4 ms·

Could be trying to make themselves a target for a big acquihire.

by dpkirchner 2y ago

dboreham 2y ago
> Could be trying to make themselves a target for a big acquihire. Is this something anyone sets out to do?
- seeknotfind 2y ago
  Yes.
- ryukoposting 2y ago
  It definitely is, yes.
to11mtm 2y ago
Cynical take: Try to get acquired by Intel for Arc.
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  More cynical take: this would be a bad strategy, because Intel hasn't shown much competence in its leadership for a long time, especially in regards to GPUs.
  - rockskon 2y ago
    They've actually been making positive moves with GPUs lately along with a success story for the B580.
    - schmidtleonard 2y ago
      Yeah but MLID says they are losing money on every one and have been winding down the internal development resources. That doesn't bode well for the future. I want to believe he's wrong, but on the parts of his show where I am in a position to verify, he generally checks out. Whatever the opposite of Gell-Mann Amnesia is, he's got it going for him.
      - derektank 2y ago
        Wait, are they losing money on every one in the sense that they haven't broken even on research and development yet? Or in the sense that they cost more to manufacture than they're sold at? Because one is much worse than the other.
        rockskon 2y ago
        They're trying to unseat Radeon as the budget card. That means making a more enticing offer than AMD for a temporary period of time.
        ryao 2y ago
        The former is likely true, but the latter is not: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42505496 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42505496 That being said, the IP blocks are shared by their iGPUs, so the discrete GPUs do not need to recoup the costs of most of the R&D, as it would have been done anyway for the iGPUs.
      - sodality2 2y ago
        MLID on Intel is starting to become the same as UserBenchmark on AMD (except for the generally reputable sources)... he's beginning to sound like he simply wants Intel to fail, to my insider-info-lacking ears. For competition's sake I really hope that MLID has it wrong (at least the opining about the imminent failure of Intel's GPU division), and that the B series will encourage Intel to push farther to spark more competition in the GPU space.
        ryao 2y ago
        My analysis is that the B580 is profitable if they build enough of them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42505496 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42505496 The margins might be describable as razor thin, but they are there. Whether it can recoup the R&D that they spent designing it is hard to say definitively since I do not have numbers for their R&D costs. However, their iGPUs share the same IP blocks, so the iGPUs should be able to recoup the R&D costs that they have in common with the discrete version. Presumably, Intel can recoup the costs specific to the discrete version if they sell enough discrete cards. While this is not a great picture, it is not terrible either. As long as Intel keeps improving its graphics technology with each generation, profitability should gradually improve. Although I have no insider knowledge, I noticed a few things that they could change to improve their profitability in the next generation: * Tom Petersen made a big deal about 16-lane SIMD in Battlemage being what games want rather than the 8-lane SIMD in Alchemist. However, that is not quite true since both Nvidia and AMD graphics use 32-lane SIMD. If the number of lanes really matter and I certainly can see how it would if game shaders have horizontal operations, then a switch to 32-lane SIMD should yield further improvements. * Tom Petersen said in his interview with Hardware Unboxed that Intel reported the active transistor count for the B580 rather than the total transistor count. This is the contrary to others who report the total transistor count (as evidenced by their density figures being close to what TSMC claims the process can do). Tom Petersen also stated that they would not necessarily be forced by defects to turn dies into B570 cards. This suggests to me that they have substantial redundant logic in the GPU to prevent defects from rendering chips unusable, and that logic is intended to be disabled in production. GPUs are already highly redundant. They could drop much of the planned dark silicon and let defects force a larger percentage of the dies