9 ms·
My background is in the FPGA industry which gives an absolutely fantastic example of this exact dynamic. FPGA companies produce a new generation of chips every
by Traster 8y ago
My background is in the FPGA industry which gives an absolutely fantastic example of this exact dynamic. FPGA companies produce a new generation of chips every 3-5 years or so. There are only two companies, with market share split 60:40. In the last 2 decades we've seen one produce a fantastic product and the other screw up, and then it flips, and then it flips back. Over that time the market share of these companies went 60:40, 62:38, 58:42, 60:40. The actual number of customers who switch to the better product is tiny. Why?
* All the existing knowledge in the company is about one platform, it's incredibly expensive to develop the skills on the other toolchain. Port all your software etc.
* The existing products are all from one vendor so you save loads of effort if all the products are basically similar.
* There are existing relationships with the company you're with.
* You know that if you do switch, all that cost of switching may result in only a few years of using the better product.
* The IP you're buying works better with the vendor you're currently on.
* You don't know what the real world performance will actually be for your application.
So yeah, you could move from Intel to AMD, but the chip is only a tiny part of that cost.
- Fnoord 8y agoGiven the future doesn't look very bright for Intel, given ARM at one hand and AMD at the other (with their 10 nm and 7 nm having multiple setbacks) I wouldn't count on Intel doing well in the future. It might end up like Nokia or Microsoft. I wouldn't invest in Intel...
- vtesucks 8y agoUmm Microsoft?
- Fnoord 8y agoMicrosoft Windows is losing relevance, and Microsoft has been unable to leverage any market position with Windows Phone.
- riffraff 8y agoBut Microsoft has been successfully repositioning itself as a cloud provider, it will be a few decades before they become irrelevant.
- dragontamer 8y agoMicrosoft is #1 company by market cap right now. Its... kinda weird to claim that they're dead and/or dying.
- Fnoord 8y agoI never said they're dead or dying. They're losing relevance because they're losing their dominant (monopolist) market position (Windows and Office). If Intel loses their dominant monopolist market position in the processor market but stays relevant in e.g. the GPU, network card, SSD, and what have you business then I (from my consumer PoV not paying too much plus ethical PoV) am happy. But the shareholders would gain far more from a dominant monopolist market position...
- bryanlarsen 8y agoLatest news is that Intel's 7nm is doing quite well, and is on track to start high volume manufacturing in 2h 2019. And given that Intel 10nm is roughly comparable to TSMC 7nm, it's certainly possible that Intel will regain their process advantage very soon. There are caveats in the above statement, but I certainly wouldn't bet against Intel.
- geezerjay 8y ago> Latest news is that Intel's 7nm is doing quite well This was the very first time I ever heard of this. Do you happen to have a source?
- twtw 8y agoI think parent typo'ed. Latest news is volume production for Intel 10nm (~ TSMC 7nm) in 2H19.
- pinewurst 8y agoHe's probably referring to the likes of this: https://www.anandtech.com/show/13683/intel-euvenabled-7nm-process-tech-is-on-track https://www.anandtech.com/show/13683/intel-euvenabled-7nm-pr...
- geezerjay 8y agoYou've quoted a press releas by Intel on how Intel is awesome and there is no problem and everything is peachy. Not the most trustworthy source of info, I may say.
- bryanlarsen 8y agoPress releases are material statements; if Intel is lying or being unrealistically optimistic then investors can sue them and likely win.
- throwaway2048 8y ago
- agumonkey 8y agoI almost know zero about FPGA market but it seems that it's infinitely harder to port programs between FPGAs than from CPUs. Other than that thanks for the insights, interesting facts.
- gameswithgo 8y agoThat is probably generally true but if you have some serious compute workloads that you specialized for your server's CPU it could be hard to port between AMD and Intel as well. When people have customized the code for particular cache sizes, SIMD instruction sets, core counts, throttling schemes, ram throughput, and branch predictors and so on.
- agumonkey 8y agoIt's quite true, but what I've heard from FPGA users is that toolchain and conventions are aliens to each others, I think these are both two different kinds of hell. I don't know what would cost more to a company.
- ohyes 8y agoWhen you deliver an FPGA you’re normally also making your own hardware. That’s a big part of the FPGA porting cost, you have to redesign your boards. I don’t think the same is generally true in the x86 realm. Even if you’re specifically using some feature of the intel micro architecture it’s still essentially a code change rather than an full redesign.
