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Coming 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 ar
by kristopolous 3y ago
Coming 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.