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Just a quick reminder when considering Intel products... if it ain't Mama x86, it won't be around very long.
by fallous 7y ago
Just a quick reminder when considering Intel products... if it ain't Mama x86, it won't be around very long.
- reitzensteinm 7y agoEven then, Xeon Phi had a fairly limited run. I hope they're in it for the long haul with Xe.
- arcanus 7y ago> hope they're in it for the long haul with Xe Hope aside, is there any reason to believe this time is different, and that Intel is serious about GPUs?
- mark-r 7y agoI have this picture in my mind of Charlie Brown, Lucy, and a football.
- Twirrim 7y agoIt feels like the same as with Google products. To paraphrase the common saying, "Insanity is trusting Intel over and over again with new products, and expecting different results"
- petschge 7y agoThe Xe is supposed to power Aurora, the next big DOE supercomputer.
- Nelson69 7y agoWasn't "Roadrunner" powered by Cell? What's Cell doing these days?
- nl 7y agoCell was a PowerPC variant, which is still doing ok as the POWER series of CPUs. The Summit supercomputer[1] used POWER9 and is the fastest supercomputer in the world. If you go speak to IBM and you have an interesting app you can get time on a POWER9 server to see how well it runs. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summit_(supercomputer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summit_(supercomputer)
- reitzensteinm 7y agoCalling Cell a PowerPC is a bit of a stretch. The only reason to use the Cell was the SPEs, which had their own custom SIMD instruction sets. The PowerPC core was just there for coordination. Any work you put in to optimizing your code for the Cell would be completely thrown out if you brought it to another POWER architecture. At that point you might as well have hopped over to x86, ARM, CUDA, Xeon Phi, the Connection Machine, whatever.
- PaulHoule 7y agoSo they'll make 50,000 of them for that purpose.
- rrss 7y agoXeon Phi was supposed to power Aurora too, until it got delayed by 3 years and redesigned.
- reitzensteinm 7y agoOnly the paranoid survive era Intel would be treating the receding x86 monopoly and rise of GPGPU as an existential threat. Xe would be treated as a top priority and not be allowed to fail. The guys in charge now? Who the fuck knows. They seem good at making immense amounts of cash from yesterday's defacto monopoly, not so much at setting up tomorrow's.
- ksec 7y ago>Only the paranoid survive era Intel would be treating the receding x86 monopoly and rise of GPGPU as an existential threat. Not really. GPGPU is not an existential threat to Intel, even now neither Nvidia or AMD are hurting Intel much. But TSMC is an existential threat, even with the recent rumours of splitting up Intel Fabs, it is all too late.
- reitzensteinm 7y agoIt's the two in combination that I believe to be an existential threat. nVidia is succeeding at entrenching CUDA as a standard, just as Intel's x86 grip is loosening and processors are becoming commodities. This leaves nVidia in a great position to commoditize their compliments, offering high performance ARM CPUs (like Amazon is offering) for a tiny margin just to fuck with Intel. And it really would. Versions with nVidia GPUs in the cache hierarchy (HBM) are just the icing on the cake. Intel smartly got out of the memory business because it didn't want to join a race to the bottom fabbing commodity transistors, but there's a good chance that's in their not so distant future. And yeah, TSMC is a pretty big threat too... I was ignoring 10nm as part of this, because we don't have any data yet as to whether it represents a permanent shift in Intel's ability to compete on fabrication. I personally doubt that. But it is possible.
- HeWhoLurksLate 7y ago> They seem good at making immense amounts of cash from yesterday's defacto monopoly, not so much at setting up tomorrow's. Well said.
- kbumsik 7y agoAlthough the CPU hasn't been improved much, Intel has improved its iGPU quite a lot and now outperforms the current Ryzen mobile. [1] I think it is natural for Intel to start making dGPU to replace popular mainstream mobile GPU such as nVidia MX250. And that's what Intel's new DG1 starts from. [1]: https://www.anandtech.com/show/15213/the-microsoft-surface-laptop-3-showdown-amd-picasso-vs-intel-ice-lake/4 https://www.anandtech.com/show/15213/the-microsoft-surface-l...