- kevin_thibedeau 8y agoOnly when you design with unportable IP which the FPGA vendors are dying for you to design in. Some proprietary things like clock multipliers are unavoidable but they can be isolated in portable wrappers. Most FPGA devs are not this forward thinking and lock designs into a platform that makes future migration a problem. No different than writing code against Win32 vs Posix. It is quite routine for ASIC development to prototype on FPGAs and that code will necessarily be made more portable to accommodate the architecture changes an ASIC requires.
- gnulinux 8y agoBut isn't the biggest customers of these chips are server owners? It's not like these companies/people will program the CPU itself and software support for Intel and AMD is exactly the same (is there anything that gcc can compile on Intel but not on AMD? Maybe one can argue the other way around due to recent security bugs, Spectre et al). So I can't see how this can be a factor.
- gabble 8y agoWhen it comes to servers its even more true as you're buying the platform as well as the CPU, the CPU is important to be sure but the platform features are even more so for running the hardware at scale. A simple example, for a long time you couldn't PXE boot a server from a 10Gb NIC while using AMD chipsets. So every AMD system needed a 1Gb NIC cabled and maintained just to build the server vs a single 10Gb NIC on an Intel platform. That scales out for hundreds of servers now you need a 1Gb fabric and the associated switches etc just to allow you to build your systems.
- Hello71 8y agoThat, uh, doesn't sound right. None of your networking equipment can do auto-negotiation?
- jsight 8y agoI think that he meant that the workload still required the 10Gb link, so the AMD servers ended up with two NICs and two sets of cables (a 10 Gb connection and a 1 Gb connection). This leads to higher resource requirements, as they need effectively double the # of switches. I'm not familiar with the problem at all, that is just how I interpreted his statements.
- bluGill 8y agoIf you use an intel CPU you can use the intel compiler which in some workloads does a better job of optimization than gcc. The intel compiler doesn't know the right optimizations for AMD processors (at best, intel has been known to pessimize AMD processors). Though overall you are correct that switching AMD to Intel is generally not a big deal, the above factors need to be accounted for.
- okl 8y agoThere are more than two companies.
- _archon_ 8y agoWhat other player exists in this space, producing comparable performance in the same cost ballpark?
- okl 8y agoPerformance and price are not the only characteristics that might be important for a project. In the aerospace industry microsemi has a large market share with their range of rad-hard/-tolerant FPGAs.
- throwaway2048 8y agoAre rad-hard CPUs going to generate billions in sales to replace intel and AMD gear? For the market segment we are talking about there is exactly 2 actual choices.
- TomVDB 8y agoA large market share in the aerospace doesn’t translate into a large market share. I think most people know that there are more than 2 FPGA suppliers, but all the other ones are essentially niche or low-end market players. The moment you’re looking at FPGAs with a serious amount of logic, you’re restricted to Intel and Xilinx.
- Kliment 8y agoMicrosemi is no more. They got purchased by Microchip.
- simias 8y agoI also work with FPGA (on the software side, but obviously I have a lot of interaction with the RTL people) and I think it's not entirely comparable. Switching from an Intel x86-64 CPU to an AMD x86-64 CPU is absolutely trivial compared to switching between, say, a Xilinx Zynq SoC and an Altera Arria10 Soc (to take two chips I'm familiar with). Switching from one FPGA to an other means changing all vendor-provided IPs (things like serializers/deserializers, encoders, decoders, MACs, DMA etc...), you probably have to change almost all your software stack, you need different tools, you need a different kernel, a different bootloader. You need to redesign your motherboards because obviously the pinout is different. And of course even beyond that it's never a 1:1 match it terms of capabilities, there are not always exact equivalents of one chip in the other vendor's inventory. So you may end up having to buy a more expensive chip to have the same number of memory blocks, I/O or whatever. I think the main reason people are not switching to AMD en masse for servers is mainly inertia. The vendor lock-in is pretty tame compared to FPGAs.
- vtesucks 8y agoI agree with you but would somebody care to enumerate all the ways in which switching is difficult? All i can think is * Intel amt (all enterprises use) * avx-512 (nobody uses)
- davrosthedalek 8y agoIn the HPC segment, there might also be compiler issues.
- ams6110 8y agoThat's true, universities for example will often use Intel compilers on academic licenses, other sites may use other performance-oriented commercial compilers such as PGI.
- greglindahl 8y agoHPC compilers have supported AMD pretty well for the past 15 years, from back when Opteron was the best x64 for a couple of generations.
- shaklee3 8y agoThis is especially apt since altera is now owned by Intel, and they're the one this generation that put out a dud.
- anfilt 8y agoI do work with FPGA's as well. The tool chains are a lot more tightly coupled to the device. Also IP tends to uses chip specific features a lot of times to get better performance or space utilization. So it's a lot harder to justify a switch. AMD's CPUs cover the cases of what intel provides 99% of the time.