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Fun fact: More than half of all engineers at NVIDIA are software engineers. Jensen has deliberately and strategically built a powerful software stack on top of
by brindlejim 3y ago
Fun fact: More than half of all engineers at NVIDIA are software engineers. Jensen has deliberately and strategically built a powerful software stack on top of his GPUs, and he's spent decades doing it.
Until Intel finds a CEO who is as technical and strategic, as opposed to the bean-counters, I doubt that they will manage to organize a successful counterattack on CUDA.
- mi_lk 3y agoYou don't know Pat Gelsinger do you?
- drexlspivey 3y agoor Lisa Su
- ActionHank 3y agoWe're in 2023, he's been in the CEO seat for 2 years already. He's had plenty of time to show the world his intent and where they are going. All that has happened is they launched a very mid GPU and have yielded more ground to AMD. Meanwhile AMD continue to eat away at Intel's talent pool, market share, and still managed to push into the AI space. He should be sweating.
- pgeorgi 3y ago> for 2 years already ... All that has happened is they launched a very mid GPU Hardware development cycles are closer to 5 years. So while he might have gotten some adjustments done on the designs so far, if he turned the ship around it'll take a while longer to materialize. The software side is more agile, so any tea leave reading to discern what Gelsinger's strategy looks like is best done over there.
- jorvi 3y agoNot only that, for a “first” (not sure how much of Larrabee was salvaged) discrete GPU attempt, Intel Arc is fantastic. Look at the first GPUs Nvidia and ATI launched. It’s only when you put them up against Nvidia and AMDs comes-with-decades-of-experience offerings that Intel’s GPUs seem less than stellar.
- CuriousCosmic 3y agoYeah Arc is incredible in how much it accomplished as a first attempt and as long as they keep at it without chopping it up into a bunch of artificially limited market segments then it'll probably be incredibly competitive in a few generations.
- signatoremo 3y agoHis intent is “5 nodes in 4 years” - [0]. The goal is to reclaim the node leadership from TSMC by 2025. They announced the first chips based on Intel 4 today, which is more or less equivalent to TSMC’s 5nm. They may fail, but the goal is clear and ambitious. [0] - https://www.xda-developers.com/intel-roadmap-2025-explainer/ https://www.xda-developers.com/intel-roadmap-2025-explainer/
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ksec 3y ago>All that has happened is they launched a very mid GPU and have yielded more ground to AMD. And you dont blame that to Raja Koduri but to Gelsinger?
- sulam 3y agoYeah, they should get someone who actually architected a successful chip, like the 486. Maybe a boomerang who used to be CTO. Get rid of this beancounter and hire someone like that!! /S
- papichulo2023 3y agoAre you saying they able to develop without a PM every 5 engineers? Insane.
- baq 3y agoThis was true for Intel for at least 10 years and I’m pretty sure for much longer than that. It was probably true for nvidia for about as long as they exist. Hardware without software is just expensive sand. Every semiconductor company knows this. Intel was the one to perfect the whole package with x86 in the first place… In the GPU compute space CUDA is x86. It’s ubiquitous, de facto standard and will be disrupted. Question is if it takes a year or a decade.
- JonChesterfield 3y agoThe stereotype is hardware engineers all think software is easy. So while semiconductor firms know software is important, they're often optimistic about the ease of creating it. Cuda is enormous, very complicated and fits together relatively well. All the semiconductor startups have a business plan about being transparent drop in replacements for cuda systems, built by some tens of software engineers in a year or two. That only really makes sense if you've totally misjudged the problem difficulty.
- natbennett 3y agoI find the hero-worship of Pat Gelsinger — examples in sibling comments — really weird. My impression of him at VMware was very beancounter-y, not especially technical, and too caught up in personal vendettas and status games to make good technical leadership decisions. Granted, I may have just gotten off on the wrong foot. The first thing he said to Pivotal during the acquisition announcement was, “You were our cousins, but you’re now more like children.” So the whole tone was just weird.
- roenxi 3y agoGelsinger is saying "the entire industry" and that seems likely to be a simple fact. Every single player, other than Nvidia, has an incentive to minimise the importance of CUDA as a proprietary technology. That is a lot more programmers than Nvidia can afford to employ. Even if Intel falls over its own feet, the incentives to bring in more chip manufacturers are huge. It'll happen, the only question is whether the timeframe is months, years or a decade. My guess is shorter timeframes, this seems to mostly be matrix multiplication and there is suddenly a lot of money and attention on the matter. And AMD's APU play [0] is starting to reach the high end of the market with the MI300A which is an interesting development. [0] EDIT: For anyone not following that story, they've been unifying system and GPU memory; so if I've understood this correctly there isn't any need to "copy data to the GPU" any more on those chips. Basically the CPU will now have big extensions for doing matrix math. Seems likely to catch on. Historically they've been adding that tech to low-end CPU so it isn't useful for AI work, now they're adding it to the big ones.
- droopyEyelids 3y agoI'm not an expert here, but with: > That is a lot more programmers than Nvidia can afford to employ How do you account for the increased complexity those developers have to deal with in an environment where there are multiple companies with conflicting incentives working on the standard? My gut reaction is to worry if this is one of those problems like "9 people working together can't have a baby in one month".