to be usable by only cutdown models. I could have read too much into things that Tom Petersen said. Then again, he did say that their design team is conservative and the doubling rather than quadrupling of the SIMD lane count and the sheer amount of dark silicon (>40% of the die by my calculation) spent on what should be redundant components strike me as conservative design choices. Hopefully the next generation addresses these things. Also, they really do have >40% dark silicon when doing density comparisons: * ARC B580: 72.1M / mm² * Nvidia 4070 Ti: 121.8M / mm² * TSMC claim for 5nm: 138.2M / mm² They have 41% less density than Nvidia and 48% less density than TSMC claims the process can obtain. We also know that they have additional transistors on the die that are not active from Tom Petersen’s comments. Presumably, they are for redundancy. Otherwise, there really is no sane explanation that I can see for so much dark silicon. If they are using transistors that are twice the size as the density figure might be interpreted to suggest, they might as well have used TSMC’s 7nm process since while a smaller process can etch larger features, it is a waste of money. Note that we can rule out the cache lowering the density. The L1 + L2 cache on the 4070 Ti is 79872 KB while it is 59392 KB on the B580. We can also rule out IO logic as lowering the density, as the 4070 Ti has a 256-bit memory bus while the B580 has a 192-bit memory bus. https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/arc-b580.c4244 https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/arc-b580.c4244 https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/geforce-rtx-4070-ti.c3950 https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/geforce-rtx-4070-ti.c3... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_nm_process#Nodes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_nm_process#Nodes The hardware unboxed interview of Tom Petersen is here: https://youtu.be/XYZyai-xjNM https://youtu.be/XYZyai-xjNM
    - kimixa 2y ago
      B580 being a "success" is purely a business decision as a loss leader to get their name into the market. A larger die on a newer node than either Nvidia or AMD means their per-unit costs are higher, and are selling it at a lower price. That's not a long-term success strategy. Maybe good for getting your name in the conversation, but not sustainable.
      - jvanderbot 2y ago
        I was reading this whole thread as about technical accomplishment and non-nvidia GPU capabilities, not business. So I think you're talking about different definitions of "Success". Definitely counts, but not what I was reading.
      - bitmasher9 2y ago
        It’s a long term strategy to release a hardware platform with minimal margins in the beginning to attract software support needed for long term viability. One of the benefits of being Intel.
      - 7speter 2y ago
        I don’t know if this matters but while the B580 has a die comparable in size to a 4070 (~280mm^2), it has about half the transistors (~17-18 billion), iirc.
        ryao 2y ago
        Tom Petersen said in a hardware unboxed video that they only reported “active” transistors, such that there are more transistors in the B580 than what they reported. I do not think this is the correct way to report them since one, TSMC counts all transistors when reporting the density of their process and two, Intel is unlikely to reduce the reported transistor count for the B570, which will certainly have fewer active transistors. That said, the 4070 die is 294mm^2 while the B580 die is 272mm^2.
      - ryao 2y ago
        Is it a loss leader? I looked up the price of 16Gbit GDDR6 ICs the other day at dramexchange and the cost of 12GB is $48. Using the gamer nexus die measurements, we can calculate that they get at least 214 dies per wafer. At $12095 per wafer, which is reportedly the price at TSMC for 5nm wafers in 2025, that is $57 per die. While defects ordinarily reduce yields, Intel put plenty of redundant transistors into the silicon. This is ordinarily not possible to estimate, but Tom Petersen reported in his interview with hardware unboxed that they did not count those when reporting the transistor count. Given that the density based on reported transistors is about 40% less than the density others get from the same process and the silicon in GPUs is already fairly redundant, they likely have a backup component for just about everything on the die. The consequence is that they should