10 ms·
If Intel makes it out of the current soup with its dominance intact it will make for an interesting case study. Think they are facing the perfect storm on multi
by dman 7y ago
If Intel makes it out of the current soup with its dominance intact it will make for an interesting case study. Think they are facing the perfect storm on multiple fronts.
a. The 10nm process fiasco
b. Missing the chiplet concept
c. ISA fragmentation - AVX512 which was supposed to be the next big thing was server CPU side only till recently and downclocks the entire chip when used making it extremely hard to reason about whether it makes sense to use it for mixed workloads.
d. With a move to more distributed programming models the network is often in the critical path now, making cpu performance less relevant for many workloads
e. ARM eating their lunch in mobile
f. Nvidia eating their lunch with GPGPU
g. Big players are increasingly building accelerators for critical workloads that offer better power / performance
h. Strong execution from AMD for the first time in over a decade
i. GUIs moving to browsers and a lot of compute moving to runtime based languages like Python/JS means that any new ISA features are initially hard to utilize in killer apps on the client side. So if Intel ships a killer new set of instructions there is a significant lag between it doing something useful for the user.
- daxfohl 7y agoAlso, end of Moore's law, slowing down the upgrade cycle and making CPU more of a commodity business. I'll add a caveat to (d) because distributed can also mean distributed across cores, and whoever handles that the best gets a strong differentiator.
- dman 7y agoThat is a good point.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- jonstewart 7y agoWell, and for 25-30 years, everyone’s been crowing about how they were doomed to fail because of x86 as a CISC design. Intel killed off most RISC competitors as Moore’s Law held in the 90 and they could just add more transistors to turn x86 into a facade. But that increase in transistors and doing whatever possible to keep x86 performant meant they were doomed to lose the power/performance war that came with mobile processors. ARM held on just long enough in the low margin embedded world to then conquer mobile. Intel was able to win price/performance through superior fabrication and economies of scale, but power/performance really does require a superior design. If Intel recovers, it may need to jettison x86, or offload x86 interpretation to a secondary unit for desktop processor with it gone from server procs. This would make me happy because it’s been crushing to think I might go my entire career/lifetime with little endian processors being the mainstream. :-/
- dman 7y agoThis space will be interesting to watch! We live in extremely interesting times hardware wise.
- atq2119 7y agoLittle endian has nothing to do with CISC vs RISC or x86 though. Everybody is little endian today. x86 helped with that historically, certainly, but fundamentally endianness just doesn't matter most of the time, and when it does, little endian makes more sense from first principles.
- api 7y agoIf anyone wants to see why little endian is better try implementing a sigint. Big endian makes everything backwards in terms of iteration order.
- takeda 7y agoYou are presenting argument in favor of little endian, yet you're provide enough information that is only useful for someone who already knows the answer.
- tedunangst 7y agoThe answer is also only useful to those who know it? I mean, nerds love to shout about the superiority of this or that, but they're mostly just parroting their tribe motto. If you have reason to really care about endian order, I would encourage you to do more research than you'll find in an HN comment. Perhaps there's even more than one right answer depending on circumstance.
- takeda 7y agoI don't have too much knowledge in that area, but my understanding is as follows: for a software engineer big endian simpler to use, for hardware engineer little endian is simpler to implement. I think it's similar to scientific calculator vs RPN calculator.
- jiggawatts 7y ago> With a move to more distributed programming models the network is often in the critical path now, making cpu performance less relevant for many workloads Oddly, Intel ought to have an edge here, because they have been selling chips with embedded 100 Gbps Ethernet controllers on-die. However, I've never seen such a beast in data centre, I suspect they've "reserved" this feature for HPC workloads only.
- wmf 7y agoThat was 100G Omni-Path (not Ethernet compatible) which has been subsequently canceled, I guess due to lack of demand. Intel's 100G Ethernet NICs were years behind other vendors due to the 10 nm fiasco.
- shaklee3 7y agoIntel had always said they were behind because they wanted to be. In other words, they didn't think 100G was on the rise. I tend to believe them since nic asics are much easier to make than an x86 processor.
