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This is a really good article. Couple of comments: * Intel is dead man walking. They've been coasting on superior process technology for years, and now they'

This is a really good article. Couple of comments: * Intel is dead man walking. They've been coasting on superior process technology for years, and now they're being attacked on two sides in the datacenter: From ARM many-core chips like this, that have 50% of the performance per core, but 4x as many cores for about the same price and TDP. On the other side, you've got NVIDIA. The Volta has something like 9X the memory bandwidth of typical Intel server CPUs. This is starting to get used in databases, and of course they already own deep learning. * libjpegturbo is a great choice if you need fast CPU JPEG encoding/decoding. It's a very near drop-in replacement for libjpeg, and it runs about 2x faster, mostly due to AVX/NEON optimizations.

thecompilr 9y ago
Our jpegtran is still faster. We use libjpegturbo for other manipulations though.
CyberDildonics 9y ago
> * Intel is dead man walking. Intel is so dominant that they can sell their server processors for many thousands of dollars and still command the vast majority of the server market. I don't think any other CPUs have the number of SIMD units they have either. Intel has also already made a lower power more core architecture with the Xeon Phi. It even has high bandwidth memory separate from main memory. The Xeon Phi is niche, but so are many core ARM servers. The point being that Intel is far from unprepared in this area and companies making many core ARM servers are going to have to do a lot to prompt a switch.
- stu2010 9y ago
  Intel's market segmentation is getting even more aggressive, which gives them future flexibility to address pricing in a very fine-grained manner. Notice that they make you pay up for 2 AVX-512 modules per core: Xeon Gold 6xxx has them, and 5xxx only has 1 per core. Huge price jump to get those extra SIMD units.
  - rbanffy 9y ago
    There aren't nearly enough different parts for ARM to credibly threaten Intel at this moment. Also, with Intel's profit margins, they can substantially reduce prices to remain competitive in all but the most price-sensitive segments. What the future holds, however, is different. We see we are (finally!) getting over the binary compatibility problem and we are now able to use more or less the same software recompiled and tuned for different architectures (POWER, ARM, Intel, AMD) that cover a vast space in the price/performance/watt space, much larger than any single vendor could before. I can't wait to see people becoming creative again with hardware.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - pjmlp 9y ago
      It was easier to be more creative with hardware in the past, because of the full stack experience. Now that OSes and bytecode as portable binaires have become commodity it is very hard to try to sell something where users can just leave at any moment.
      - rbanffy 9y ago
        > It was easier to be more creative with hardware in the past In the early 70s, perhaps. Then being compatible with DOS and then Windows limited most computers to x86 processors. One of the niches that was not limited gives us some hints of what can be now: Unix workstations that employed Motorola and RISC processors and all sorts of creative hardware to get a performance edge over what Intel could offer. They didn't need to reinvent the wheel and licensed large amounts of code to make the core of their OSs. They sometimes needed to port the C compiler to their architecture, but that was not the norm. Developing for them was often making small changes to headers and recompiling the same source.
        pjmlp 9y ago
        And then they died, because that C code could run anywhere regardless of the hardware improvements they were offering to the world. This is what I meant with having nothing that could prevent developers to go away from the platform, just the performance edge wasn't good enough against commodity hardware.
- Something1234 9y ago
