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Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

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Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#31

Post by gumby »

CalChris wrote: post #17
matt_wulfeck wrote: post #11

From what I gather online, intel is entering into an exestential crisis as homegrown chips and GPUs are replacing CPUs in the battle for tomorrow's data center. All of the interesting research from Google and others all have one thing in common: a custom asic processor.

custom asic processor Is that like La Brea Tarpit ? Just say ASIC. An ASIC is an Application Specific Integrated Circuit . In particular, a GPU is not an ASIC. Saying Custom Application Specific Integrated Circuit Processor is doubly redundant. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application-specific_integrate... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_processing_unit

I don't think so: a GPU is application-specific, (not GPGPU if such a thing really exists), as are other ones. Lisp Machine chips were application-specific. Various application-specific accelerator chips have been designed for FP, video decoding, security etc.

Where you're right is that Nirvana was a chip company founded for this ASIC and I think the term "custom" is misnomer. You could argue that Google isn't a chip company so theirs are custom.

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#33

Post by ghaff »

komali2 wrote: post #30
pkaye wrote: post #7

I'm guessing these yearly conferences will fade away as Moore's Law falls apart and Intel and others will have a harder time coming up with something new to showcase every year. No longer can you rely on process shrinks to innovate.

People always talk about Moore's Law falling apart, and it seems like people didn't see it coming. I mean, I didn't, I'm just a guy that reads a lot of scifi. But I always assumed whiz-bang mathematicians had already figured out, I dunno, the threshold at which a processor can be nanosized, or like how big a processor could become before the distances became too great that due to the speed of light further computatio…

>People always talk about Moore's Law falling apart, and it seems like people didn't see it coming.

First of all, let's be more precise. In this context, what people mean by the "end of Moore's Law" is the slowdown and, soon, probable end of CMOS process scaling. The issue is that CMOS process scaling has been such an incredible engine for performance that just getting those kinds of performance increases in other ways isn't easy. I wrote a bit about this a year ago.

http://bitmason.blogspot.com/2016/01/beyond-general-purpose-...

To answer your question, people did see this coming. There were disagreements about how far down you could economically drive feature sizes so there has been debate about exact dates. But pretty much no one thought CMOS features could be made arbitrarily small.

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#34

Post by puzzle »

eklitzke wrote: post #28
matt_wulfeck wrote: post #11

From what I gather online, intel is entering into an exestential crisis as homegrown chips and GPUs are replacing CPUs in the battle for tomorrow's data center. All of the interesting research from Google and others all have one thing in common: a custom asic processor.

The ASIC processors Google use are for inference , not training. Having efficient inference is great, but training is what uses up most of the compute power. The battle between GPUs and CPUs in the datacenter is real, but I wouldn't count out regular CPUs yet. Even with GPU-ready frameworks like Tensorflow, Theano, and Pytorch, it still requires a fair amount of domain expertise to get good performance out of GPUs. T…

Correction: the ASIC processors that Google used in 2015 and just talked about, two years later, were for inference. We don't know what they use now and how. The paper hints that training might happen in a later revision.

You have to wonder why they started with inference and not the other way round. Perhaps it's the case that you train a model once, then use it for predictions many, many, many times, thus using more aggregate compute power. (I used to work at Google, but the above is based on public information and speculation alone.)

The paper does confirm that CPUs are closer to GPUs for smaller or latency-sensitive workloads than most people assumed. At least on 2015-vintage hardware, that is. And they're a lot less trouble to set up and provision.

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#35

Post by jtmcmc »

puzzle wrote: post #34
eklitzke wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ASIC processors Google use are for inference , not training. Having efficient inference is great, but training is what uses up most of the compute power. The battle between GPUs and CPUs in the datacenter is real, but I wouldn't count out regular CPUs yet. Even with GPU-ready frameworks like Tensorflow, Theano, and Pytorch, it still requires a fair amount of domain expertise to get good performance out of GPUs. T…

Correction: the ASIC processors that Google used in 2015 and just talked about, two years later, were for inference. We don't know what they use now and how. The paper hints that training might happen in a later revision. You have to wonder why they started with inference and not the other way round. Perhaps it's the case that you train a model once, then use it for predictions many, many, many times, thus using more…

Training can happen asynchronously and in batch - inference needs to be low latency and have massive parallelism because it's powering millions of android devices voice to text recognition - for instance.

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#36

Post by alayne »

my123 wrote: post #26
alayne wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AMD has had cheaper/slower processors for many years. Is something different about Ryzen?

Yes, the Naples 32 cores/64 threads powerhouse is what's dangerous to Intel, especially at its performance level. (datacenter is where Intel probably makes most of its profits, and Naples is eating right into that market)

According to articles on Forbes and Extremetech, Intel currently has 99% of the server market. This is a new product that may affect Intel, but it hasn't done anything yet. So far this is just speculation then.

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#37

Post by Analemma_ »

eklitzke wrote: post #28
matt_wulfeck wrote: post #11

From what I gather online, intel is entering into an exestential crisis as homegrown chips and GPUs are replacing CPUs in the battle for tomorrow's data center. All of the interesting research from Google and others all have one thing in common: a custom asic processor.

The ASIC processors Google use are for inference , not training. Having efficient inference is great, but training is what uses up most of the compute power. The battle between GPUs and CPUs in the datacenter is real, but I wouldn't count out regular CPUs yet. Even with GPU-ready frameworks like Tensorflow, Theano, and Pytorch, it still requires a fair amount of domain expertise to get good performance out of GPUs. T…

> The ASIC processors Google use are for inference, not training. Having efficient inference is great, but training is what uses up most of the compute power.

I think that was the GP's point? The training is done on GPUs, the execution is done on ASICs, and neither step involves Intel. That's what alarms them. Dedicated hardware might help this, but that seems iffy to me. ML and neural networks are still a fast-evolving field, and instructions that might help today could be useless next year. ASICs can be thrown out and replaced, but instructions that Intel adds to its ISA will be there forever.

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#38

Post by akuma73 »

komali2 wrote: post #30
pkaye wrote: post #7

I'm guessing these yearly conferences will fade away as Moore's Law falls apart and Intel and others will have a harder time coming up with something new to showcase every year. No longer can you rely on process shrinks to innovate.

People always talk about Moore's Law falling apart, and it seems like people didn't see it coming. I mean, I didn't, I'm just a guy that reads a lot of scifi. But I always assumed whiz-bang mathematicians had already figured out, I dunno, the threshold at which a processor can be nanosized, or like how big a processor could become before the distances became too great that due to the speed of light further computatio…

Have a look at this photo: http://m.eet.com/media/1169843/120906_intel_22_3.jpg

That's a fin of a modern transistor (Intel 22nm). The dots in the photo are atoms. It's fair to say that Moore's law is nearing an end or has already ended.

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#39

Post by rgbrenner »

m-p-3 wrote: post #2

I'm wondering why Intel is withdrawing so much of their money from different projects like this and OpenStack. Maybe AMD is putting a lot of financial pressure on them, and they have to put more funds in R&D?

I question how much pressure intel really feels from AMD.

Intel: 60b in revenue, of which over 50b is from processors.

AMD: 4b revenue. It's impossible tell what part of that is ATI and processors... since AMD mixes desktop cpus with ATI revenue; and mixes server cpus with embedded and soc revenue. So they're playing a bit of a game to hide their cpu sales. If we assume 1/2 is from cpus, that's 2B.

Does Intel really feel pressure to reduce their prices because of a competitor that sells (perhaps) 1/25th of their revenue?

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