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Intel to Develop Discrete GPUs, Hires AMD's Raja Koduri as Chief Architect
- rurban 9y agoWhat? Is there no noncompete clause? Strange
- gbrown_ 9y agoIt will be interesting to see how "discrete" thses GPUs will be. I'm assuming they will only be "descrete" in the sense that they are not on the same chip, but rather same package (via EMIB). Either way surely this is a move by Intel to take away from Nvidia's consumer share (which makes up the vast majority of their income) as Nvidia make inroads into the data center market?
- diab0lic 9y agoPart of me feels it would be very awesome to see onboard GPU hardware outputting similar performance to discrete chips. Of course it would change the size of the socket, or at least the piece of hardware in the socket and cooling requirements. This would have downsides in terms of consumer choice, mind you, or even the fact that upgrading a chip would involve upgrading both. It definitely has merit in the server or small form factor space though.
- wyldfire 9y agoThe big win that discrete GPUs provide to the cloud/backend marketplace (that Intel sorta plays in via Xeon Phi) is from large banks of VERY fast memory coupled with fast-clocked vector processors. But without a bunch of HBM or something similar, the discrete GPU won't be able to do training at the scale that NVIDIA and AMD do.
- gbrown_ 9y agoOne would assume that in the data center for discrete cards Intel would do something with their Nervana acquisition and HBM, or possibly (but less likely) MCDRAM.
- hackerfromthefu 9y agoMy guess is they are competing for the nascent consumer vr/ar market, which may not require top tier gpu performance for that much longer. Microsoft's Mixed Reality platform has the stated goal of running on integrated graphics and even a mid tier card in a year or two should do fine for usable vr/ar.
- diab0lic 9y agoThe link is incredibly light on actual content but this seems to be good news for AI enthusiasts as perhaps now we'll get a reasonable competitor to CUDA/CUDNN and their associated hardware for running GPU accelerated machine learning. Intel seems to be taking the ML/AI space seriously and this move seems very likely to be related. Yes I'm aware of OpenCL as I am also aware of it's level of support with libraries such as PyTorch, Tensorflow, Theano -- it isn't the first class citizen that CUDA is. While those libraries aren't perfect they offer the experience of writing the experiment on your laptop without a GPU, validating, then running the full experiment on larger hardware. In my ideal world competition from intel would force NVidia to play nice with OpenCL or something similar, and encourage competition in the hardware space instead of driver support space. Unfortunately the worst-case looks something more like CUDA, OpenCL and a third option from Intel with OpenCL like adoption. :(
- moonbug22 9y agoOnly armchair spectators are still talking about OpenCL. It's as dead as disco.
- diab0lic 9y agoThat is more or less what I was getting at, while trying to remain polite on the subject. The truth is that none of the deep learning backends have real support for it and OSX supports an outdated version (IIRC). It has seen very little adoption outside of a handful of niche use cases.
- abiox 9y agoare there insurmountable technical constraints there, or could it be resuscitated?
- payne92 9y agoFinally! Intel has a lot of catching up to do. As GPUs continue to evolve into general purpose vector supercomputers, and as ML/deep learning applications emerge, it seems clear that more and more future chip real estate (and power) will go to those compute units, not the x86 core in the corner orchestrating things.
- rodgerd 9y ago> Finally Why on earth would you think Intel extending their near-monopoly is a thing to celebrate?
- dsr_ 9y agoThey don't have a monopoly in add-on GPUs. There are two strong competitors, and Intel's current on-chip GPUs are comparatively pitiful.
- mynameisvlad 9y agoIntel doesn't have a near-monopoly in anything, really. AMD is now a solid CPU competitor with Ryzen and Threadripper, and ATI and nVidia exist and dominate in the GPU space.
- retailbuyout 9y agoErr, because they don’t have a monopoly on GPUs and nvidia direly needs competition? EDIT: also if it is discrete gpus and not further integrated ones, I imagine it’s harder to leverage the dominance in the cpu space to push the gpu. (Harder, not assigning any general difficulty to doing that.) Hell, this could even be monopoly protection depending on how they position it—“we can’t be a monopoly because you can use it with an AMD chip!”