  Isn't Xeon phi dead? There haven't been any updates since 2013. My one professor who worked on them said they have many issues from being passively cooled to requiring the Intel compiler to get halfway decent performance.
  - CyberDildonics 9y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeon_Phi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeon_Phi The previous version was a 14nm CPU that was haswell instruction compatible. The 10nm version has been canceled.
  - martinpw 9y ago
    That 2013 date is a bit misleading. Although the most recent generation was announced that year, it did not ship until 2016, and the Knights Mill derivative launched just a few months ago. Knights Hill was canceled. I hadn't heard anything about the entire line being killed, although it would not be totally surprising if that were to happen.
walrus01 9y ago
Disagree that Intel is a dead man walking. If they see a serious threat in the number of 1U size ARM servers actually going into production at scale, which is not happening yet, they have the ability to make 50% price cuts on 16/24/32-core xeons to make them competitive again. With no new r&d money. You cannot yet buy small to medium sized quantities of ARM motherboard from any of the top ten taiwanese motherboard manufacturers. Intel and AMD have advantages of massive economy of scale. If you look at the global server market for individual bare metal hypervisor platforms priced from $900 to $11000 each, x86-64 is literally like 99% of motherboards shipped. The other 1% is probably spread between arm, power and other even more esoteric platforms. I would dearly like to be proven wrong. If anyone is aware of a $400 arm board I can buy right now from MSI, asus, gigabyte, supermicro, tyan, quanta, or others please post a link here.
- colechristensen 9y ago
  I'd guess that Intel is "coasting" on purpose to maintain their ability to consistently deliver improvements. The company doesn't benefit from deploying their best tech as fast as possible if there is nothing to compete with it. When there is competition, it is easy for them to move forward. I would like it if there were ARM servers in the marketplace too, but as yet it doesn't seem they are a real threat. "dead man walking" is a bit premature when the competition barely exists.
  - walrus01 9y ago
    yeah, I mean to make an analogy, it's like declaring Toyota a "dead man walking" because Tesla has awesome tech. Before researching the number of new-build cars/trucks/vans shipped and delivered to customers each year... Toyota, cars, 9.1m Tesla, all of 2017: Something like 101,000
    - jarym 9y ago
      It’s also like looking at the iPhone in 2007 and saying Nokia can do x/y/z to keep the upstart out. Fact is, mis-placed corporate focus and the sense of superiority kicks these companies off top spot. Intel, as it stands this minute IS next. They can’t price like ARM, they don’t have the scale that ARM devices have - those two things are what Intel usually relies on itself to dominate competitors (eg like AMD). Add to this that Intel really is focussed on growing its business outside of chips and continually dropping the ball on the chip side (how late is CoffeeLake? Can anyone understand their marketing kefudgery with the generational mixture of chips?) and it’s an absolute recipe for corporate implosion.
mattsfrey 9y ago
Faster cores will still be supreme until parallel computing solutions ramp up enough to fully utilize all the cores - there are still way too many problems and just software in general being built with the constraint of being single threaded.
throwaway84742 9y ago
Intel is going to be fine. There’s no real alternative to Intel CPUs in cloud for most workloads, which is why they’re able to charge so much for their top SKUs, and none anywhere on the horizon. And if challengers do appear (like AMD on the desktop) they could just throw in more cores, bump frequencies, lower prices slightly and coast on their superior tech for another decade. Don’t get me wrong, I do think the current situation is pretty bad, and I do want alternatives to get more traction, but Intel would need to screw up really badly and repeatedly to be in any trouble.