be able to use at least 99% of those dies even after tossing unusable dies, such that the $57 per die figure is likely correct. As for the rest of the card, there is not much in it that would not be part of the price of an $80 Asrock motherboard. The main thing would be the bundled game, which they likely can get in bulk at around $5 per copy. This seems reasonable given how much Epic games pays for their giveaways: https://x.com/simoncarless/status/1389297530341519362 https://x.com/simoncarless/status/1389297530341519362 That brings the total cost to $190. If we assume Asrock and the retailer both have a 10% margin on the $80 motherboard used as a substitute for the costs of the rest of the things, then it is $174. Then we need to add margins for board partners and the retailers. If we assume they both get 10% of the $250, then that leaves a $26 profit for Intel, provided that they have economics of scale such that the $80 motherboard approximation for the rest of the cost of the graphics card is accurate. That is about a 10% margin for Intel. That is not a huge margin, but provided enough sales volume (to match the sales volume Asrock gets on their $80 motherboards), Intel should turn a profit on these versus not selling these at all. Interestingly, their board partners are not able/willing to hit the $250 MSRP and the closest they come to it is $260 so Intel is likely not sharing very much with them. It should be noted that Tom Petersen claimed during his hardware unboxed interview that they were not making money on these. However, that predated the B580 being a hit and likely relied on expected low production volumes due to low sales projections. Since the B580 is a hit and napkin math says it is profitable as long as they build enough of them, I imagine that they are ramping production to meet demand and reach profitability.
- dangero 2y ago
  More cynical take: Trying to get acquired by nvidia
  - dizhn 2y ago
    Person below says they (the whole team) already joined Nvidia.
- dogma1138 2y ago
  Intel is in a vastly better shape than AMD, they have the software pretty much nailed down.
  - indolering 2y ago
    Tell that to the board.
  - bboygravity 2y ago
    Someone never used intel killer wifi software.
  - lhl 2y ago
    I've recently been poking around with Intel oneAPI and IPEX-LLM. While there are things that I find refreshing (like their ability to actually respond to bug reports in a timely manner, or at all) on a whole, support/maturity actually doesn't match the current state of ROCm. PyTorch requires it's own support kit separate from the oneAPI Toolkit (and runs slightly different versions of everything), the vLLM xpu support doesn't work - both source and the docker failed to build/run for me. The IPEX-LLM whisper support is completely borked, etc, etc.
    - moffkalast 2y ago
      I've recently been trying to get IPEX working as well, apparently picking Ubuntu 24.04 was a mistake, because while things compile, everything fails at runtime. I've tried native, docker, different oneAPI versions, threw away a solid week of afternoons for nothing. SYCL with llama.cpp is great though, at least at FP16 since it supports nothing else but even Arc iGPUs easily give 2-4x performance compared to CPU inference. Intel should've just contributed to SYCL instead of trying to make their own thing and then forgot to keep maintaining it halfway through.
      - lhl 2y ago
        My testing has been w/ a Lunar Lake Core 258V chip (Xe2 - Arc 140V) on Arch Linux. It sounds like you've tried a lot of things already, but case it helps, my notes for installing llama.cpp and PyTorch: https://llm-tracker.info/howto/Intel-GPUs https://llm-tracker.info/howto/Intel-GPUs I have some benchmarks as well, and the IPEX-LLM backend performed a fair bit better than the SYCL llama.cpp backend for me (almost +50% pp512 and almost 2X tg128) so worth getting it working if you plan on using llama.cpp much on an Intel system. SYCL still performs significantly better than Vulkan and CPU backends, though. As an end-user, I agree that it'd be way better if they could just contribute upstream somehow (whether to the SYCL backend, or if not possible, to a dependency-minized IPEX backend). the IPEX backend is one of the more maintained parts of IPEX-LLM, btw. I found a lot of stuff in that repo that depend on versions of oneKit that aren't even downloadable on Intel's site. I couldn't help but smirk when I heard someone say "Intel has their software nailed down."