- craftyguy 9y agoThis isn't the first time Intel has tried to develop a discrete GPU... anyone remember Larrabee? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larrabee_(microarchitecture) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larrabee_(microarchitecture)
- jjaredsimpson 9y agoSo what's going to win out, the "Intel is evil" circle jerk, or "competition fixes all markets" meme?
- abiox 9y agocan they coexist?
- user982 9y agoI can't wait for the twist in tomorrow's episode.
- eganist 9y agoCan't fight them on price? Fight them on talent. Whoever at AMD who refused to match the offer probably made a terrible decision. This is about the worst time to lose that talent right after inking a gpu die deal which, in light of this news, will only be temporary. AMD just got played. If I were AMD, I would review Mark Papermaster's comp and incentives to ensure he doesn't leave. (I'm long AMD)
- shmerl 9y agoYeah, that's kind of weird, at the time when AMD need to invest more effort in their GPUs to get ahead to Nvidia.
- 0xbear 9y agoIf they are playing this smart, there should be a bench of people, nearly as experienced, and willing to bust their ass twice as hard for half as much.
- marcosdumay 9y agoSomehow, companies never play this smart. Maybe at very R&D laden companies things are different, so I wouldn't bet against AMD, but wouldn't bet on them either.
- eksu 9y agoI don’t think this was all about money. Raja had been trying to run Radeon Technologies Group like an independent company and pushing for separation from AMD for a while. HardOCP did a good piece on this -> https://hardocp.com/article/2016/05/27/from_ati_to_amd_back_journey_in_futility https://hardocp.com/article/2016/05/27/from_ati_to_amd_back_... I think the recent Intel + AMD custom chip was probably the last thing Raja did before he got pulled RTG got the reins put back on and now he’s hoping ship to peruse what he’s wanted all along. To work with more independence.
- Terribledactyl 9y ago
- JosephLark 9y agoInteresting, given that just 2 days ago it was announced [0] that Intel was going to start to use AMD for some of their integrated graphics. Now they're going to complete against them in the discrete graphics space. Also, Koduri recently left AMD after what many felt was a disappointing discrete graphics release in Vega. [0] https://www.anandtech.com/show/12003/intel-to-create-new-8th-generation-cpus-with-amd-radeon-graphics-with-hbm2-using-emib https://www.anandtech.com/show/12003/intel-to-create-new-8th...
- wyldfire 9y agoAlso here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15651848 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15651848
- cameronhowe 9y agoCan someone explain this to me: Isn't the GPU industry all about Patents and trade secrets (enforced by NDAs). Won't all Rajas expertise be tied up in that?
- ChuckMcM 9y agoIntel has a both a large patent portfolio and a lot of legal firepower in that space, so no, I don't think folks like Nvidia will be able to "threaten" Intel with patents. Nvidia might be able to threaten them with the monopoly card (clearly Intel is using its dominance in desktops and laptops to move into an adjacent market) but they have been doing that for many years with the integrated GPUs so I would expect it to be a weak play.
- cameronhowe 9y agoI must have expressed myself poorly. He's coming from AMD/RTG, everything he knows is presumably what they use/own. Nothing to do with NVIDIA
- ChuckMcM 9y agoNo, I understood, I just called out Nvidia because they are so often on the other side of a patent dispute with Intel. AMD and Intel have broad cross patent licensing deals in place because of previous fights over patents on the frontside bus, the instruction set, etc. From a strategic markets point of view I see it this way; Discrete GPUs gives Intel a shot of owning both pieces of high margin silicon in a laptop / tablet design win (GPU & CPU) and potentially it gives Intel additional ammunition to go after Nvidia or to mitigate their encroaching.
- bhouston 9y agoNvidia and Intel have gone to war previously over parents with big settlements.
- awalton 9y agoIt's likely Intel's already got cross-licensing agreements for everything they need, seeing as they already build GPUs. (Or is somehow everyone forgetting that fact?) The case is probably that the Intel graphics team just decided they'd rather play against the big boys at nVidia and actually put enough cores on a chip to be a competitor, but in order to do that, they'd need to go off-chip for power and heat dissipation reasons. Hiring the guy from AMD helps you sell the new solution, since presumably that's what this guy's good at. The market's rife for being disrupted as it has been incredibly stagnant with nVidia and AMD's tit-for-tat for the past, well, decade.
