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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

#101

Post by scottlegrand2 »

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…

Those "inference" chips are capable of 16/32 fixed point MADS on par with a current Pascal GPU with better perf/W. So they could be used for training. Just sayin'...

As to whether the TPU can perform efficient training or whether it chokes like current FPGAs due to insufficient memory bandwidth is a different question. That would be my guess but I'd love to be proven wrong.

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#102

Post by wfunction »

rbanffy wrote: post #98
wfunction wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not sure how that would work in this sort of situation but I suppose I can't rule it out...

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#103

Post by chrisseaton »

pmarreck wrote: post #56
coldtea wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Do you think general purpose applications are all going to run on GPUs or ASICs in the future? I wouldn't think so.

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#104

Post by ghaff »

bsder wrote: post #87
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…

> People always talk about Moore's Law falling apart, and it seems like people didn't see it coming. People didn't WANT to see it coming. The data that it broke were back at 65nm but very much at 40nm and 28nm. RAM hasn't scaled in years. However, the history of technology is littered with the corpses of those who bet against Moore's Law. Combine this with the fact that your job basically depends upon Moore's Law con…

There's some truth in that. And there are also various approaches that can probably mitigate the end of CMOS process scaling for a while (special-purpose hardware, photonics, 3D stacking, etc.)

Some of these will cause some pain in other areas like software development.

That said, there's absolutely no guarantee that there's a true CMOS 2.0 on the horizon that will provides anything like the approximately 3500X performance gains we've seen from CMOS process scaling. There are huge macro implications if computing basically stops getting faster/cheaper/smaller from year to year.

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#105

Post by monort »

Symmetry wrote: post #65
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…

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 t…

Where did you get the number for attojoule per gate operation?

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#106

Post by nextweek2 »

MichaelMoser123 wrote: post #59
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 ?

Yes.

If you are a large multi-national where your product pipeline is shallow due to competitors creation better products than your R&D.

I think the Xeon Phi is an example of something which fell flat.

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#107

Post by coldtea »

pmarreck wrote: post #56
coldtea wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I don't care what GPU my mobile phone runs. It's fast enough, I'm ok with it.

I also don't care about servers. I'm not a dev-ops/admin person.

On my laptop/desktop, where I DO care, I don't see Intel going away anytime soon.

Even if we switched to some ARM devices, it would be a regression (if not for anything else, for having to run most Windows/MacOS stuff under some kind of Rosetta-like interpreter for many years).

Besides, as soon as ARM CPUs approach the limits of various manufacturing processes, they will face the same issues Intel does. Moore's law is not coming back.

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#108

Post by dom0 »

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.

Actually there is plenty of precedent for that conclusion. Scaling CPU cores up (=efficient but high performance cores) is super-hard -- making low-power cores is pretty simple in comparison --; almost everyone fails or failed at it. Currently there are two companies on the planet that do that sort of thing, and not so long ago it was only one. Notable names that failed hard in this are: Intel, DEC, Sun, Fujitsu, AMD, IBM, HP, Intel, as well as SGI, IBM and AMD.

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#109

Post by visionscaper »

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 Von Neumann architecture is dead, IMHO future computing architectures involve many cores, all with local memory (not just a bit of cache), Tensor computing capabilities and very high bandwidth connecting these cores.

Intel has Xeon Phi, but what else are they doing? There is so much opportunity in new computing architectures but it seems like Intel has been taken by surprise. I hope this giant wakes up.

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#110

Post by Gibbon1 »

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.

We're at a crossroads.

Fifteen or so years ago I read someone mentioning that the ratio of processor state transitions per bit of program state was growing almost exponentially.

Anecdote: Starting in the early eighties I started using CAD programs. And they were painfully slow. Yet around 1995 suddenly they weren't 'slow'. That was huge. Since then improvements in processor speed and memory hasn't provided nearly as much functional improvement.

What I think is we're in a world were current processor designs are over kill of much of the programming tasks people need done. What people want is not more speed but better efficiency. That points towards using excess silicon to implement task specific coprocessors, not for more unneeded GPU performance gains.

This leaves Intel in a bad spot. Especially since everyone and their dog is loath to design in Intel parts if they can help it.

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