Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

anandtech.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 201 posts

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#91

Post by bsder »

anodin3 wrote: post #66
rbanffy wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Power goes as C v^2 f. At best. That doesn't change.

If you look at a particular technology node, one of the best correlations of power consumption is chip area. It's pretty much a straight line.

Now, that has probably changed a bit with how aggressively we turn chip areas off nowadays. So, we probably have to alter that to power consumption vs active chip area--but it's still a fixed line for a technology node.

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#92

Post by komali2 »

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…

>Abandon silicon entirely

Abandon for what? In many series they hand-wave this away using words like "hyperspace substrate" or "dark matter" or "unobtanium." Do we have an idea of what we could use in reality?

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#93

Post by joezydeco »

ksec wrote: post #21
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?

But these money are tiny compared to the Impact they will/should get from AMD Ryzen. To remain price competitive with AMD Ryzen, Intel's Gross margin will likely take a dive from the current 60% to below 50% over the next few years. The Data Center Group represent 30% of the Revenue, and my guess it represent 60%+ of the profits. OpeX is increasing, R&D required for each node is increasing. They are not in Smartphone…

Why can't that be the motive? Panic makes companies like Intel execute lots of quick short-sighted changes in the hopes of turning the boat.

Something like cancelling a developer's conference would totally fit this scenario.

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#94

Post by komali2 »

samfisher83 wrote: post #68
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…

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.

Well uh, can you squeeze the atoms closer together? I didn't think they were solid objects, but clouds of electrons? I guess eventually the nuclear power or whatever it is that pushes atoms apart becomes too strong?

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#95

Post by Akkuma »

rgbrenner wrote: post #89
rocqua wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, anyone that's going to build their own PC in the near future is going to put Ryzen in there. The only hold Intel has over the desktop market comes from pre-build systems. Those are probably the majority, but if some of them start budging, that market might flip faster than you think.

That remains to be seen. I just built a new PC and put an i7 in it. The Ryzen 1800x is more expensive than an i7-7700k, while having worse performance. Obviously AMD makes cheaper versions where that comparison doesn't hold.. but the advantage for AMD here isn't clear cut, and so there's no reason to believe there will be a mass migration to AMD. Besides I've heard this kind of rhetoric about AMDs cpus before.. and y…

I'm not a Intel or AMD fanboy by any stretch (only ever built with Intel), but I don't know what benchmarks you've been reading and I've read a lot and you'll have to clarify what you mean by worse performance.

In any multithreaded application the Ryzen 1600(x) are just as good if not better. The 1800x to 1700 are even more multithreaded performance and the 1700 is priced a little cheaper than 7700k and able to be OC to the same performance as the 1800x (the entire Ryzen lineup seems to be capable of the same OC, but also capped pretty heavily). The only place that is showing Intel winning are in single threaded scenarios and in gaming scenarios. The gaming scenarios are interesting as one of the more recent benchmarks I saw (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VvwWTQKCZs) was showing in many cases the worse case FPS is better than the 7600k. Additionally, several games have received engine updates that seem to put Ryzen on par with Intel now.

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#96

Post by rgbrenner »

Akkuma wrote: post #95
rgbrenner wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That remains to be seen. I just built a new PC and put an i7 in it. The Ryzen 1800x is more expensive than an i7-7700k, while having worse performance. Obviously AMD makes cheaper versions where that comparison doesn't hold.. but the advantage for AMD here isn't clear cut, and so there's no reason to believe there will be a mass migration to AMD. Besides I've heard this kind of rhetoric about AMDs cpus before.. and y…

I'm not a Intel or AMD fanboy by any stretch (only ever built with Intel), but I don't know what benchmarks you've been reading and I've read a lot and you'll have to clarify what you mean by worse performance. In any multithreaded application the Ryzen 1600(x) are just as good if not better. The 1800x to 1700 are even more multithreaded performance and the 1700 is priced a little cheaper than 7700k and able to be OC…

Yes, you are right that the 1800x has better multithread performance.. In my workload, the single thread performance was what mattered, so that's what I paid attention to.

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#97

Post by CalChris »

wfunction wrote: post #53

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

Ask yourself what use you have for an FPGA on the desktop that you couldn't use the GPU for. Fact is, your desktop will include a GPU anyways. So that FPGA will not be in lieu of but rather in addition to.

So this will only change when either of a couple things happen. One is demand side: a killer application on the desktop which requires an FPGA comes along and drives demand. The other is supply side: the demand for CPU+FPGA is so great from Amazon+Microsoft+Google that chip manufacturers just supply it in desktops for 'nothing'.

An example of the demand side is game graphics. I don't need this but a lot of people do and then my UI graphics get better.

An example of the supply side is that I don't really need cryptographic grade random number seeds, RDSEED, but I get it for free because someone who buys a ton more than I do does need this.

I don't see this happening for 5-10 years.

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#98

Post by rbanffy »

wfunction wrote: post #64
rbanffy wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Seeding programs. You give your hardware to selected partners so they can develop for it before it hits general availability.

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#99

Post by shaklee3 »

paulsutter wrote: post #73
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…

There's nothing about the TPU architecture that prevents use for training. Training is also done as tensor operations, and training can be done at limited precision[1]. Just because the first TPU was memory-limited doesn't mean TPUs can never be used for training. [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.06160

Sure, but it's a garbage in, garbage out thing. If you're using those in production in something like, say, google images, you wouldn't want to lose accuracy on a one-time pass. Anything can be quantized lower, but you start making the tradeoff of losing information that may affect the quality of your product later.

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#100

Post by kcorbitt »

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…

> But we can't, and won't stop there to continue to drive down the cost of computing. It is just the end of the road for CMOS lithography.

I mean, is there any reason to believe this is actually true? There's no law that just because something is super useful its price will continue to drop forever. Just check out this chart: https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/import/switchboard/.... The blue line is the inflation-adjusted price of electricity by year. I think it's fair to say that electricity is even more vital to the modern economy than compute power, and that having more of it for cheaper would unquestionably raise the standard of living for everyone. There's also a functional and mostly-free market for its production. And yet its real cost has remained essentially stagnant over the last 40+ years.

Now, there are obviously reasons why Moore's law has been a thing for so long (probably a lot to do with the exponentially increasing number of chips we use and the experience curve http://www.economist.com/node/14298944), but the last 50 years in chips may have been more the exception than the rule.

Post reply on HN