5 ms·

> 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 ago
I have this picture in my mind of Charlie Brown, Lucy, and a football.
Twirrim 7y ago
It 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 ago
The Xe is supposed to power Aurora, the next big DOE supercomputer.
- Nelson69 7y ago
  Wasn't "Roadrunner" powered by Cell? What's Cell doing these days?
  - nl 7y ago
    Cell 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 ago
      Calling 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 ago
  So they'll make 50,000 of them for that purpose.
- rrss 7y ago
  Xeon Phi was supposed to power Aurora too, until it got delayed by 3 years and redesigned.
reitzensteinm 7y ago
Only 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 ago
    It'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 ago
Although 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 ago
  Well, 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 ago
    Fair point, but what I mean is Intel is probably at a good time to make its own dGPU for mobile, just to clarify.

mark-r 7y ago

I have this picture in my mind of Charlie Brown, Lucy, and a football.

Twirrim 7y ago

It 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 ago

The Xe is supposed to power Aurora, the next big DOE supercomputer.

Nelson69 7y ago
Wasn't "Roadrunner" powered by Cell? What's Cell doing these days?
- nl 7y ago
  Cell 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 ago
    Calling 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 ago
So they'll make 50,000 of them for that purpose.
rrss 7y ago
Xeon Phi was supposed to power Aurora too, until it got delayed by 3 years and redesigned.

reitzensteinm 7y ago

Only 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 ago
  It'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 ago

Although 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 ago
Well, 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 ago
  Fair point, but what I mean is Intel is probably at a good time to make its own dGPU for mobile, just to clarify.