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The rise of AI is creating new variety in the chip market, and trouble for Intel

economist.com

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Re: The rise of AI is creating new variety in the chip market, and trouble for Intel

#31

Post by coldtea »

friedman23 wrote: post #26
coldtea wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If only, intel has been abusing their market position and pushing out "upgrades" that barely have a performance improvement over the previous generation. And why is that because of "abusing their market position", as opposed to plainly and clearly being more difficult to get faster processors at 14 nm and lower resolutions (and with the low power requirements of today)? Besides, the trend the article points to is a…

>And why is that because of "abusing their market position", as opposed to plainly and clearly being more difficult to get faster processors at 14 nm and lower resolutions (and with the low power requirements of today)? Okay, let's say that Intel hasn't been under investing in improving the performance of their cpus. They still have 63% margins across their entire product line, they still don't have 8 core cpu option…

>All of which is only possible because they have had a monopoly.

You got it backwards: them having a monopoly is only possible because it hasn't been possible for anyone else to produce more efficient desktop/laptop CPUs. On the mobile, where there are competent competitors, it's a different story.

It's not as if if they sacrificed their margins they'd magically be able to produce faster processors. Just cheaper ones.

And why would they have "consumer cpu options that ditch the integrated graphics"? What that would accomplish, when there's a ton of cpu being wasted otherwise?

Re: The rise of AI is creating new variety in the chip market, and trouble for Intel

#32

Post by varelse »

Crazy idea: buy the rights to sell AMD's Vega GPUs fabbed out of Intel and use Intel's resources to build top-notch math and AI libraries for them.

Stupid idea: Keep insisting that x86-compatibility is the killer feature for winning the parallel processor wars.

Stupidest idea: CS professors continuing to tell their students that learning concurrent programming is too hard.

Re: The rise of AI is creating new variety in the chip market, and trouble for Intel

#33

Post by cjhanks »

Retric wrote: post #25
cjhanks wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A significant portion of any real-world AI system is dedicated to extracting relevant features from raw sensor information. Doing that digitally has proven to have a very high cost rated in both watts and operating temperature. Most machine learning algorithms are by design resilient to random noise. They can even be learned to be resilient to systematic noise (due to say.. variable hardware performance in mass produ…

The problem is you now dramatically increased the cost of training. Which might be ok for speech recognition, but not for self driving cars etc.

Any feature extractor worth using will be robust against some amount of Gaussian noise. The neural nets will probably never even see the bad readings.

It would surprise me if even unfiltered analog noise in the sensors significantly changed recall. I suppose I don't know off-hand know the magnitude of noise in typical analog systems.

Re: The rise of AI is creating new variety in the chip market, and trouble for Intel

#34

Post by jhj »

The "3,854 cores" versus "28 cores" is dubious as always. 3,854 I think counts just the individual fp32 ALUs; a true similar comparison would be number of warp schedulers or maximum number of warps resident at once, or even just SM count (which share a cache).

Apples to oranges (a super-hyperthreaded 1024/2048-bit wide vector machine with minimal cache to a minimally hyperthreaded 128/256-bit wide vector machine with lots of cache).

Re: The rise of AI is creating new variety in the chip market, and trouble for Intel

#36

Post by mee_too »

coldtea wrote: post #31
friedman23 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And why is that because of "abusing their market position", as opposed to plainly and clearly being more difficult to get faster processors at 14 nm and lower resolutions (and with the low power requirements of today)? Okay, let's say that Intel hasn't been under investing in improving the performance of their cpus. They still have 63% margins across their entire product line, they still don't have 8 core cpu option…

> All of which is only possible because they have had a monopoly. You got it backwards: them having a monopoly is only possible because it hasn't been possible for anyone else to produce more efficient desktop/laptop CPUs. On the mobile, where there are competent competitors, it's a different story. It's not as if if they sacrificed their margins they'd magically be able to produce faster processors. Just cheaper one…

>> You got it backwards: them having a monopoly is only possible because it hasn't been possible for anyone else to produce more efficient desktop/laptop CPUs.

Intel has patents over the x86 instruction set.

>> It's not as if if they sacrificed their margins they'd magically be able to produce faster processors. Just cheaper ones.

