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I think the bigger story is that Intel is really starting to sweat. You don't pull this kind of stunt if you have an unassailable market lead - you do it when y

I think the bigger story is that Intel is really starting to sweat. You don't pull this kind of stunt if you have an unassailable market lead - you do it when you're really worried about your competition. It's been a long, long time since Intel had any real competition at the high end.

agumonkey 8y ago
They seem to be losing faith in themselves. I thought intel, after a decade of market domination, was sitting on piles of options and brains. But AMD made them drown (on the PR side) way faster than I expected. The only thing they had was Premium 10cores models. No innovative design or idea. I don't know if they sunk all their energy in the new fabs or not ..
- dingo_bat 8y ago
  > No innovative design or idea. Infinity fabric seems quite novel for desktops. https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/amd/infinity_fabric https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/amd/infinity_fabric
  - bitL 8y ago
    They meant Intel.
    - agumonkey 8y ago
      I did mean intel
      - dingo_bat 8y ago
        Reading comprehension fail on my part, sorry.
- wolfgke 8y ago
  > I thought intel, after a decade of market domination, was sitting on piles of options and brains. But AMD made them drown (on the PR side) way faster than I expected. The only thing they had was Premium 10cores models. No innovative design or idea. Intel has AVX-512, which is in my opinion one of the greatest innvoation in the x96 instruction set for a long time. The problem is that Intel wants to introduce AVX-512 only very slowly into consumer CPUs (slowly beginning with Cannon Lake, which will only be available in small quantities for some time if rumors are to be believed). Even more: For some parts of AVX-512 (e.g. 4FMAPS and 4FMAPS which are very useful for deep learning), Intel seems to be willing only for special expensive accelerator cards (Knights Mill) to include them to segment markets even further. Similarly it is often complained that Intel offers no ECC support for the Core i... series of CPU (IMHO this complaint is rightful). Again: Intel does offer it, but only in the much more expensive server/workstation CPUs (Xeon). So in my opinion Intel is sitting on a lot of options and brains - but they seem only willing to sell this in the really expensive CPUs for much higher prices than lots of market segments are willing to pay.
  - bitL 8y ago
    I think they are waiting for 10nm in order to reduce massive power consumption/downclocking needed when one runs AVX-512. So in a way their manufacturing process is holding them back. AMD completely avoided these headaches by castrating AVX in Ryzen, allowing much lower TDP (65W). I am also curious why would 4FMPAS be useful for Deep Learning when all the major performance improvements lately come from half 16-bit/quarter 8-bit-precision floating/fixed point math (you don't need precise boundaries).
    - wolfgke 8y ago
      > I am also curious why would 4FMPAS be useful for Deep Learning when all the major performance improvements lately come from half 16-bit/quarter 8-bit-precision floating/fixed point math (you don't need precise boundaries). This is a claim by Intel. See for example slide 140 of http://cs231n.stanford.edu/slides/2017/cs231n_2017_lecture15.pdf http://cs231n.stanford.edu/slides/2017/cs231n_2017_lecture15...
TazeTSchnitzel 8y ago
Intel is in trouble because 1) their 10nm is very late and currently performs worse than their 14nm process, and 2) AMD's multi-chip module Infinity Fabric design for Epyc/Threadripper means they can produce high-core-count CPUs with much better yields (much more cheaply, better profit, less scarcity for highest-end models) than Intel can with their monolithic dies. Combine these two factors and AMD might have high-core-count server chips on TSMC's (much more on track!) 7nm before Intel even has decent desktop chips on 10nm.

agumonkey 8y ago

They seem to be losing faith in themselves. I thought intel, after a decade of market domination, was sitting on piles of options and brains. But AMD made them drown (on the PR side) way faster than I expected. The only thing they had was Premium 10cores models. No innovative design or idea. I don't know if they sunk all their energy in the new fabs or not ..

dingo_bat 8y ago
> No innovative design or idea. Infinity fabric seems quite novel for desktops. https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/amd/infinity_fabric https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/amd/infinity_fabric
- bitL 8y ago
  They meant Intel.
  - agumonkey 8y ago
    I did mean intel
    - dingo_bat 8y ago
      Reading comprehension fail on my part, sorry.
wolfgke 8y ago
> I thought intel, after a decade of market domination, was sitting on piles of options and brains. But AMD made them drown (on the PR side) way faster than I expected. The only thing they had was Premium 10cores models. No innovative design or idea. Intel has AVX-512, which is in my opinion one of the greatest innvoation in the x96 instruction set for a long time. The problem is that Intel wants to introduce AVX-512 only very slowly into consumer CPUs (slowly beginning with Cannon Lake, which will only be available in small quantities for some time if rumors are to be believed). Even more: For some parts of AVX-512 (e.g. 4FMAPS and 4FMAPS which are very useful for deep learning), Intel seems to be willing only for special expensive accelerator cards (Knights Mill) to include them to segment markets even further. Similarly it is often complained that Intel offers no ECC support for the Core i... series of CPU (IMHO this complaint is rightful). Again: Intel does offer it, but only in the much more expensive server/workstation CPUs (Xeon). So in my opinion Intel is sitting on a lot of options and brains - but they seem only willing to sell this in the really expensive CPUs for much higher prices than lots of market segments are willing to pay.
- bitL 8y ago
  I think they are waiting for 10nm in order to reduce massive power consumption/downclocking needed when one runs AVX-512. So in a way their manufacturing process is holding them back. AMD completely avoided these headaches by castrating AVX in Ryzen, allowing much lower TDP (65W). I am also curious why would 4FMPAS be useful for Deep Learning when all the major performance improvements lately come from half 16-bit/quarter 8-bit-precision floating/fixed point math (you don't need precise boundaries).
  - wolfgke 8y ago
    > I am also curious why would 4FMPAS be useful for Deep Learning when all the major performance improvements lately come from half 16-bit/quarter 8-bit-precision floating/fixed point math (you don't need precise boundaries). This is a claim by Intel. See for example slide 140 of http://cs231n.stanford.edu/slides/2017/cs231n_2017_lecture15.pdf http://cs231n.stanford.edu/slides/2017/cs231n_2017_lecture15...

TazeTSchnitzel 8y ago

Intel is in trouble because 1) their 10nm is very late and currently performs worse than their 14nm process, and 2) AMD's multi-chip module Infinity Fabric design for Epyc/Threadripper means they can produce high-core-count CPUs with much better yields (much more cheaply, better profit, less scarcity for highest-end models) than Intel can with their monolithic dies. Combine these two factors and AMD might have high-core-count server chips on TSMC's (much more on track!) 7nm before Intel even has decent desktop chips on 10nm.