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I'm still convinced by Intel's and Pat's XPU strategy. Having a well rounded portfolio of CPUs, GPUs, SoCs, and FPGAs that all work flawlessly, alongside a comp
by Aromasin 4y ago
I'm still convinced by Intel's and Pat's XPU strategy. Having a well rounded portfolio of CPUs, GPUs, SoCs, and FPGAs that all work flawlessly, alongside a comprehensive software environment to make cross-platform development easier (their OneAPI stack) is a dream for any OEM/ODM; provided it works.
Their issue at the moment isn't strategy. It's execution. Axing their GPU division would only hurt their current plan, and do nothing to fix the the systematic problem that they're missing deadline's and shipping incomplete products. From the outside looking in, it seems like there's some fat that needs trimming and people aren't pulling their weight. If they can scale back to efficient team and org sizes, cut the side projects, and focus on excellent software and hardware validation, I can see them pulling this off and Pat being lauded as a hero.
- PaulHoule 4y agoPeople I know who develop high performance systems are so indifferent to OpenCL it's hard for me to picture what could make people develop for OpenCL. There is such a long term history of failure here that somebody has to make a very strong case that the next time is going to be different and I've never seen anyone at Intel try that or even recognize that history of failure.
- Miraste 4y agoIt's unfortunate, but the reality is it would take an act of god to unseat CUDA at this point.
- tambourine_man 4y agoUnless someone beats them in the hardware front. GPUs that are 30-50% faster (or just as fast but 30-50% cheaper). I could see Apple and AMD, working with TSMCs latest node, stepping up to the challenge.
- ceeplusplus 4y agoNo way 30-50% is enough. You need 2x at least, if not more. There is a deep rooted ecosystem of CUDA apps. You would need to have at least 2-3 generations of 2x lead to get people to switch.
- bobajeff 4y agoThat or they could just open their GPU cores to direct programming instead of locking it behind some API.
- amluto 4y agoThis depends on the degree to which the underlying hardware remains compatible across generations. nVidia can sell monster GPU systems today to run 5-year-old CUDA code faster without any recompilation or other mandatory engineering work. I don’t know whether this is possible with direct hardware access.
- PaulHoule 4y agoIntel's OneAPI (rebranded OpenCL) can allegedly do this. It also claims to do this across radically different architectures like FPGA and all I can say to that is "I find that very hard to believe"
- buildbot 4y agoYeah it is in practice not really true. Maybe after hacking the code you can watch it compile for _days_ and then perform probably worse than a GPU without extreme tuning, which removes the point anyway.
- pjmlp 4y agoRebranded SYCL, if it was rebranded OpenCL, it wouldn't even be worth a 2nd look.
- greenknight 4y agoDepends... sometimes its built specifically to kernels. One common instance is, blender's Cycles renderer. Every time there is a new NVIDIA GPU. It needs to be recompiled to support it. Sometimes that also requires a new CUDA version to be able to do it. CUDA versions over the years have deprecated different operations and what not.
- wmf 4y ago
- nicoburns 4y agoCould Intel just implement CUDA support? That would certainly be a huge task, but Intel aren’t have the resources for that.
- paulmd 4y agoThe GPU Ocelot project did exactly that at one point. It's probably a legal minefield for an organized corporate entity though. https://gpuocelot.gatech.edu/ https://gpuocelot.gatech.edu/
- TomVDB 4y agoOne of the big attractions of CUDA is not just the core (programming, API, compiler, development tool) but also the libraries (cuDNN, FFT, cuSignal, … It’s a very long list). These libraries are usually not open source, and can thus not be recompiled even if you have core CUDA support.
- Aromasin 4y agoIntel doesn't implement CUDA, but they're working on a CUDA to DPC++ (their parallel programming language) migration tool to make the jump less painful. I've tested some of the NVIDIA samples with it and it seems to do the vast majority of the grunt work, but there are still some sections where refactoring is required. You can find it in the OneAPI base toolkit.
- doppioandante 4y agoThere is ZLUDA, based on oneAPI if I recall correctly: https://github.com/vosen/ZLUDA https://github.com/vosen/ZLUDA
- VHRanger 4y agoVulkan compute might, over time, take root. The fact that a similar API can be used for training on servers, inference from laptops to phones, is an appealing proposition Best part: most devices have decent vulkan drivers. Unlike openCL.
- pjmlp 4y agoOnly on Khronos dreams, its experience is even worse than OpenCL.
- pinewurst 4y agoAnd could care even less about “oneAPI”(tm).
