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Looking Ahead at Intel's Xe3 GPU Architecture
- cptskippy 2y agoI hope this means they're going to continue to invest in the GPU line. Competition is good.
- Venn1 2y agoLooking ahead is challenging. Intel launched the B580 on December 13th, and it sold out within hours. We're still waiting on a restock.
- tylerchurch 2y agoI’ve been tracking it for weeks and it comes back in stock only to sell out minutes later. I’ve had 2 or 3 times where I thought I got one, only to get the order cancelled email. I can’t tell if there’s just no stock, or huge demand, but either way it seems like a great product. If only you could buy it.
- cogman10 2y agoI suspect scalping. If you hit Amazon you'll see a bunch of b580s listed with $100 markups.
- brcmthrowaway 2y agoIt seems these chips have all sort of hardcoded and heuristic knowledge literally baked into them. Disappointing. Why can't AI come up with some kind of fast universal computation machine that doesnt have the need for the siliconized version of ifdefs?
- Jotalea 2y agoAI doesn't "create", it "modifies" existing data.
- rileymat2 2y agoIsn't a collage a creative work?
- timewizard 2y agoIt regurgitates whatever was in it's training set.
- MBCook 2y agoIf you’re lucky.
- golf_mike 2y agoDon't we all :)
- timewizard 2y agoKnowledge is significantly different from a training set. In particular we can hold incomplete knowledge that is eventually resolved through further practice and observation. Also knowledge access is analog and inaccurate to a degree that often introduces emergent behavior into outputs.
- acchow 2y agoDo you mean FPGAs? Because fixed silicon inevitably has fixed "baked in" choices.
- immibis 2y agoThis is, like, the entirety of computing. Did x86 spring fully-formed from Zeus's forehead or did people bake in their knowledge of what programmers wanted their programs to do? When you write programs do you not use heuristics? And tests?
- buildbot 2y agoIt’s a little known fact that x86 is literally Athena! Which I guess means Intel should be casting some lightning bolts towards AMD and others.
- ok_computer 2y agoYep, the crowning achievement of machine complexity in recent human history is easily generalized in computational efficacy by effectively markov chain chatbots that were trained on project Gutenberg, reddit comments, and github python and javascript repos.
- wegfawefgawefg 2y agotheres lots of ai other than llms
- ok_computer 2y agoOk fair point. One such method was an improvement in matrix matrix multiplication in 2022. So I’m sure there is a potential discovery of many efficient numerical algorithms that will be uncovered with machine learning. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05172-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05172-4 My parent comment was a knee jerk response to the over confidence and wishful thinking of computer work people to a magic AI box solving all the hard physical problems like its some simple conversation prompt away.
- shermantanktop 2y agoUnfortunately I think the fetishization of prompting is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Over time these models will be able to understand enough of the physical problems to have a dumb prompt yield a reasonable if not optimal solution. But of course that house of cards collapses when fundamental advances appear.
- barotalomey 2y agoIf you're not smart enough to make use of a optimal or even acceptable solution, the quality of the LLM answer doesn't matter.
- nl 2y agoHuman brains have lots of "hard wired" heuristic knowledge literally baked into them. See for example https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/computer-science/ventral-stream https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/computer-science/ventra... Is it surprising that silicon does too?
- barotalomey 2y ago> Is it surprising that silicon does too? Given that human brains and silicon has nothing in common, then yes, it is surprising. What makes you think otherwise?
- nl 2y agoIf evolution has worked out that having specifically optimized pathways for specific actions it doesn't seem terrible that human designed machines are similar.
- barotalomey 2y agoI feel that's assuming a whole lot of unrelated things, such as machines and humans having anything at all in common. I get that your take qualifies as stoner philosophy, so I won't push too far, but really. Do give some concrete examples to support your ideas rather than GPT fluff.
- immibis 2y agoWhere do they get all this information about things like registers? I thought GPU ISAs were treated like trade secrets?
- wmf 2y agoIntel and AMD GPUs have public documentation and open source drivers.
- ForTheKidz 2y agoDoes "open source drivers" imply documentation of the underlying ISA or just the tooling to shepherd it? How much code would I need to go from bootloader to quake 2 assuming I only needed to play that one piece of software on my one card?
- almostgotcaught 2y agohttps://www.amd.com/content/dam/amd/en/documents/instinct-tech-docs/instruction-set-architectures/amd-instinct-mi300-cdna3-instruction-set-architecture.pdf https://www.amd.com/content/dam/amd/en/documents/instinct-te... The compiler is LLVM https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/tree/main/llvm/lib/Target/AMDGPU https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/tree/main/llvm/lib/Targ... It's all there. For the driver/runtime everything is also open and upstreamed into the Linux kernel (register map and pcie bar and etc). The packet protocol isn't well-documented but documented enough that tinygrad managed to build their own driver from scratch.
- ForTheKidz 2y agoOh wow, that's very impressive documentation. We might actually see an opportunity to move beyond linux and closed drivers in this lifetime.
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- Tsiklon 2y agoI’m really hopeful for the future of Intel’s GPU pipeline. B580 proved there is an audience for their parts. If a C770 or C970 card can prove to be a contender like B580 is at the respective price point then people will buy them.
- Tsiklon 2y agoFrom some of the interviews i saw at B580’s launch, it seems like Intel know the shortcomings of the Alchemist and Battlemage architectures, but weren’t able to change them before launch. Of course these are parts that have been in the works for several years now. They’ve had time to see what Nvidia and AMD are doing with their competitive products