Could be trying to make themselves a target for a big acquihire.

dboreham 2y ago

> Could be trying to make themselves a target for a big acquihire. Is this something anyone sets out to do?

seeknotfind 2y ago
Yes.
ryukoposting 2y ago
It definitely is, yes.

to11mtm 2y ago

Cynical take: Try to get acquired by Intel for Arc.

shiroiushi 2y ago
More cynical take: this would be a bad strategy, because Intel hasn't shown much competence in its leadership for a long time, especially in regards to GPUs.
- rockskon 2y ago
  They've actually been making positive moves with GPUs lately along with a success story for the B580.
  - schmidtleonard 2y ago
    Yeah but MLID says they are losing money on every one and have been winding down the internal development resources. That doesn't bode well for the future. I want to believe he's wrong, but on the parts of his show where I am in a position to verify, he generally checks out. Whatever the opposite of Gell-Mann Amnesia is, he's got it going for him.
    - derektank 2y ago
      Wait, are they losing money on every one in the sense that they haven't broken even on research and development yet? Or in the sense that they cost more to manufacture than they're sold at? Because one is much worse than the other.
      - rockskon 2y ago
        They're trying to unseat Radeon as the budget card. That means making a more enticing offer than AMD for a temporary period of time.
      - ryao 2y ago
        The former is likely true, but the latter is not: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42505496 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42505496 That being said, the IP blocks are shared by their iGPUs, so the discrete GPUs do not need to recoup the costs of most of the R&D, as it would have been done anyway for the iGPUs.
    - sodality2 2y ago
      MLID on Intel is starting to become the same as UserBenchmark on AMD (except for the generally reputable sources)... he's beginning to sound like he simply wants Intel to fail, to my insider-info-lacking ears. For competition's sake I really hope that MLID has it wrong (at least the opining about the imminent failure of Intel's GPU division), and that the B series will encourage Intel to push farther to spark more competition in the GPU space.
      - ryao 2y ago
        My analysis is that the B580 is profitable if they build enough of them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42505496 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42505496 The margins might be describable as razor thin, but they are there. Whether it can recoup the R&D that they spent designing it is hard to say definitively since I do not have numbers for their R&D costs. However, their iGPUs share the same IP blocks, so the iGPUs should be able to recoup the R&D costs that they have in common with the discrete version. Presumably, Intel can recoup the costs specific to the discrete version if they sell enough discrete cards. While this is not a great picture, it is not terrible either. As long as Intel keeps improving its graphics technology with each generation, profitability should gradually improve. Although I have no insider knowledge, I noticed a few things that they could change to improve their profitability in the next generation: * Tom Petersen made a big deal about 16-lane SIMD in Battlemage being what games want rather than the 8-lane SIMD in Alchemist. However, that is not quite true since both Nvidia and AMD graphics use 32-lane SIMD. If the number of lanes really matter and I certainly can see how it would if game shaders have horizontal operations, then a switch to 32-lane SIMD should yield further improvements. * Tom Petersen said in his interview with Hardware Unboxed that Intel reported the active transistor count for the B580 rather than the total transistor count. This is the contrary to others who report the total transistor count (as evidenced by their density figures being close to what TSMC claims the process can do). Tom Petersen also stated that they would not necessarily be forced by defects to turn dies into B570 cards. This suggests to me that they have substantial redundant logic in the GPU to prevent defects from rendering chips unusable, and that logic is intended to be disabled in production. GPUs are already highly redundant. They could drop much of the planned dark silicon and let defects force a larger percentage of the dies to be usable by only cutdown models. I could have read too much into things that Tom Petersen said. Then again, he did say that their design team is conservative and the doubling rather than quadrupling of the SIMD lane count and the sheer amount of dark silicon (>40% of the die by my calculation) spent on what should be redundant components strike me as conservative design choices. Hopefully the next generation addresses these things. Also, they really do have >40% dark silicon when doing density comparisons: * ARC B580: 72.1M / mm² * Nvidia 4070 Ti: 121.8M / mm² * TSMC claim for 5nm: 138.2M / mm² They have 41% less density than Nvidia and 48% less density than TSMC claims the process can obtain. We also know that they have additional transistors on the die that are not active from Tom Petersen’s comments. Presumably, they are for redundancy. Otherwise, there really is no sane explanation that I can see for so much dark silicon. If they are using transistors that are twice the size as the density figure might be interpreted to suggest, they might as well have used TSMC’s 7nm process since while a smaller process can etch larger features, it is a waste of money. Note that we can rule out the cache lowering the density. The L1 + L2 cache on the 4070 Ti is 79872 KB while it is 59392 KB on the B580. We can also rule out IO logic as lowering the density, as the 4070 Ti has a 256-bit memory bus while the B580 has a 192-bit memory bus. https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/arc-b580.c4244 https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/arc-b580.c4244 https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/geforce-rtx-4070-ti.c3950 https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/geforce-rtx-4070-ti.c3... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_nm_process#Nodes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_nm_process#Nodes The hardware unboxed interview of Tom Petersen is here: https://youtu.be/XYZyai-xjNM https://youtu.be/XYZyai-xjNM
  - kimixa 2y ago
    B580 being a "success" is purely a business decision as a loss leader to get their name into the market. A larger die on a newer node than either Nvidia or AMD means their per-unit costs are higher, and are selling it at a lower price. That's not a long-term success strategy. Maybe good for getting your name in the conversation, but not sustainable.