- ksec 7y agoWell, not really iGPU, those low res benchmarks relies more on CPU, and Icelake is quite far ahead of 1st Gen Zen. Not to mention it is an 14nm product and not even priced at the same segment. The coming Ryzen Mobile with Zen 2 and Power Optimised Vega will do far better.
- kbumsik 7y agoFair point, but what I mean is Intel is probably at a good time to make its own dGPU for mobile, just to clarify.
- pjmlp 7y agoI was at one of the GDCE Intel sessions in 2009 when Larrabee was supposed to take over the world. The problem in the GPU space is that so far Intel has always under delivered in tooling and performance. I guess at least one can be happy that by being the underdog they play nice with FOSS community, as it tends to happen.
- HeWhoLurksLate 7y agoMan, Larrabee was really cool! I wish that something had become of the software-defined pipeline thingy that let them add support for new graphics API's- IIRC they added DX9 or Vulkan or some other pipeline support to the card after it was made. Now I want to get one, or a Phi or something from that era.
- chrisseaton 7y agoIntel have implementations of other instruction sets for their GPUs, don't they? And have done for years?
- lizknope 7y agoIntel had the i740 GPU in 1998. Poor performance and cancelled after 2 years. I don't know what you would call its internal instruction set. Intel was going to release Larrabee, their GPU based on x86, in 2010 but cancelled it because of poor performance. All of Intel's integrated GPUs are adequate for desktop use and light gaming but they have poor performance compared to any Nvidia or AMD GPU. I don't know what you would call their internal instruction set. We will see how Intel's new Xe GPU does. I'm predicting that they will cancel it in 2 years because of poor performance.
- UncleOxidant 7y agoOr even if Xe performance is reasonably good they'll still cancel it in 2 years because Intel.
- rasz 7y agoi740 was fixed function pipeline, no instruction set.
- chrisseaton 7y agoI presume it still had an instruction set, just that the driver did it for you.
- wtallis 7y agoBack in the early days of consumer 3D graphics accelerators, there was no such thing as a shader program and GPUs were not Turing-complete. You had to pick from among the texture blending modes that your GPU natively supported. Some GPUs exposed an interface that was basically a large portion of the OpenGL 1.x state machine, implemented in hardware.
- Rafuino 7y agoCounterpoint: Intel SSDs have been going strong since at least 2008.
- mark-r 7y agoDefine "strong". I've never actually seen one.
- freeone3000 7y agoThey exist on Newegg. You can buy one. I have one.
- astrodust 7y agoI have a few. For certain applications they're excellent.
- zszugyi 7y agoWould your definition include "I've seen one"?
- mark-r 7y agoIt's rather like proving a negative. If they were really popular, chances are I'd have seen one by now - but I haven't. That doesn't mean they aren't popular, but it reduces the odds.
- CamperBob2 7y agoWhen the only tool you have is a rusty hammer made from an alloy of plutonium and Chinese pot metal...
- snarf21 7y agoMy friend calls pot metal Chinesium instead. :)
- Fnoord 7y agoLets see. (Someone else already mentioned SSD.) * Intel GPU. Work quite well on Linux for the past 10 years (albeit not ace 3D performance due to hardware limitations) * Intel WLAN. Work great on Linux. They even worked in a time where almost no other FOSS drivers for WLAN were around. * Intel LAN. Work great on Linux. Great performance. I'm not at all a fan of Intel. Their x86-64 CPUs are overpriced compared to AMD's Ryzen and Threadripper. But the above three? I would not run away from these; on the contrary.
- fallous 7y agoIt's not that the products are poor but that Intel has a long and proud tradition of killing any product that is not directly related to x86. Intel GPU started with i740 (a stand-alone AGP card), which is the last stand-alone GPU they made... and that was 1998 or so. Their networking chipsets were a result of Intel's own x86 motherboard business, especially in the server arena. Intel also bought out companies in the late 90s/early 2000s to build their stand-alone network appliance business (routers, firewalls, SSL accelerators, etc) only to prompt kill that off when x86 started stumbling thanks to the P4 and AMD's competition.