- late2part 7y agoIt's a good tenant of personal responsibility to say that one's owns actions are the result of one's own choices. So by that logic, I suppose they wanted to be? :-)
- goosehonk 7y agoThis comment seems kinda slanted. AVX-512 debuted on Xeon because datacenter operators asked for it. It does not “downclock a whole chip”, it gates the core where it is active and there’s not even that penalty on the current generation parts. “10nm” is marketing fluff which has little or nothing to do with actual semiconductor construction. “Chiplet” is also marketing-speak for “wow this memory topology is hard to program around “. Not sure they should feel too bad about missing that boat. What Intel really should be worried about is the client side being their largest revenue segment. That’s a dead business, eventually. And the bets they made didn’t pan out: FPGAs aren’t popular because the people sophisticated enough to use them are also smart enough to tape out ASICs. IoT is not a thing.
- kevin_thibedeau 7y agoChiplets are more significant than you credit them for. They allow higher yields and make the production economics much more favorable for AMD, whereas Intel is throwing out a lot more silicon.
- StillBored 7y agoYield might be part of it, but I'm sure intel can ship partially functional chips with a core here/there disabled. Another of the big advantages for AMD is that their products aren't reticle limited. The basic design lets them have a single design they bolt into dozens of configurations that scale larger than what intel can fit on a single die. Hence 64 "big" cores in a single socket. There are likely other advantages too (cooling?) that partially make up for the longer more complex core->core latencies.
- solidasparagus 7y agoChips with problematic cores are sold as lower end chips. For the same production cost, you are getting less revenue - failure rate plays a big role in profit margins.
- StillBored 7y ago
- Abishek_Muthian 7y ago>ARM eating their lunch in mobile. Not just mobile. Obviously, that's the content of the OP. But, ARM based servers have been available for quite a while for dirt cheap prices[1] and they are great for workloads where ARM libs are available. Edge ML inference[2]. [1]https://www.scaleway.com/en/virtual-instances/arm-instances/ https://www.scaleway.com/en/virtual-instances/arm-instances/ [2]https://developer.nvidia.com/embedded/jetson-nano-developer-kit https://developer.nvidia.com/embedded/jetson-nano-developer-...
- amluto 7y agoAlso, Intel is bizarrely behind on PCIe. Historically, a data center machine with big expensive GPUs or other accelerators also had a couple of expensive Xeons in it. Right now, AMD has a much better offering even ignoring cost. I’m sure someone outside x86 (Amazon? ARM itself? POWER?) will jump in, too.
- StillBored 7y agoPOWER has had PCIe gen4 for a couple years now too.
- shaklee3 7y agoI think they were intentionally behind. None of their products used/supported pcie4, so it was to their advantage to limit their competitors.
- ksec 7y agoI would bet they were not, PCI-E 4.0 has always been on their Roadmap for 10nm+. The whole 10nm fiasco shifted all of their product roadmap from Modem, Chipset, Controller, to Custom Foundry off the wrong path.
- m463 7y agoFor desktop computing, Intel (or possibly "h. AMD") is still the best solution (imho)
- jl6 7y ago> i. GUIs moving to browsers and a lot of compute moving to runtime based languages like Python/JS means that any new ISA features are initially hard to utilize in killer apps on the client side. So if Intel ships a killer new set of instructions there is a significant lag between it doing something useful for the user. I’d argue that the deployment of new native code has never been easier, because it will be the browsers that first make use of new instructions, and they have large sophisticated dev teams who push out frequent releases with minimal user effort to adopt.
- mister_hn 7y agoAbout point i, using different languages than native is really weird and in the age of green computing really not efficient at all. UIs based on JavaScript, Python or even Java are heavier and less efficient than what a platform can do with native compiled code. There are now also loads of possibilities to build native code, squeezing the best performance, especially for critical systems. I still don't understand why there's now a hype in using JavaScript or Python in microcontrollers as well
- saagarjha 7y agoNot every system is critical, and not every application needs native compiled code.
- pjc50 7y agoSpeed of development currently trumps everything else. Developers are expensive, electricity is cheap, and software changes at a high rate. If we could reduce the "churn" perhaps people could transition to optimised versions, but optimisation makes rapid change harder.
- mister_hn 7y agoas PoC sure, but as productive system, I would always rely on the best performance out there