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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

#61

Post by rbanffy »

puzzle wrote: post #4
agumonkey wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be surprised if Intel needs to withdraw things in such a hurry. Aren't they still wealthy ? they could take the blow for a while, then react. Also killing the IDF is not very developer / designer friendly. You're reducing the community vibe and life.

To be fair, IDF was all over the place. I suspect I'm not the only one who felt that only a fraction of the talks were relevant to my interests. On the other hand, it was great for networking.

The food was OK ;-)

Networking was great too, and lots of old friends to meet.

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#62

Post by drewg123 »

alayne wrote: post #20
SadWebDeveloper wrote: post #8

Interesting move after "AMD Rizen" was launched, wonder how this is going to be viewed on the stock market.

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

The Naples (server version of Ryzen) has more memory BW, more cores, and more PCIe lanes than Intel's Xeons, and threatens their data center hegemony when it is released.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/03/amd-n...

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#63

Post by kodfodrasz »

rbanffy wrote: post #58
kodfodrasz wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, I implied this.

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#64

Post by wfunction »

rbanffy wrote: post #60
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.

How can you get mainstream support when nobody has it to program for it?

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#65

Post by Symmetry »

wtallis wrote: post #41
komali2 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> " 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…

I was doing some back of the envelope math for a blog post last night[1] and it looks like we're not that far away from the limits of what's possible - at least for non-reversible computing. Getting rid of a bit of information as in a Nand get is always going to cost at least 2.75 zeptoJoules and current transistor technology can do it for an attoJoule, so just another factor of 360 to go. Of course then we can try to transition to reversible computing to get around that[2].

[1]http://hopefullyintersting.blogspot.com/2017/04/the-coming-i...

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#66

Post by anodin3 »

rbanffy wrote: post #58
kodfodrasz wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>When an ARM chip reaches the performance of a Xeon, it'll draw about as much power as a Xeon.

There is absolutely no reason to reach that conclusion.

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#67

Post by bhouston »

rbanffy wrote: post #60
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.

We only got Intel 64 bit CPUs once AMD got them first and people starting to buy them.

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#68

Post by samfisher83 »

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…

The problem is at some point the gates start getting to the size of an atom. How do you get smaller than an atom? I don't think you can.

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#69

Post by kensai »

I think it's better for them. The IDF was used to showcase new products. If they have no new significant products to show, it's better not to summon anyone instead of getting the flak for introducing only minor evolutions as it has happened in the past few years with the (dying?) tick-tock model.

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#70

Post by jacquesm »

mtgx wrote: post #22
puzzle wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You forgot that Intel bought Nervana Systems last year, right before IDF. They develop custom ASIC processors for machine learning.

Which doesn't necessarily mean anything for Intel's future in machine learning. Intel bought an ARM chip maker before, too, and because of internal conflict of interest with the x86 group, it ended-up killing the ARM division. Will the same happen to other non-x86 groups? Who knows. But we also see that even Intel's previous "accelerator" divisions have moved focus to being "CPU-driven" as well (Xeon Phi), so we have…

Xeon Phi was a nice idea without much in terms of support or distribution. I tried getting one through various sources, they were advertised just about everywhere and even at huge discounts but actually getting one has so far proved to be impossible. And it still remains to be seen how useful it would have been, whereas a $600 GPU can be dropped into your computer and put to work in about half an hour. The hardest part is the driver installation and NVIDIA's dumb 'sign up before you download' strategy.
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