- bubblethink 4y agoWith all accelerators, GPUs, FPGAs etc., the solution to me seems pretty simple. Give it away. Like literally give them away like usb sticks in a parking lot. All these companies and startups work on raising massive rounds and focus on enterprise sales and deals with national labs etc., while the average joe has nothing to tinker with. Everybody who mattered had a cheap GPU, and a cheap x86 system before that. That's what drives adoption.
- jiggawatts 4y agoBack in the early 2000s you just had to put your email into a developers' sign-up list and tiny startups nobody had ever heard of like NVIDIA would ship you a GPU nearly a full year before it was available to mainstream customers. Fun times...
- PaulHoule 4y agoThere are FPGA dev kits that are fairly affordable. It's probably still cheaper to get a breadboard and a bag of 54xx chips if you want to learn digital logic but I'd say the problem for hobby FPGAs is that the developer tools are poor and the FPGA vendors keep the bitstream format secret so there is no competition to produce better developer's tools. I was also going to mention some dev boards NVIDIA had come out in the last few years that were affordable (I think) but they are all out of stock now and the ones you can get are $2000+ now.
- rasz 4y agoIntel tried that in its own way. Galileo/Edison Quark based products, lasted 2 years and was pure shit. They entered Arduino hobby embedded world with microcontroller like x86 without dedicated fast IO (it could do something like 1KHz max) and no support/documentation. Intel version of giving it away was pricing slightly below? competition with similar spec (400MHz) while targeting 8bit 16MHz market :-) Nowadays only Chinese seem to be able to give it away to grow market share. $1 Espressif is a good example, Govin $7 GW1N-1 fpga devboards. Raspberry <$1 RP2040 is one western exception I could come up with.
- rowanG077 4y agoFor me it's like watching a slowly unfolding car crash. Opencl for all it's flaws is the only compute API that is open, yeah oke Vulkan compute exist as well. All of them using proprietary CUDA has already bitten them in the ass many times. Yet there is nothing beeing done to remove CUDA from the stack at all. Quite the opposite in fact.
- khitchdee 4y agoExecution is about engineers. Intel can't retain their engineers. Without good engineers you can't compete. So you downsize and try compete only on one thing -- better x86. Pat Gs return as CEO does help with engineer retention though.
- PaulHoule 4y agoFor the last 20 years there have always been stories in the press about how Intel is laying off 10,000 engineers. It never struck me as a very psychologically safe place to work.
- AnimalMuppet 4y agoIIRC, they had (maybe still have?) a policy of laying off the bottom 5%. Every year. For a company that size, it's a lot of engineers. But yes, that probably does not make it a psychologically safe place to work...
- PaulHoule 4y agoIt's a dangerous policy because the one person who never gets laid off is the narcissist who is good at managing people's impressions of them.
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago>Execution is about engineers. Meh, not really. Google has some of the best engineers in the world yet they fail at nearly everything that isn't related to search, android, ads and e-mail. Even Jensen Huang said that it's more about vision and not all about execution. He said in the early days of Nvidia all of their competitors at the time had engineers good enough to execute, yet only they had the winning vision that enabled them to make and sell exactly what the market wanted, nothing more, nothing less.
- khitchdee 4y agoGoogle used to be search only. Now they have Android. That's pretty good.
- mugivarra69 4y agoisnt that amd rn
- klelatti 4y agoYou may well be right but if each of the individual components of that portfolio is worse than the competition then it will be an uphill struggle.
- khitchdee 4y agoXPU is too generic a term and harmful looking at it from a business perspective.
- AceJohnny2 4y ago> provided it works Ay, there's the rub!
- mrtweetyhack 4y ago
- tlb 4y agoPart of strategy is knowing what your organization is capable of, and not burning time and money trying to do something you can't execute effectively. I mean, "make the fastest CPUs and GPUs and charge a premium" would be a great strategy if they could deliver. But in a world where they're struggling to keep up on the CPU side, pouring resources into GPUs could lose them both markets.
- ncmncm 4y agoBut they need a decent-ish GPU to integrate on their CPU dies.
- Dalewyn 4y agoDo they? I can't remember the last time I sincerely used an integrated GPU, Intel or AMD, since they're too weak for my purposes. I only ever use them as a Lowest Common Denominator failsafe when troubleshooting. And for use cases (not necessarily mine) where low-end GPUs make sense, it's not like Nvidia and AMD don't sell bottom of the barrel GPUs that you (or OEMs) can buy for a Franklin each or something.
- ncmncm 4y agoLaptops and netbooks.
- 4y ago