processes, they will face the same issues Intel does. Moore's law is not coming back.
- brendangregg 9y agoThat's disappointing. It was a useful technical and marketing event to learn about a variety of Intel technologies, some I wouldn't have otherwise been exposed to, and certainly not had a chance to talk to the engineers. I'd rather they moved it to somewhere cheaper than to cancel it.
- iced0wn 9y agoIntel can easily convert their fabs to the latest fads. This is just a signal that the dominance of the x86 fad is on its way out. Nothing to be ashamed of considering the amount of time they were able to ooze out of it.
- Animats 9y agoIndependent developers have fulfilled their function and are no longer needed.
- lowglow 9y agoIt's all part of a cycle! :)
- CalChris 9y agoDunno if you've been to an IDF, but I'd say that IDFs have fulfilled their function and are no longer needed. I went to the Skylake IDF and after a very predictable presentation there was an opportunity to ask questions. It went roughly like this: What time is it? The question was what time is it. Intel is an industry leading leader committed to developing customer solutions. We are not disclosing what time it is now. We may be making announcements related to time in the future. This cost me a day. On the plus side of the ledger, I like Intel documentation, especially their Optimization Reference Manual. But I don't need to go to IDFs anymore and now I don't have to.
- ghaff 9y agoAn industry analyst of my acquaintance made a similar comment to me. He said that Intel has become significantly less willing to disclose their future plans with developers and others. He also said that there seems to be diminished interest by developers in going to an Intel-centric show. A show like IDF clearly makes less sense if you're increasingly unwilling to say much about future directions. It's also entirely possible that the projections for event sponsorships, etc. weren't looking to be where Intel wanted them to be.
- wfunction 9y agoAnybody know if and when desktop CPU's might start getting FPGAs? Been waiting for that for a while now...
- rbanffy 9y agoNot before mainstream software supports it. We had 64-bit with Alpha, MIPS, SPARC, but 64-bit x86 only happened when it could run 32-bit x86 code flawlessly and it only got mass adoption when Windows went 64-bit.
- wfunction 9y agoHow can you get mainstream support when nobody has it to program for it?
- rbanffy 9y agoSeeding programs. You give your hardware to selected partners so they can develop for it before it hits general availability.
- wfunction 9y agoNot sure how that would work in this sort of situation but I suppose I can't rule it out...
- rbanffy 9y agoIf tomorrow IBM came out with a POWER8 box at a price point competitive with my Xeon E3 workhorse running full Fedora 25 or Ubuntu 17.04, I wouldn't think twice. Same goes for Oracle and SPARC. The lowest POWER goes is in the mid E5 range, which I can't justify for my home office.
- bhouston 9y agoWe only got Intel 64 bit CPUs once AMD got them first and people starting to buy them.
- kensai 9y agoI think it's better for them. The IDF was used to showcase new products. If they have no new significant products to show, it's better not to summon anyone instead of getting the flak for introducing only minor evolutions as it has happened in the past few years with the (dying?) tick-tock model.
- rdslw 9y agoThis for me is a clear sign of mobile (and their processors) steady growth (and probably dominance) to (some) decline of Intel. Android as an OS surpassing this March everything else on web-usage speaks the same story in different words (http://www.wired.co.uk/article/android-overtakes-windows http://www.wired.co.uk/article/android-overtakes-windows).
- drawkbox 9y agoIntel has always been a great research company. They are responsible for OpenCV[1] and largely the entire augmented reality craze is from that sponsored work. They are an important part of technological progression in the last couple decades, they even made Apple sales pick up with intel chips (creating a killer *nix dev machine for a time '06ish) before the iPhone came along. It would be a shame if the bean counters got them into this with drawing back r&d and are now taking r&d away. The engineers are definitely not in control at Intel today, hard to quantify research projects and developer/engineer outreach to non engineers. These types of moves have been known to kill off companies. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCV https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCV
- doublerebel 9y agoMy experience is that also Willow Garage is listed as the main author on many of the (still current) AR tooling, but I don't know the story between them and Intel. It's an incredible amount of open source work that enables the startup I'm doing now, I can only hope to contribute as much back/forward from our company.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- residentx 9y agoDon't try to make too much of this. I had been working with Intel since December on the issues of IDF. The vendor was not performing. They had no website up and emails and calls were not returned. Also, when I finally did reach the vendor, I asked them how they were going to handle the visa logistics of China/Asia IDF attendees coming to the US. I asked them if 2-3 months would be enough to get Visas approve with the Trump Administration. A few days here we are with the cancellation. This mess is purely Intel's fault. I even emailed Krazanich about putting more eyes on this. But's let's move. I'm heading to Ignite now....