- chucky_z 9y agoI don't know too much about Raja Koduri, but is leaving AMD and immediately joining Intel not... really shady?
- Maskawanian 9y agoHow is it shady to change jobs? This notion that you should be jobless for a period of time is ridiculous.
- mathperson 9y agothey are companies directly competing...it is very possible AMD engineer could bring proprietary information to INTEL. as in this literally recently happened and received massive press coverage with UBER and WAYMO- resulted in intense legal action.
- diab0lic 9y agoI mean Koduri did skip the whole step of immediately founding a company with almost nothing, which would be purchased in short order for a ridiculous sum of money, and have it then come out that he had met with the CEO of Intel on several occasions prior to this. The entire deal seems much more out in the open and above board.
- awalton 9y agoThe fact is that people have to have job mobility, and need to be trusted that when they leave a company, they leave behind that company's secrets. Many companies make you sign a document that attests this: if you have any company data, you destroy it, if you have any company equipment, you return it, if you have any company knowledge, you forget or neglect to discuss it. Most people, honest people, have no problems understanding these obligations and abiding. Dishonest people, who lie about destroying documents, are why we have Uber and Waymo battling it out.
- FireBeyond 9y agoRight, companies can't have it both ways. "We reserve the right to let someone go, at any time, for any or no reason." and "We also reserve the right to dictate who they can (or rather can't) work for." No. If you want to say "I can't work in my field for 2 years", then you can pay me 2 years severance.
- abiox 9y agointel once tried to do this with larrabee[0] some years back. hopefully they learn from what went wrong there. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larrabee_(microarchitecture) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larrabee_(microarchitecture)
- awalton 9y agoLarrabee was an attempt to see if the x86 architecture could power a GPU. The answer was "not very likely", but it got turned into a product of its own anyways because it turned out to be very interesting for other compute-heavy use-cases. Larrabee's descendents became "Knights", which became the Xeon Phi product line. Keep in mind Intel currently builds GPUs - just of the integrated variety. What's new here is that Intel is deciding to build discrete (standalone, like those you'd plug into a PCIe port) GPUs.
- craftyguy 9y agoIt was definitely being targeted to compete with other discrete graphics products, and at some point in the program they figured out that they would never meet the performance necessary to compere effectively. So in order to not have completely wasted several years of development, it was re-purposed as a product targeting HPC (the first generation Knights/Xeon Phi product)
- awalton 9y agoIntel really doesn't mind "wasting" time on innovation - they make tens of billions of dollars a year and they're on top of the market. They can afford to go down blind avenues, especially when the research spills out so well, as it did in this case. It definitely wasn't a "saving throw" that Larrabee's architecture got repurposed. There were several teams at Intel working in similar directions - one team worked on a "cloud on a chip", one team worked on high bandwidth chip-to-chip interconnects, one team worked on on-chip networking... they all came together and formed the Knights Ferry research project, which then got turned into the Xeon Phi. The "core" of Larrabee, its quick little Pentium-derivatives, went on to be repurposed in the Quark product line and its lineage (e.g. the Intel PCH has a "Quark" inside). The 512-bit instruction set got parted out and became AVX512 in is various incarnations. They definitely got their money's worth out of Larrabee. Nobody is disagreeing with the fact that Larrabee didn't turn into a discrete GPU despite their attempts make it so. (It's also not surprising, seeing the carriage turn back into a pumpkin with Cell and other Many Core architectures fail to pan out to be good at graphics workloads). But that's a separate issue from Intel building GPUs, since they have a completely other team that works on building productized and shipped GPUs.
- gigatexal 9y agowhat a coup this was. Raja: "I'm...um...going on sabbatical." Lisa (CEO): "OK." Intel: "We're hiring Raja!!..." Lisa: "WTF".
- fermienrico 9y agoAt the risk of turning HN into Reddit, I'd like to politely suggest to keep jokes, puns, and other shenanigans off of Hacker News. If you have nothing constructive to add to the discussion, please refrain from commenting. Thank you :)
- gigatexal 9y agowhy do we all have to be so stoic and serious? can't we have a bit of fun?