    - jvanderbot 2y ago
      I was reading this whole thread as about technical accomplishment and non-nvidia GPU capabilities, not business. So I think you're talking about different definitions of "Success". Definitely counts, but not what I was reading.
    - bitmasher9 2y ago
      It’s a long term strategy to release a hardware platform with minimal margins in the beginning to attract software support needed for long term viability. One of the benefits of being Intel.
    - 7speter 2y ago
      I don’t know if this matters but while the B580 has a die comparable in size to a 4070 (~280mm^2), it has about half the transistors (~17-18 billion), iirc.
      - ryao 2y ago
        Tom Petersen said in a hardware unboxed video that they only reported “active” transistors, such that there are more transistors in the B580 than what they reported. I do not think this is the correct way to report them since one, TSMC counts all transistors when reporting the density of their process and two, Intel is unlikely to reduce the reported transistor count for the B570, which will certainly have fewer active transistors. That said, the 4070 die is 294mm^2 while the B580 die is 272mm^2.
    - ryao 2y ago
      Is it a loss leader? I looked up the price of 16Gbit GDDR6 ICs the other day at dramexchange and the cost of 12GB is $48. Using the gamer nexus die measurements, we can calculate that they get at least 214 dies per wafer. At $12095 per wafer, which is reportedly the price at TSMC for 5nm wafers in 2025, that is $57 per die. While defects ordinarily reduce yields, Intel put plenty of redundant transistors into the silicon. This is ordinarily not possible to estimate, but Tom Petersen reported in his interview with hardware unboxed that they did not count those when reporting the transistor count. Given that the density based on reported transistors is about 40% less than the density others get from the same process and the silicon in GPUs is already fairly redundant, they likely have a backup component for just about everything on the die. The consequence is that they should be able to use at least 99% of those dies even after tossing unusable dies, such that the $57 per die figure is likely correct. As for the rest of the card, there is not much in it that would not be part of the price of an $80 Asrock motherboard. The main thing would be the bundled game, which they likely can get in bulk at around $5 per copy. This seems reasonable given how much Epic games pays for their giveaways: https://x.com/simoncarless/status/1389297530341519362 https://x.com/simoncarless/status/1389297530341519362 That brings the total cost to $190. If we assume Asrock and the retailer both have a 10% margin on the $80 motherboard used as a substitute for the costs of the rest of the things, then it is $174. Then we need to add margins for board partners and the retailers. If we assume they both get 10% of the $250, then that leaves a $26 profit for Intel, provided that they have economics of scale such that the $80 motherboard approximation for the rest of the cost of the graphics card is accurate. That is about a 10% margin for Intel. That is not a huge margin, but provided enough sales volume (to match the sales volume Asrock gets on their $80 motherboards), Intel should turn a profit on these versus not selling these at all. Interestingly, their board partners are not able/willing to hit the $250 MSRP and the closest they come to it is $260 so Intel is likely not sharing very much with them. It should be noted that Tom Petersen claimed during his hardware unboxed interview that they were not making money on these. However, that predated the B580 being a hit and likely relied on expected low production volumes due to low sales projections. Since the B580 is a hit and napkin math says it is profitable as long as they build enough of them, I imagine that they are ramping production to meet demand and reach profitability.
dangero 2y ago
More cynical take: Trying to get acquired by nvidia
- dizhn 2y ago
  Person below says they (the whole team) already joined Nvidia.
dogma1138 2y ago
Intel is in a vastly better shape than AMD, they have the software pretty much nailed down.
- indolering 2y ago
  Tell that to the board.
- bboygravity 2y ago
  Someone never used intel killer wifi software.
- lhl 2y ago
  I've recently been poking around with Intel oneAPI and IPEX-LLM. While there are things that I find refreshing (like their ability to actually respond to bug reports in a timely manner, or at all) on a whole, support/maturity actually doesn't match the current state of ROCm. PyTorch requires it's own support kit separate from the oneAPI Toolkit (and runs slightly different versions of everything), the vLLM xpu support doesn't work - both source and the docker failed to build/run for me. The IPEX-LLM whisper support is completely borked, etc, etc.
  - moffkalast 2y ago
    I've recently been trying to get IPEX working as well, apparently picking Ubuntu 24.04 was a mistake, because while things compile, everything fails at runtime. I've tried native, docker, different oneAPI versions, threw away a solid week of afternoons for nothing. SYCL with llama.cpp is great though, at least at FP16 since it supports nothing else but even Arc iGPUs easily give 2-4x performance compared to CPU inference. Intel should've just contributed to SYCL instead of trying to make their own thing and then forgot to keep maintaining it halfway through.
    - lhl 2y ago
      My testing has been w/ a Lunar Lake Core 258V chip (Xe2 - Arc 140V) on Arch Linux. It sounds like you've tried a lot of things already, but case it helps, my notes for installing llama.cpp and PyTorch: https://llm-tracker.info/howto/Intel-GPUs https://llm-tracker.info/howto/Intel-GPUs I have some benchmarks as well, and the IPEX-LLM backend performed a fair bit better than the SYCL llama.cpp backend for me (almost +50% pp512 and almost 2X tg128) so worth getting it working if you plan on using llama.cpp much on an Intel system. SYCL still performs significantly better than Vulkan and CPU backends, though. As an end-user, I agree that it'd be way better if they could just contribute upstream somehow (whether to the SYCL backend, or if not possible, to a dependency-minized IPEX backend). the IPEX backend is one of the more maintained parts of IPEX-LLM, btw. I found a lot of stuff in that repo that depend on versions of oneKit that aren't even downloadable on Intel's site. I couldn't help but smirk when I heard someone say "Intel has their software nailed down."