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>Nvidia had nothing to do with their failure, unless they had some sort of high-level mole in AMD's driver teams. I wonder why Jensen wouldn't help his cousin

by trhway 2y ago

>Nvidia had nothing to do with their failure, unless they had some sort of high-level mole in AMD's driver teams. I wonder why Jensen wouldn't help his cousin Lisa Su with a good advice :) In general it isn't surprising that hardware companies like Intel and AMD fall at software - just talk to any programmer at such a hardware shop. What striking is that Jensen is able to have such a prominent and huge software development in a naturally hardware company. NVDA is the only hardware company where my programmer acquaintances don't complain about it being a hardware company.

Dalewyn 2y ago
>it isn't surprising that hardware companies like Intel and AMD fall at software A lot of what keeps Intel relevant is their prowess in both hardware and software, bringing properly refined products to market when it matters. Intel's failure against Nvidia had far more to do with their business strategy of CPU First missing the broadside of a barn; it's like bringing a knife to a gunfight, of course you're going to get your ass wrecked. AMD fucking sucks at software though, no disagreement there.
- 7f4784e3f1 2y ago
  Intel has some great software like MKL and related libraries, but, speaking from experience, due to its internal politics Intel is unable to innovate in a meaningful way or build a reasonable SW strategy for GPUs. The oneAPI heavily contributed to their GPU failures IMO. Choosing SYCL and promoting non-existing performance portability and pouring resources in the trying to shove CPU and GPU (and at some point FPGA!) into the same programming model while disinvesting from OpenCL was a big mistake, but it was probably the only way to please both CPU and GPU management. And the problem is not SYCL per se but the fact that they try to make it an open standard rather then trying to provide a way to extract maximum performance from their HW. They needed to build a CUDA alternative, where, after jumping through considerable hoops, you can get to actually programming tensor cores for those who need it. Not surprisingly, Intel is not using SYCL for their GPU kernels (look at oneDNN sources). With Raja gone there may be hope, but I'm not holding my breath. The only thing that they have that is competitive is Habana's stuff which is outside of the oneAPI. I would not be surprised if AMD has a similar issue of infighting due selling both CPUs and GPUs. And NVIDIA does not have this problem.
  - orhmeh09 2y ago
    What are your thoughts on the move from ICC to the LLVM-based ICX? Does that fit in with this product strategy somehow?

by trhway 2y ago

Dalewyn 2y ago

>it isn't surprising that hardware companies like Intel and AMD fall at software A lot of what keeps Intel relevant is their prowess in both hardware and software, bringing properly refined products to market when it matters. Intel's failure against Nvidia had far more to do with their business strategy of CPU First missing the broadside of a barn; it's like bringing a knife to a gunfight, of course you're going to get your ass wrecked. AMD fucking sucks at software though, no disagreement there.

7f4784e3f1 2y ago
Intel has some great software like MKL and related libraries, but, speaking from experience, due to its internal politics Intel is unable to innovate in a meaningful way or build a reasonable SW strategy for GPUs. The oneAPI heavily contributed to their GPU failures IMO. Choosing SYCL and promoting non-existing performance portability and pouring resources in the trying to shove CPU and GPU (and at some point FPGA!) into the same programming model while disinvesting from OpenCL was a big mistake, but it was probably the only way to please both CPU and GPU management. And the problem is not SYCL per se but the fact that they try to make it an open standard rather then trying to provide a way to extract maximum performance from their HW. They needed to build a CUDA alternative, where, after jumping through considerable hoops, you can get to actually programming tensor cores for those who need it. Not surprisingly, Intel is not using SYCL for their GPU kernels (look at oneDNN sources). With Raja gone there may be hope, but I'm not holding my breath. The only thing that they have that is competitive is Habana's stuff which is outside of the oneAPI. I would not be surprised if AMD has a similar issue of infighting due selling both CPUs and GPUs. And NVIDIA does not have this problem.
- orhmeh09 2y ago
  What are your thoughts on the move from ICC to the LLVM-based ICX? Does that fit in with this product strategy somehow?