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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

#51

Post by ghaff »

CalChris wrote: post #48
Animats wrote: post #40

Independent developers have fulfilled their function and are no longer needed.

Dunno if you've been to an IDF, but I'd say that IDFs have fulfilled their function and are no longer needed. I went to the Skylake IDF and after a very predictable presentation there was an opportunity to ask questions. It went roughly like this: What time is it? The question was what time is it. Intel is an industry leading leader committed to developing customer solutions. We are not disclosing what time it is now…

An industry analyst of my acquaintance made a similar comment to me. He said that Intel has become significantly less willing to disclose their future plans with developers and others. He also said that there seems to be diminished interest by developers in going to an Intel-centric show.

A show like IDF clearly makes less sense if you're increasingly unwilling to say much about future directions. It's also entirely possible that the projections for event sponsorships, etc. weren't looking to be where Intel wanted them to be.

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#52

Post by my123 »

alayne wrote: post #45
snovv_crash wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It hasn't done anything yet because it hasn't been released yet. So of course it is speculation. However, based on the downclocked Ryzen benchmarks I have seen, it should significantly outperform anything Intel has in Perf/W at the 5W/core level. And Perf/W is what datacenters care about.

I'm just trying to relate OP's comment to changes in the conference or even claims about a market effect. It seems like wishful thinking.

AMD will have to also do chipsets right for the platform to have a chance - they didn't really prove that yet.

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#54

Post by kodfodrasz »

dep_b wrote: post #46
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.

I see Intel falling apart, ARM-based chipmakers are still ramping up the curve as usual.

Because they are not there yet...

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#55

Post by akuma73 »

Animats wrote: post #42
akuma73 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Atoms are too big, photons are too big, electrons are too big, and the speed of light is too slow. There's no longer plenty of room at the bottom. Still, it's not like the physical size of semiconductors is the problem. A CPU today is maybe 100mm^2 of silicon. 4U of rack space can easily hold tens of thousands of CPUs, if you can power them, cool them, and connect them up in a useful way.

if you can power them, cool them, and connect them up in a useful way.

Good luck with that. Power costs go up linearly at best with cores if you don't have any more transistor scaling.

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#56

Post by pmarreck »

coldtea wrote: post #18
pmarreck wrote: post #12

I for one am not terribly upset that the Intel hegemony's time has run out

Who said their hegemony has run out? The fact that AMD put out some also-run processors?

The writing is on the wall. From ARM to incredibly powerful emerging GPU's to interest in custom ASIC, the Intel instruction set's days are numbered

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#57

Post by akuma73 »

ansible wrote: post #49
wtallis wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> " 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 computational advancement wasn't possible. " We're nowhere near the absolute limits imposed by the fundamentals of thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, etc. Those are…

But we don't know precisely how many incremental improvements we have left to discover before we need to abandon silicon entirely. Well, it is not as if we will just suddenly stop using CMOS, but the end of improvements is in sight: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_nanometer If we are willing to putter along with no process improvements whatsoever, then yes, we can keep using 5nm indefinitely. And no doubt there will…

What are your thoughts on the drivers for reducing the cost of computing beyond CMOS?

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#58

Post by rbanffy »

kodfodrasz wrote: post #54
dep_b wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see Intel falling apart, ARM-based chipmakers are still ramping up the curve as usual.

Because they are not there yet...

When an ARM chip reaches the performance of a Xeon, it'll draw about as much power as a Xeon. There is no magic - computation has a minimum energy cost.

What can happen is to make chips simpler in that less computation is spent in instruction decoding, tracking, scheduling and more is spent on actual execution.

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#59

Post by MichaelMoser123 »

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.

They put up a lot of money for the recent acquisition of mobileye, is a company in problems supposed to do big acquisitions ?

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#60

Post by rbanffy »

wfunction wrote: post #53

Anybody know if and when desktop CPU's might start getting FPGAs? Been waiting for that for a while now...

Not before mainstream software supports it. We had 64-bit with Alpha, MIPS, SPARC, but 64-bit x86 only happened when it could run 32-bit x86 code flawlessly and it only got mass adoption when Windows went 64-bit.
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