4 ms·
What’s their hope right now? Some sort of Quark-derived desktop CPU à la Dothan?
by xattt 3y ago
What’s their hope right now? Some sort of Quark-derived desktop CPU à la Dothan?
- scrlk 3y agoDoubling down on becoming a competitive foundry and becoming the western equivalent to TSMC. If their 18A process ships on time (2025), there's a chance that they could regain process leadership.
- baq 3y agoFingers crossed but they don’t have a good track record in the last 10 years. The world needs at least two good processes.
- sweetjuly 3y agoI can't imagine the US government letting Intel Foundry Services fail. Not so much in the banking "too big to fail" sense but a "national security interest" sense: not only are semiconductors critical to the domestic economy but having the latest nodes available for military application gives a major leg up. We see this elsewhere too; SkyWater is a kinda terrible fab (their yield for even very old processes is incredibly bad lol) but the DoD is still throwing gobs of money at them to developed their radhard process because they need some domestic, trusted vendor to turn to. IFS might not be competitive but they probably aren't going anywhere, even if they fail to deliver anywhere near on time.
- kristopolous 3y agoComing out with better chips at lower prices. I know how obvious that sounds but it's true. The difficulty is they need to make nearly decade-long bets that are the size of small countries economies due to the complexity of manufacturing and Intel's made a few bad ones recently. I don't know who to listen to on what chip design will be a market win in 2030 either. AI applications are extremely resource intensive so that will be driving things for a while but how to solve that in an affordable chip created by a reliable efficient manufacturing process is beyond me. This stuff is phenomenally hard. I'd say the winner is something like an NVIDIA graphics pipeline that is separated into a pile called "graphics" and "ai" and then has the graphics part gutted for a cheaper AI pipeline which can use system memory as opposed to preciously expensive graphics memory and then gets integrated into their next gen CPUs taking Nvidia out of the loop and dealing a blow to AMD at the same time. They'd mop the floors with something like that especially if you could just drop it into pytorch and have it work automagically. They could probably then just turn around and license it to ARM. AMD and Nvidia wouldn't work together to mount a unified defense because of ATI and this would allow Intel to weasel their way back into the Apple money stream. But I'm just some unemployed dude typing this on a 4 year old android. Don't listen to me.
- tomcam 3y agowouldn’t graphics and AI both pretty much reduce to mad matrix operations?
- monocasa 3y agoGraphics has more than that between texture pipelines, ROPs, more complex compute dispatch than needed for AI, etc. All of that comes with area and power costs even if you clock gate the blocks you can.
- kristopolous 3y agoThings like hardware raytracing probably aren't needed and there's shading units, texture mapping, and ROPs. I'm not a hardware engineer but there's probably some way Intel can rejigger its IGT (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Graphics_Technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Graphics_Technology) to have the equivalent of Nvidia's "tensor cores". They have an NVIDIA mainline competitor in their A770 but I think they should be exiting the direct nvidia assault strategy. I really don't know how that's going to work. They're basically a nonplayer https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html What's their winning move in that approach? It's just money in a volcano.
- comex 3y agoIsn’t AI usually highly memory-bandwidth constrained? Designing a new powerful AI chip to rely on slow memory probably isn’t the best strategy.
- kristopolous 3y agoI'd imagine when the AI dust clears there's going to be consumer and producer sides of AI and the consumer requirements will be a carveout of the producer. This just appears to be the case with everything else. Making a video game, movie, song, computer program, etc, requires more resources than using one and there was a significant price delta between them for a long time.
- cmrdporcupine 3y agoImagine they got into making an ARM CPU competitive with Apple's? Or a server chip that is better than Ampera's, and sold at scale? I think they have the expertise and ability to do it.
- userbinator 3y agoA dual-mode ARM-x86 core would be an interesting CPU that they certainly have the skill to create. Thanks to the protected mode descriptor model, imagine having ARM64, ARM32, x86-32, and x86-64 code segments all coexisting in the same system, with no emulation nor virtualisation. There wouldn't be any overhead, because all instructions regardless of ISA get translated to uops anyway. They could add a RISC-V front-end too, just for completeness sake.