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> The potential for intel to explode is definitely there if intel executes with its AI demand. Nope. Intel doesn't get "It's the software, stupid." Intel is

by bsder 3y ago

> The potential for intel to explode is definitely there if intel executes with its AI demand. Nope. Intel doesn't get "It's the software, stupid." Intel is congenitally unable to pay software people more than their engineers--and they treat their engineers like crap, mostly. And they're going to keep getting beaten black and blue by nVidia for that.

j16sdiz 3y ago
Intel love software and firmware -- they do things in sw instead of hw whenever they can. They just bad at it.
mastax 3y ago
I think Intel is doing relatively well on the software side, given how short a time frame we're talking about. OneAPI is in the same ballpark as AMD and on a better trajectory, I think. They're competing for second place, remember. The more disappointing thing for me is that they bought like 5 AI startups pretty early on and have basically just shut most of them down. Maybe that was always the plan? See which ones develop the best and consider the rest to be acqui-hires? But I think it's more likely just fallout from Intel's era of flailing around and acquiring random crap.
- eyegor 3y ago
  Intel has been running oneapi for several years, and as a long time user I assure you it's horrible to deal with. It's the only software I've dealt with that breaks other software. Every year or two I'd have to fully reinstall visual studio because it hopped in, messed up a bunch of files, and the uninstaller never works. It will also happily break your system python environment if you let it try. And did I mention it takes over an hour to run through their horrible installer that tends to break itself? Even under linux it would try to hop in and screw up system /bin and /sbin links because why not. They also shut down their old license validation portals so their older, working versions can no longer be installed. Intels dev tooling is absolutely the worst tooling around.
  - rbanffy 3y ago
    > They also shut down their old license validation portals For a company that makes a truckload of money from selling CPUs it's unforgivable their tools are not a) free b) top-notch I know one is limited by how good Windows is when you ship a tool for Windows, but your description is quite horrifying.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  OneAPI still isn't as polyglot as CUDA, and they had to buy Codeplay to get better tooling to start with.
varelse 3y ago
[dead]
georgeburdell 3y ago
ML/AI engineers get paid a lot more for the same experience as other software engineers at Intel, so much so that there’s a “soft” Principal Engineer grade where they don’t go through the usual nomination process
- hamandcheese 3y ago
  This sounds like a problem to me. It takes more than ML folks to ship a high quality, production ready product.
bradgessler 3y ago
You’d think they’d “out-Open Source” Nvidia’s Linux drivers situation. It seems if they shipped “good enough” hardware (not the best) and open sourced their driver stack it would get the attention of more devs.
- ac29 3y ago
  Intel Linux GPU drivers have been open source for as long as I can remember (at least 10 years, maybe forever).

by bsder 3y ago

j16sdiz 3y ago

Intel love software and firmware -- they do things in sw instead of hw whenever they can. They just bad at it.

mastax 3y ago

I think Intel is doing relatively well on the software side, given how short a time frame we're talking about. OneAPI is in the same ballpark as AMD and on a better trajectory, I think. They're competing for second place, remember. The more disappointing thing for me is that they bought like 5 AI startups pretty early on and have basically just shut most of them down. Maybe that was always the plan? See which ones develop the best and consider the rest to be acqui-hires? But I think it's more likely just fallout from Intel's era of flailing around and acquiring random crap.

eyegor 3y ago
Intel has been running oneapi for several years, and as a long time user I assure you it's horrible to deal with. It's the only software I've dealt with that breaks other software. Every year or two I'd have to fully reinstall visual studio because it hopped in, messed up a bunch of files, and the uninstaller never works. It will also happily break your system python environment if you let it try. And did I mention it takes over an hour to run through their horrible installer that tends to break itself? Even under linux it would try to hop in and screw up system /bin and /sbin links because why not. They also shut down their old license validation portals so their older, working versions can no longer be installed. Intels dev tooling is absolutely the worst tooling around.
- rbanffy 3y ago
  > They also shut down their old license validation portals For a company that makes a truckload of money from selling CPUs it's unforgivable their tools are not a) free b) top-notch I know one is limited by how good Windows is when you ship a tool for Windows, but your description is quite horrifying.
pjmlp 3y ago
OneAPI still isn't as polyglot as CUDA, and they had to buy Codeplay to get better tooling to start with.

varelse 3y ago

[dead]

georgeburdell 3y ago

ML/AI engineers get paid a lot more for the same experience as other software engineers at Intel, so much so that there’s a “soft” Principal Engineer grade where they don’t go through the usual nomination process

hamandcheese 3y ago
This sounds like a problem to me. It takes more than ML folks to ship a high quality, production ready product.

bradgessler 3y ago

You’d think they’d “out-Open Source” Nvidia’s Linux drivers situation. It seems if they shipped “good enough” hardware (not the best) and open sourced their driver stack it would get the attention of more devs.

ac29 3y ago
Intel Linux GPU drivers have been open source for as long as I can remember (at least 10 years, maybe forever).