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Regarding HPC I think people here are missing the real problem for Intel: Yes, they still have a strong showing in Top500 systems. But this could easily change

Regarding HPC I think people here are missing the real problem for Intel: Yes, they still have a strong showing in Top500 systems. But this could easily change soon because there is not that much keeping system developers from switching to AMD, potentially rven ARM. At the same time NVIDIA is essentially in a hard to replace position because an increasing percentage of applications is written to get their FLOPS from their GPUs instead of Intel‘s offerings. The way Intel tries to fight back I find questionable. Both their MIC lineups and many-core Xeons suffer from a crucial flaw: Almost laughably low memory bandwidth when compared to NVIDIA, even compared to Epic. They rely so heavily on caching that it would require tremendous software efforts to get even in the range of 50% of the performance of GPU ports - I‘d argue it‘s significantly more difficult and less performance portable to do that rather than just do a basic GPU implementation, even with manually handled data transfers. Add to this the increasingly successful efforts by GPU makers to automate data handling and Intel‘s attractiveness only dwindles further. And now people are told that they might loose 20% performance? There‘s applications that use these chips like it were real-time systems (because it‘s the only thing financially possible for them). For these use cases, 20% will hurt, a lot. /rant

Joeri 9y ago
There‘s applications that use these chips like it were real-time systems (because it‘s the only thing financially possible for them). For these use cases, 20% will hurt, a lot. Applications that use these chips in a realtime capacity don’t share hardware with other apps, so it will be possible to deploy them on unpatched machines, even if inconvenient. Those workloads are also not big on context switching and so not affected much by the patch. I think cloud hosting providers will hurt the most, because that tends to be a context-switch-heavy workload, and their pricing model assumes a certain level of performance per core. They’ll mix in AMD in significant quantities just to diversify and avoid getting burned in the same way. They’re probably also the biggest market for intel’s server line. This incident will seriously hurt intel even if they handle it perfectly, which they’re not doing.
- m_mueller 9y ago
  Yes, that's a good point. The sharing of hardware over the internet (aka the 'cloud') is the most critical market here. Though, I think there's a lot of cross pollination between cloud and HPC markets - if AMD is financially successful with Zen they'll be able to pour more R&D money into fortifying their position. The question is of course whether that's going to be enough - Intel came back and beat out all competition after their last big loss of market share (~2005, 95nm process spawning AMD64 / Opteron). I'd argue that the Intel of 2018 is not the Intel of 2005. From what I'm hearing/reading, they've had an ongoing brain drain from being too much focused on short term profits versus taking real risks in developing new technologies as well as putting up the finances to actually secure and test their cash cows.
Moru 9y ago
There might be other reasons Intel isn't doing it the nVidia way. Patents are good at blocking progression for example.
- m_mueller 9y ago
  Looking at the patent landscape of 3D memory [1] I don't really see the issue that Intel would be facing. First of all, as a chip maker they seem to have completely withdrawn from the base level science in memory in the first place, which probably hurts them from getting favourable patent deals - but this seems to be a management level blunder, maybe an overreaction to the Pentium 4 proprietary RAM flop. In any case it would IMO be better to just now license 3D memory at market cost rather than just sitting on the hands and let HPC markets fade away. Remember, it has historically only taken 8-10 years for HPC developments to scale down to people's pockets - it could well be that the next iPads outperform what Intel can offer as x86 based laptops, which will not be a good look for software developers deciding which platform they should choose for the next potential killer app. [1] http://www.wipo.int/edocs/plrdocs/en/lexinnova_plr_3d_stacked_memory.pdf http://www.wipo.int/edocs/plrdocs/en/lexinnova_plr_3d_stacke...
  - Nexxxeh 9y ago
    >Pentium 4 proprietary RAM flop You mean RDRAM?
    - m_mueller 9y ago
      yes. even googling it everyone just talked about DDR back then, that‘s why I couldn‘t find it anymore.
gaius 9y ago
But this could easily change soon because there is not that much keeping system developers from switching to AMD, potentially rven ARM Right, you can very easily imagine a machine whose CPU merely marshals and dispatched work to compute elements, be they GPUs, FPGAs, ASICs, TPUs, whatever. You don’t need an all-singing all-dancing Xeon for that...
- acoye 9y ago
  … Or a Threadripper.

Joeri 9y ago

There‘s applications that use these chips like it were real-time systems (because it‘s the only thing financially possible for them). For these use cases, 20% will hurt, a lot. Applications that use these chips in a realtime capacity don’t share hardware with other apps, so it will be possible to deploy them on unpatched machines, even if inconvenient. Those workloads are also not big on context switching and so not affected much by the patch. I think cloud hosting providers will hurt the most, because that tends to be a context-switch-heavy workload, and their pricing model assumes a certain level of performance per core. They’ll mix in AMD in significant quantities just to diversify and avoid getting burned in the same way. They’re probably also the biggest market for intel’s server line. This incident will seriously hurt intel even if they handle it perfectly, which they’re not doing.

m_mueller 9y ago
Yes, that's a good point. The sharing of hardware over the internet (aka the 'cloud') is the most critical market here. Though, I think there's a lot of cross pollination between cloud and HPC markets - if AMD is financially successful with Zen they'll be able to pour more R&D money into fortifying their position. The question is of course whether that's going to be enough - Intel came back and beat out all competition after their last big loss of market share (~2005, 95nm process spawning AMD64 / Opteron). I'd argue that the Intel of 2018 is not the Intel of 2005. From what I'm hearing/reading, they've had an ongoing brain drain from being too much focused on short term profits versus taking real risks in developing new technologies as well as putting up the finances to actually secure and test their cash cows.

Moru 9y ago

There might be other reasons Intel isn't doing it the nVidia way. Patents are good at blocking progression for example.

m_mueller 9y ago
Looking at the patent landscape of 3D memory [1] I don't really see the issue that Intel would be facing. First of all, as a chip maker they seem to have completely withdrawn from the base level science in memory in the first place, which probably hurts them from getting favourable patent deals - but this seems to be a management level blunder, maybe an overreaction to the Pentium 4 proprietary RAM flop. In any case it would IMO be better to just now license 3D memory at market cost rather than just sitting on the hands and let HPC markets fade away. Remember, it has historically only taken 8-10 years for HPC developments to scale down to people's pockets - it could well be that the next iPads outperform what Intel can offer as x86 based laptops, which will not be a good look for software developers deciding which platform they should choose for the next potential killer app. [1] http://www.wipo.int/edocs/plrdocs/en/lexinnova_plr_3d_stacked_memory.pdf http://www.wipo.int/edocs/plrdocs/en/lexinnova_plr_3d_stacke...
- Nexxxeh 9y ago
  >Pentium 4 proprietary RAM flop You mean RDRAM?
  - m_mueller 9y ago
    yes. even googling it everyone just talked about DDR back then, that‘s why I couldn‘t find it anymore.

gaius 9y ago

But this could easily change soon because there is not that much keeping system developers from switching to AMD, potentially rven ARM Right, you can very easily imagine a machine whose CPU merely marshals and dispatched work to compute elements, be they GPUs, FPGAs, ASICs, TPUs, whatever. You don’t need an all-singing all-dancing Xeon for that...

acoye 9y ago
… Or a Threadripper.