They have produced slower processor on purpose. Instead of soldering the chip to the heat spreader, they started using a very inefficient thermal paste. Replacing it leads to 20K better temps. It hurts both the speed and the expected life time of the processor. But what's wrong if the customer needs a new CPU in 3 years ...

>> And why would they have "consumer cpu options that ditch the integrated graphics"? What that would accomplish, when there's a ton of cpu being wasted otherwise?

The graphics units occupy more than 50% of the die on recent Intel mainstream CPUs. Instead of GPU they could put 8 cores in chips like 7700K and save money.

Re: The rise of AI is creating new variety in the chip market, and trouble for Intel

#37

Post by jcranmer »

Zenst wrote: post #20
jdjebc82747 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>For me, I'm looking forward to a AI grammar and contextual spelling checker that will make all grama nazi's obsolete. I'm not. I feel like human language is meant to be fluid and to evolve as we do. This would potentially lead to more of a global monoculture than we are already starting to get.

That is a very fair observation and one in which I had not considered. I was somewhat biased in thinking about the aspect that it would make universal translation closer to becoming a reality. So it is somewhat a chaos aspect in languages I suppose that does allow evolution of the language. With that the whole aspect could voice translation add's another aspect to this and perhaps tackling keyboard inputs upon a keyb…

In the Classical era, grammar study was focused on a few idealized languages (Latin, Greek, Sanskrit); when people in the Early Modern decided to apply these rules to vernaculars, they ran into the problem that many modern languages don't follow such clean rules. The most common response was to try to insist that things that didn't look Latin shouldn't be considered "grammatical." Only quite recently did people begin working out how to describe the grammar of languages like English.

One consequence is that almost everything you're taught about English in school is completely and totally wrong. There's the completely bogus prescriptivisms that have no grounding (e.g., thou shall not end a sentence with a preposition). But even basic things like "what are the parts of speech" are pretty much wrong, being derived primarily from "this was what this Latin scholar said 2 millennia ago about a language that has a distant linguistic relationship to English."

It's also worth pointing out that the trend to conserve spelling and the written form probably obscures the underlying grammar as it changes. The French clitic pronouns seem rather more like recently-introduced inflections to the verbs rather than clitics, and the 's of English acts rather more like a particle than a genitive case marker.

Re: The rise of AI is creating new variety in the chip market, and trouble for Intel

#38

Post by friedman23 »

cma wrote: post #28
friedman23 wrote: post #5

> Instead of making ASICS or FPGAs, Intel focused in recent years on making its CPU processors ever more powerful If only, intel has been abusing their market position and pushing out "upgrades" that barely have a performance improvement over the previous generation. AI is not going to eat intel's lunch, all those computers still require cpus. AMD on the other hand may eat intel's lunch by releasing powerful multicor…

>AMD on the other hand may eat intel's lunch by releasing powerful multicore processors for half the price all because they don't waste space on the die for things like integrated graphics. If that's all it is isn't that going to be pretty much a simple knob for Intel to turn to respond? They already have Xeon which doesn't use the space on graphics. The main reason for pushing iGPU on desktop so hard was so the same…

It isn't an easy knob to turn as lowering margins will hurt intel's bottom line significantly.

Re: The rise of AI is creating new variety in the chip market, and trouble for Intel

#39

Post by deepnotderp »

Founder of a similar startup here.

The strategy that nervana is taking is to reduce precision to 16 bit fixed point and then accumulate in 48 bits (which appears to be unnecessary and 24 bits should be sufficient).

I can answer any questions if anyone has any.

Re: The rise of AI is creating new variety in the chip market, and trouble for Intel

#40

Post by xbmcuser »

friedman23 wrote: post #5

> Instead of making ASICS or FPGAs, Intel focused in recent years on making its CPU processors ever more powerful If only, intel has been abusing their market position and pushing out "upgrades" that barely have a performance improvement over the previous generation. AI is not going to eat intel's lunch, all those computers still require cpus. AMD on the other hand may eat intel's lunch by releasing powerful multicor…

Intel would still loose even without amd. Yesterday people that were ordering 100 Intel chips will be ordering maybe just 10% of these as the major processing s has been passed on to a different processor. They could even go for cheaper intel CPUs as the major processing power requirement would be met by gpus.
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