- fermienrico 9y agoMost people on HN are not looking for fun. They're here for information, intelligent discussion, and constructive criticism. Use Reddit for fun! There is plenty of fun on the internet. Like Reddit, hackers don't want [Serious] tag.
- microcolonel 9y agoWow, this might save Intel. They are floundering in the server market right now because they won't put enough PCIe lanes on their platforms, because that means lower sales. If they can grow up in the GPU market, then that means they basically win over AMD's latest maneuvers.
- loeg 9y agoWowza. If I moved to a direct competitor like that, my employee contract "non-compete" clause would be brought out immediately. And I'm no C-level executive, just an individual contributor. I wish Washington had California's non-compete law.
- cakebrewery 9y agoHaven't read much on it, but this happening right after the integrated GPU deal with AMD just strengthens the "teaming up against NVIDIA" theme going on.
- Rarebox 9y agoIt's like an Age of Empires FFA where the losing players always team up against the leader.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- ironchef253 9y agoOften there is a form of mutually assured destruction at play. Qualcomm and Intel have cross-hired major executives like Murthy and no one got sued. I feel like non-competes are similar to parents these days. Everyone has tons of patents and everyone is infringing on everyone else so they just agree to pay licensing fees to one another and never go to war. I’m certain AMD has hired their share of Intel people by now, its a no win.
- m3kw9 9y agoTrojan horse 101 lesson for AMD
- LoSboccacc 9y agoremember when project larrabee could raytrace quake in real time? hope this will be another stab at an hybrid gpgpu
- throwaway613834 9y agoCan someone explain how I'm supposed to interpret this along with the other recent article on Intel & AMD creating a joint chip of some sort? Are they competing or cooperating?
- solotronics 9y agomaybe in some cases its better to think of large corporations more like states, different elements within competing and cooperating with other entities.
- djrogers 9y agoThey’re not creating ‘a joint chip of some sort’ - AMD will be selling GPUs to Intel who will package them with their CPUs via EMIB. [1] https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/foundry/emib.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/foundry/emib.html
- bhouston 9y agoI am not convinced that Intel can win here. They seem to not succeed with home grown GPU tech and other big bang approaches. Now if they were to acquire decent GPU tech then I would bet on them. Just the homegrown route seems to not work out for them. I suspect part of the reason is the long time frames for dev of this tech. I suspect it is at least 2 years for this to see the light of day. That is forever in this space. Intel failed with Larrabee and itanium. Maybe this will go better?
- mtgx 9y agoIt looks like Raja will lead the development of machine learning-focused GPUs. Isn't this Intel basically admitting that their Xeon Phi, Nervana, and Altera GPU efforts to win the machine learning market are all a dead-end? How many machine learning strategies is Intel going to try? Does it even know what it's doing? Spending billions of dollars left and right on totally different machine learning technologies kind of looks like it doesn't, and it's just hoping it will get lucky with one of them. And even if you think that's not a terrible strategy to "see what works", there's still the issue that they need to have great software support for all of these platforms if they want developer adoption. The more different machine learning strategies it adopts, the harder that's going to be for Intel to achieve.
- ironchef253 9y agoIntel needs a CEO that skates to where the puck is going to be, not where it was three goals ago.
- keganunderwood 9y agoThat's scary of that's what is required of a ceo. You would either need to be an oracle and predict where the industry will go or you'd need to make the industry go the direction you're taking the company.
- stochastic_monk 9y agoI do love AVX512 and FMA instructions for CPU code with lots of branching. But that's not definitely going to cut it for the pure almost solely linear algebra workloads of most deep learning. I do have high hopes for their memristor initiative, but that's got to be years out. The GPU move is smart for Intel.
- shmerl 9y ago> With his hire, Intel will be developing their own high-end discrete GPUs. With Intel and AMD backing Mesa, things on Linux will get very interesting.
- madez 9y agoI am sceptical about the consequences for user-controlled computing. AMDs GPUs have made a positive development in the past, while Intel is unfriendly to users control over the hardware they buy.
