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> And on the server front, which I'm sure is what's keeping them in business now, they face an existential threat in the form of ARM. HPC and inertia. Lots of

> And on the server front, which I'm sure is what's keeping them in business now, they face an existential threat in the form of ARM. HPC and inertia. Lots of inertia.

petschge 5y ago
HPC still has a lot of Intel, because these systems run for ~5 years. But if I look at the Top500, there is systems with AMD Rome (and Milan and Naples). There is systems with IBM POWER9 (and POWER7) and the fastest system in the list is of course running Fujitsu A64FX. And there is exotic systems with Vector Engine, Marvell ThunderX2, Hygon Dhyana or Sunway. And while Xeon Phi (and predecessors) used to be very popular, the accelerator market is now dominated by Nvidia (mostly Volta, but also Ampere and Pascal) and AMD Vega. Actually only two systems (#7 in China and #10 in Texas) of the top 10 systems rely on Intel. And upcoming systems also feature a wild mix of architectures and vendors. So way less inertia that you might think.
dragontamer 5y ago
Intel has soundly lost HPC to NVidia at this point. Not only because of NVidia GPUs, but also because NVidia bought Mellanox (who makes those fancy InfiniBand NICs that those supercomputers use). Intel's Xeon Phi didn't work out so hot. They're working on Intel Xe (aka: Aurora Supercomputer), but Aurora has been bungled so hard that Intel's losing a lot of reputation right now. Intel needs to deliver Aurora if they want to be taken seriously.
- formerly_proven 5y ago
  A lot of stuff in HPC still doesn't utilize GPUs (because the problem is not amenable to GPU architecture or laziness / lack of funding and interest) so at least for commercial deployments with a diverse set of solvers I'd say CPUs remain important. Intel might be unable to outperform their competitors at this time, but they have more than enough money to be temporarily cheaper to (seemingly) make up for that.

> And on the server front, which I'm sure is what's keeping them in business now, they face an existential threat in the form of ARM. HPC and inertia. Lots of inertia.

petschge 5y ago

HPC still has a lot of Intel, because these systems run for ~5 years. But if I look at the Top500, there is systems with AMD Rome (and Milan and Naples). There is systems with IBM POWER9 (and POWER7) and the fastest system in the list is of course running Fujitsu A64FX. And there is exotic systems with Vector Engine, Marvell ThunderX2, Hygon Dhyana or Sunway. And while Xeon Phi (and predecessors) used to be very popular, the accelerator market is now dominated by Nvidia (mostly Volta, but also Ampere and Pascal) and AMD Vega. Actually only two systems (#7 in China and #10 in Texas) of the top 10 systems rely on Intel. And upcoming systems also feature a wild mix of architectures and vendors. So way less inertia that you might think.

dragontamer 5y ago

Intel has soundly lost HPC to NVidia at this point. Not only because of NVidia GPUs, but also because NVidia bought Mellanox (who makes those fancy InfiniBand NICs that those supercomputers use). Intel's Xeon Phi didn't work out so hot. They're working on Intel Xe (aka: Aurora Supercomputer), but Aurora has been bungled so hard that Intel's losing a lot of reputation right now. Intel needs to deliver Aurora if they want to be taken seriously.

formerly_proven 5y ago
A lot of stuff in HPC still doesn't utilize GPUs (because the problem is not amenable to GPU architecture or laziness / lack of funding and interest) so at least for commercial deployments with a diverse set of solvers I'd say CPUs remain important. Intel might be unable to outperform their competitors at this time, but they have more than enough money to be temporarily cheaper to (seemingly) make up for that.