thecompilr 9y ago

Our jpegtran is still faster. We use libjpegturbo for other manipulations though.

CyberDildonics 9y ago

> * Intel is dead man walking. Intel is so dominant that they can sell their server processors for many thousands of dollars and still command the vast majority of the server market. I don't think any other CPUs have the number of SIMD units they have either. Intel has also already made a lower power more core architecture with the Xeon Phi. It even has high bandwidth memory separate from main memory. The Xeon Phi is niche, but so are many core ARM servers. The point being that Intel is far from unprepared in this area and companies making many core ARM servers are going to have to do a lot to prompt a switch.

stu2010 9y ago
Intel's market segmentation is getting even more aggressive, which gives them future flexibility to address pricing in a very fine-grained manner. Notice that they make you pay up for 2 AVX-512 modules per core: Xeon Gold 6xxx has them, and 5xxx only has 1 per core. Huge price jump to get those extra SIMD units.
- rbanffy 9y ago
  There aren't nearly enough different parts for ARM to credibly threaten Intel at this moment. Also, with Intel's profit margins, they can substantially reduce prices to remain competitive in all but the most price-sensitive segments. What the future holds, however, is different. We see we are (finally!) getting over the binary compatibility problem and we are now able to use more or less the same software recompiled and tuned for different architectures (POWER, ARM, Intel, AMD) that cover a vast space in the price/performance/watt space, much larger than any single vendor could before. I can't wait to see people becoming creative again with hardware.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    It was easier to be more creative with hardware in the past, because of the full stack experience. Now that OSes and bytecode as portable binaires have become commodity it is very hard to try to sell something where users can just leave at any moment.
    - rbanffy 9y ago
      > It was easier to be more creative with hardware in the past In the early 70s, perhaps. Then being compatible with DOS and then Windows limited most computers to x86 processors. One of the niches that was not limited gives us some hints of what can be now: Unix workstations that employed Motorola and RISC processors and all sorts of creative hardware to get a performance edge over what Intel could offer. They didn't need to reinvent the wheel and licensed large amounts of code to make the core of their OSs. They sometimes needed to port the C compiler to their architecture, but that was not the norm. Developing for them was often making small changes to headers and recompiling the same source.
      - pjmlp 9y ago
        And then they died, because that C code could run anywhere regardless of the hardware improvements they were offering to the world. This is what I meant with having nothing that could prevent developers to go away from the platform, just the performance edge wasn't good enough against commodity hardware.
Something1234 9y ago
Isn't Xeon phi dead? There haven't been any updates since 2013. My one professor who worked on them said they have many issues from being passively cooled to requiring the Intel compiler to get halfway decent performance.
- CyberDildonics 9y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeon_Phi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeon_Phi The previous version was a 14nm CPU that was haswell instruction compatible. The 10nm version has been canceled.
- martinpw 9y ago
  That 2013 date is a bit misleading. Although the most recent generation was announced that year, it did not ship until 2016, and the Knights Mill derivative launched just a few months ago. Knights Hill was canceled. I hadn't heard anything about the entire line being killed, although it would not be totally surprising if that were to happen.

walrus01 9y ago

Disagree that Intel is a dead man walking. If they see a serious threat in the number of 1U size ARM servers actually going into production at scale, which is not happening yet, they have the ability to make 50% price cuts on 16/24/32-core xeons to make them competitive again. With no new r&d money. You cannot yet buy small to medium sized quantities of ARM motherboard from any of the top ten taiwanese motherboard manufacturers. Intel and AMD have advantages of massive economy of scale. If you look at the global server market for individual bare metal hypervisor platforms priced from $900 to $11000 each, x86-64 is literally like 99% of motherboards shipped. The other 1% is probably spread between arm, power and other even more esoteric platforms. I would dearly like to be proven wrong. If anyone is aware of a $400 arm board I can buy right now from MSI, asus, gigabyte, supermicro, tyan, quanta, or others please post a link here.

colechristensen 9y ago
I'd guess that Intel is "coasting" on purpose to maintain their ability to consistently deliver improvements. The company doesn't benefit from deploying their best tech as fast as possible if there is nothing to compete with it. When there is competition, it is easy for them to move forward. I would like it if there were ARM servers in the marketplace too, but as yet it doesn't seem they are a real threat. "dead man walking" is a bit premature when the competition barely exists.
- walrus01 9y ago
  yeah, I mean to make an analogy, it's like declaring Toyota a "dead man walking" because Tesla has awesome tech. Before researching the number of new-build cars/trucks/vans shipped and delivered to customers each year... Toyota, cars, 9.1m Tesla, all of 2017: Something like 101,000
  - jarym 9y ago
    It’s also like looking at the iPhone in 2007 and saying Nokia can do x/y/z to keep the upstart out. Fact is, mis-placed corporate focus and the sense of superiority kicks these companies off top spot. Intel, as it stands this minute IS next. They can’t price like ARM, they don’t have the scale that ARM devices have - those two things are what Intel usually relies on itself to dominate competitors (eg like AMD). Add to this that Intel really is focussed on growing its business outside of chips and continually dropping the ball on the chip side (how late is CoffeeLake? Can anyone understand their marketing kefudgery with the generational mixture of chips?) and it’s an absolute recipe for corporate implosion.

mattsfrey 9y ago

Faster cores will still be supreme until parallel computing solutions ramp up enough to fully utilize all the cores - there are still way too many problems and just software in general being built with the constraint of being single threaded.

throwaway84742 9y ago

Intel is going to be fine. There’s no real alternative to Intel CPUs in cloud for most workloads, which is why they’re able to charge so much for their top SKUs, and none anywhere on the horizon. And if challengers do appear (like AMD on the desktop) they could just throw in more cores, bump frequencies, lower prices slightly and coast on their superior tech for another decade. Don’t get me wrong, I do think the current situation is pretty bad, and I do want alternatives to get more traction, but Intel would need to screw up really badly and repeatedly to be in any trouble.