- ohyes 9y agoIt isn't clear that AMD's GPU architecture has been really competing with nvidia. We'll have to see how big a deal this is when AMD's APUs come out. I expect them to be quite a bit better than intels integrated product. This seems to be more of an direct competitive attack on AMDs integrated product than it is competition with nvidia. It feels to me like building discrete GPUs is almost a misdirection.
- chisleu 9y agoI'm excited. I don't care if Intel wins. I just want a video card that doesn't suck and works perfectly with linux. Even if I unplug my monitor sometimes... Even if it's a laptop and it switches GPU for different outputs... Even if I want to use the standard xrandr and normal ass linux tools for configuring my monitor.
- orbifold 9y agoMaybe that would happen if kernel developers were not such divas and thought it was appropriate to use coarse language in public discourse. Nvidias graphics drivers work perfectly on windows and they have the only OpenGL implementation that is not a total joke on Linux.
- retailbuyout 9y agoI was under the impression the open source AMD drivers were quality, if slower than the proprietary nvidia ones.
- madez 9y agoWhy do you say the Mesa OpenGL is a total joke?
- orbifold 9y agoThis is a bit outdated http://richg42.blogspot.de/2014/05/the-truth-on-opengl-driver-quality.html?m=1 http://richg42.blogspot.de/2014/05/the-truth-on-opengl-drive... overview of driver status by a game developer, vendor A is NVIDIA and as the article points out they are the only one with a performant relatively bug free implementation. Also notice how he mocks Intel for having two driver teams: That Linux expects to get special treatment by integrating the driver into their Graphics abstractions leads demonstrably to worse performance and less features than if you bypass all those abstractions and use essentially the same driver for all kernels.
- madez 9y ago
- 40acres 9y agoIntel is all in on becoming a "data company", with the recent design wins in self driving cars & the AMD deal I'm confident that they will come out of the AI HW race in strong shape. This move just reaffirms that.
- mc32 9y agoSince the days of Chips and Technology, intel has vacillated between going the full hog and retracting from GPUs. Wonder if this time they will stick with it for the long haul.
- yalogin 9y agoWhat is a discrete GPU?
- wmf 9y agoA GPU that's a separate chip, not integrated into the same chip as a CPU.
- jaas 9y agoA discrete GPU is a GPU that's not on-die with the CPU. A discrete GPU is usually something you stick in a PCIe slot. A GPU on the CPU die, non-discrete, is often referred to as an "integrated GPU" or "integrated graphics." They're typically not very powerful, though they run common non-gaming applications just fine.
- reiichiroh 9y agoAh, they sort of half-assed in trying with Real 3D. Was that Larrabee?
- artellectual 9y agoDamn, this is a major loss for AMD, losing Raja is definitely not the right move. It would have been interesting to see the next iteration of AMD graphics with Raja on board. Threadripper, and the Zen architecture, put them back on the map, that’s some serious hardware for the price. I wish they had just kept iterating on the CPUs and GPUs. Vega is not a bad product, it just doesn’t beat nvidia’s offering in the bar charts, doesn’t mean it’s bad, it just means it’s second place which is fine since it’s cheaper as well. Technology needs to be iterated on. Something must be going on at AMD at the moment.
- farhanhubble 9y agoNvidia is lightyears ahead in the GPU market besides if this GPU push is aimed at the Deep Learning market Intel will have competition from the likes of Xilinx too. IMHO they need to provide great software to go with their GPUs. Traditionally hardware manufacturers have shipped barely usable software. They should perhaps try to use opencl and keep the rest of the tools and libraries open source.
- deepGem 9y agoThis is what many people outside the AI world don’t seem to understand. Nvidia has a stranglehold in the form of CUDA and Cudnn. There isn’t any open source equivalent to Cudnn. AMD is trying to push OpenCl in this direction but it will be a long time before DL libraries start migrating to OpenCl. Like tomorrow by miracle if al alternative GPU which is as good as the 1080ti popped up, it would be useless in the AI market.