- roenxi 3y agoI actually find that a really interesting question with a really interesting answer - the scaling properties of large groups of people are unintuitive. In this case, my guess would be high market complexity, and the entire userbase to ignore that complexity in favour of 1-2 vendors with simple and cheap options. So the market overall will just settle on de-facto standards. Of course, based on what we see right now that standard would be Nvidia's CUDA; but while CUDA is impressive I don't think running neural nets requires that level of complexity. We're not talking about GUIs which are one of the stickiest and most complicated blocks of software we know about, or complex platform-specific operations. I'd expect that the need for specialist libraries to do inference to go away in time and CUDA to be mainly useful for researching GPU applications to new problems. Training will likely just come down to raw ops/second in hardware rather than software. It isn't like this stuff can't already run on other cards. AMD cards can run stable diffusion or LLMs. The issue is just that AMD drivers tend to crash. That is simultaneously a huge and a tiny problem - if they focus on it it won't be around for long. CUDA is an advantage, but not a moat.
- tester756 3y ago>finds a CEO who is as technical and strategic, as opposed to the bean-counters Did you just call Gelsinger a "non-technical"? wow, how out of touch with reality >Gelsinger first joined Intel at 18 years old in 1979 just after earning an associate degree from Lincoln Tech.[9] He spent much of his career with the company in Oregon,[12] where he maintains a home.[13] In 1987, he co-authored his first book about programming the 80386 microprocessor.[14][1] Gelsinger was the lead architect of the 4th generation 80486 processor[1] introduced in 1989.[9] At age 32, he was named the youngest vice president in Intel's history.[7] Mentored by Intel CEO Andrew Grove, Gelsinger became the company's CTO in 2001, leading key technology developments, including Wi-Fi, USB, Intel Core and Intel Xeon processors, and 14 chip projects.[2][15] He launched the Intel Developer Forum conference as a counterpart to Microsoft's WinHEC.
- brindlejim 3y agoIntel spent more than a decade under Otellini, Krzanich and Swan. Bean counters. Gelsinger was appointed out of desperation, but the problem runs much deeper. I doubt that culture is gone. It has already cost Intel many opportunities.
- tester756 3y ago>Intel spent more than a decade under Otellini, Krzanich and Swan. Bean counters. It still doesn't change mistake in your original message. >Gelsinger was appointed out of desperation, but the problem runs much deeper. How much "much deeper"? VPs? middle level managers? engineers? The example goes from the top, so if he can change the culture at the top, it will eventually get deeper.
- ac29 3y agoIntel has over 15,000 software engineers, per their website. I couldn't find a number for NVIDIA, but it looks like they have a bit above 26k total employees. So, its very likely Intel has more software engineers than NVIDIA. Intel has far more products than NVIDIA though, so NVIDIA almost certainly has more software engineers working on GPU.
- logicchains 3y agoUltimately it comes down to Intel and AMD being penny wise, pound foolish. They're unwilling to hire a lot of quality software engineers, because they're expensive, so they just continue to fall behind NVidia.
- seanalltogether 3y agoNvidia GPU moat has always been their software. Game ready drivers are a big deal for each AAA game launch and they always help to push their fps numbers on reviewers charts. I feel like for 20 years I've been reading people online complain about ATI/AMD drivers and how they want to go back to an Nvidia card the next chance they get.
- epolanski 3y agoThis hasn't been true for more than a decade at this point, and in fact AMD tends to have the better driver support, especially long term.
- overdrive23 3y agoWell, you said a decade so I'll take an easy one from 4 years ago. "Yes, you know all those r/amd and r/nvidia posts about people ditching their RX 5700 XT and switching over to an Nvidia RTX 2070 Super… AMD is reading them and has obviously been jamming them down the throats of its software engineers until they could release a driver patch which addresses the issues Navi users have been experiencing." https://www.pcgamesn.com/amd/radeon-rx-5700-drivers-black-screen-fix https://www.pcgamesn.com/amd/radeon-rx-5700-drivers-black-sc...
- muxr 3y agoPeople used the same argument when saying AMD would never beat Intel in CPUs. Intel has a lot of software engineers. Also these days AMD has a good number of software folks, thanks to the Xilinx acquisition and the organic investments in this area.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- specialist 3y agoYes and, for different reasons: > ...as opposed to the bean-counters Intel whining about the CHIPS Act, while doing huge layoffs, while continuing massive stock buybacks, while continuing to pay dividends... I'm not impressed. I'd expect a corporation facing an existential crisis would make some tough decisions and accept the consequences. I know that Wall St (investors) is the tail wagging the dog. But I expect a leader to hold off the vultures (ghouls) long enough to do the necessary pivots. At least Intel's doom spiral isn't as grimm as the condundrum facing the automobile manufacturers. They need to prop up their declining business units, pay off their loan sharks (investors), somehow resolve their death embrace with the unions, transform culture (bust up their organizational siloes), transform relationships with their suppliers, AND somehow get capital (cheap enough) to fund their pivots. I'm sure Intel has the technical chops to do great things. But financially their half-measures strategy doesn't instill confidence. Source: Just a noob reading the headlines. Am probably totally off base.