- SJetKaran 9y agoNo it won't. Especially if the price is competitive. Say for the price of 1 1080ti, if i can buy 1.5 units of comparable performance graphics card, i'll surely buy it. There are already resources being spent on OpenCI based ML/DL platforms (https://github.com/plaidml/plaidml https://github.com/plaidml/plaidml). The architectures keep getting bigger and training time keeps getting longer. I think you underestimate this factor. I need as much gpu computing power as i can buy within the budget.
- deepGem 9y agoTrue, I would love for some alternatives such as plaidml. However, I can't seem to fathom that Plaidml will be a worthy alternative to lets say Tensorflow or Pytorch or Caffe. I hope I am proven wrong.
- SJetKaran 9y agoI think support for OpenCI will eventually come to other frameworks. But the main problem is the fact that AMD is still far from the NVidia in terms of performance. Vega couldn't reach the performance of 1080Ti, and with Volta next year, the gap is gonna drastically increase. If only AMD can fill the gap, the support, i'm sure, will soon come after that.
- chx 9y ago> GT4-class iGPUs, which are, roughly speaking, on par with $150 or so discrete GPUs. Erm. Nope. No Intel iGPU is on par with the 1050 much less the 1050 Ti. http://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Iris-Pro-580-Mobile-Skylake-vs-Nvidia-GTX-1050-Mobile/m132950vsm211022 http://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Iris-Pro-580-Mobi... (I compared mobile chips since the most powerful GT4 can only be found in the mobile chips.) It's only slightly behind the 1030 which costs $73.
- Synaesthesia 9y agoThey’re on par with laptop discrete GPU’s with a low power envelope. The sort that would fit into a Macbook Pro. The 1050 uses 70w.
- unsigner 9y agoLook at it another way: no Intel iGPU is on par with any discrete GPU, because in price segments where iGPUs appear, discrete GPUs tend to vanish in a matter of 1-2 years. There used to be a significant number of NVIDIA Geforce MX420/440s, 5200s and 6200s. Then much fewer 730s. Now 1030s are practically only in laptops. Intel has been nibbling away at this market slowly, but steadly for a decade.
- llukas 9y agoIf driving FHD display is all that you want then integrated GPU is fine. But we start getting 4k/UHD nowadays...
- zachruss92 9y agoAn interesting counterpoint here. I have a friend who works for Intel as an algorithms engineer for their self-driving vehicle acquisition (Mobileye). Currently, he's using 2 1080TIs w/ TensorFlow to perform deep learning. It is possible that Intel could be looking to develop a chip used specifically for this purpose (a bet on self driving cars) and not for mass-production/sale outside of that tech. Either way, all of the GPU/CPU updates in the past year is just going to create more competition, which is better for the consumer in most cases.
- p1esk 9y agoWell, the whole point of Mobileye acquisition was for Intel to have a competing chip for autonomous cars. But it is possible that they are also looking to compete on 1080Ti level. Which would be very hard.
- andreiw 9y agoFool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Unclear what AMD thought they stood to gain with the Monday announcement - and it didn't take long to have it play out in their disfavor. I'm guessing Intel's GPU will never support OpenPower and Arm servers, and will never ship on a CCIX-enabled adapter.
- ActsJuvenile 9y agoRaja, if you are reading this make sure your Intel GPU has two things that competition doesn't: 1) FP8 half-precision training: NVidia is artificially disabling this feature in consumer GPUs to charge more for Tesla / Volta. 2) A licensed / clone of AMD SSG technology to give massive on-GPU memory: NVidia's 12 GB memory is not sufficient for anything beyond thumbnail or VGA sized images. My experience with Intel Phi KNL has been miserable so far, I hope Raja has better luck with GPU line.
- userbinator 9y agoFreely available full documentation, from package pinouts to ISA and programming guides (at least as extensive as the x86 SDM[1]), would also be met with great praise, especially in the open-source community. For a recent GPU to have such open documentation would be, AFAIK, a first. [1] https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-sdm https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-sdm
- ndesaulniers 9y ago> 1) FP8 half-precision half precision is FP16.
- dogma1138 9y ago1) is not true, in the current generation FP16 is not artificially disabled on consumer GPUs but rather does not exists. And it’s not just consumer GPUs out of 4 Pascal Tesla’s only 1 has support for FP16 and FP64 the GP100 based P100. The GP102 and 104 Cards which include the consumer cards and Tesla’s like the P4 and P40 are inference focused and support Int 16 and Int 8 dot products while the first generation Pascal GP100 doesn’t. If anyone artificially locked down FP16 support it’s AMD as consumer VEGA doesn’t support it for compute. 2) NVIDIA already has a competing solution, Pascal has had unified memory support form day one, 49 bit address space, AST and paging they already partner with SSD makers to have an addon card which is mapped to VRAM.
- rbanffy 9y ago> My experience with Intel Phi KNL has been miserable so far, I hope Raja has better luck with GPU line. I'd love to see the Phi approach taken further. I'm not a huge fan of having different ISAs, one for my CPU, one for the compute engines of the GPU (to say nothing about the blobs on my GPU, network controller, ME). I'd prefer a more general approach where I could easily spread the various workloads running on my CPU to other, perhaps more specialized but still binary-compatible, cores. Heck... Even my phone has 8 cores (4 fast, 4 power-efficient, running the same ISA).
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- perseusprime11 9y agoI am not sure everyone here knows about Raja. He is a talent at a totally different level. Big loss for AMD. AMD should have done all it could to keep him.
- nilsocket 9y agoNever mind, for me it seems raj has too much of higher expectations, which makes him a bad hire. Hope AMD finds someone committed and a real enthusiast to do the job.
- CrunchGo 9y agoNice! this will be a great win for Intel
- mariusmg 9y agoLarabee reloaded.
- lonk 9y agoNvidia and ATI should develop x86 cpus for the balance's sake.
- unsigner 9y agoThe connection between "AI" and "GPU" in everyone's mind is a testament to the PR chops of NVIDIA. You don't need a GPU to run ML/DL/neural networks, but NVIDIA have GPU tech so they're selling GPUs. What you need is the massive ALU power and, to lesser extent, the huge internal bandwidth of GPUs. There are huge chunks of GPU die area that are of no use when running NN-type of code: the increasingly complex rasterizers, the texture units, the framebuffer/zbuffer compression stuff, and on the software side, the huge pile of junk in the drivers that allows you not only to run games from a decade ago, but also run them better than last year's GPU. If you can afford to start from scratch, you can lose a lot of this baggage.
- midko 9y agoIndeed, and that's why there are a couple of startups working on new chips and why Google has the TPU. Here's a nice technical talk from Graphcore's CTO about that https://youtu.be/Gh-Tff7DdzU https://youtu.be/Gh-Tff7DdzU
- dharma1 9y agoWas at that talk and it looks very interesting, the team has delivered before. They just raised more money too - I just wonder how painless the developer experience will be with using their drivers with latest versions of your chosen DL framework, and how price/perf will compare with DL specific tensor processor/GPU hybrids like Volta.
- sspiff 9y agoWhat you need is a massive amount of parallel cores. Currently, the cheapest and most efficient way to achieve this is GPUs. It's true that some graphics-specific parts of a GPU are not needed for compute-only kernels (such as those for ML or other AI tools), but it's still a lower overhead than a CPU in yet another box. Who knows, perhaps Intel will be developing more general purpose massively parallel compute processors, but intends to integrate some of the knowledge and experience accrued from the field of graphics processors.
- 9y ago
- cpatil 9y agoInteresting timing for this announcement, given Nvidia earnings tomorrow. Looks like intel is back its underhanded shenanigans.
- dis-sys 9y agoThis again shows AMD is not ready for the battle with Intel. Ryzen's chief architect left in 2015, now the master mind behind its GPU is leaving. You need to be really religious to believe that AMD is going to get any better in the coming competitions with NVIDIA and Intel.
- krisives 9y agoBrings back memories of Larabee their last attempt at making a GPU before they scrapped the project and wasted everyone’s time.
- pjmlp 9y agoI was on the room at GDCE 2009, where they were praising the vector instructions while presenting a session on Larabee.
- alextooter 9y agoIntel pick the wrong guy and wrong path.It just don't work. I think Intel should acquisition Nvidia, and let Jen-Hsun Huang lead the new company.