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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

#111

Post by jacquesm »

ocschwar wrote: post #50
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.

If Intel can't offer more compelling improvements in watts per operation, I would be very disappointed. We know fab sizing is going to stop being worth it. But bigger dies, with better heat dissipation, and processors that better fit today's use cases, all that should be within Intel's capabilities.

> If Intel can't offer more compelling improvements in watts per operation, I would be very disappointed.

There are some pretty hard physical boundaries. Businesses write off their hardware in 3 or 5 years, it's rare to see a machine older than that. But there may come a time when a 10 year old computer is just as powerful as one you buy today. The replacement market is what's driving Intel's revenues for a very large part and if that should ever stop then it probably wouldn't be a great idea to hold a lot of intel stock.

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#112

Post by aquadrop »

rocqua wrote: post #84
rgbrenner wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

> Well, anyone that's going to build their own PC in the near future is going to put Ryzen in there

I think you overstate success of Ryzen. It's only clearly better in price/performance ratio of you compare it to overpriced Intel's top monsters. There are other processors from Intel which are comparable to Ryzen, plus the question of multithreaded/singlethreaded performance, whichever you need more.

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#113

Post by jacquesm »

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…

I see this as a good thing. Now we can finally get down to what we should have been doing in the first place: better software, rather than just more of it and of mediocre quality. Moore's law has bailed out many producers of inferior quality software and now that that free run has come to an end we're going to have to take a really hard look at how we cook this stuff up.

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#114

Post by slizard »

jacquesm wrote: post #70
mtgx wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pa…

> ...but actually getting one has so far proved to be impossible.

Where/when did you try buying? I didn't think it was difficult to get the 1st-gen Phi cards while they were selling them -- especially as it seemed like nobody wanted them. Admittedly I never bought any myself, my employer picked up some 31S1P from a local server OEM for testing when they were massively discounted.

Note that the Knights Landing, the current generation is released socketed only for now, so you'd need to buy a server or the ninja dev platforms Intel sells through Colfax.

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#115

Post by ansible »

kcorbitt wrote: post #100
ansible wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 infla…

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.

The entire computer industry, well, the entire technology industry is founded on compute power becoming cheaper each year.

What happens to these billion-dollar companies when that is no longer the case? Will Intel's investors be OK with it when they announce that they won't be coming out with anything much better than what they've currently got? Or will they be punished (severely) in the stock market after such an announcement? [1]

The board of directors will respond to pressure from the investors (or get replaced), and will replace company leadership if needed to continue advancement in technology.

And so they (or someone else) will invest in new technologies to move beyond CMOS lithography, such as molecular nanotechnology. Which will disrupt everything else related to technology and biology as well.

[1] I read articles about gamers buying 5-year old Xeon processors for their game machines for $70 USD which are competitive with current-generation i7 desktop processors that cost much more. If Intel can't sell new processors that are effectively better than older ones, that's going to be a real problem for them, and the stock market will eventually notice.

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#116

Post by kccqzy »

akuma73 wrote: post #38
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…

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.

People said similar things when we reached the wavelength of visible light.

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#117

Post by jacquesm »

Symmetry wrote: post #88
rocqua wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I recall correctly, the lower bound on energy for destroying a bit depends (linearly?) on the temperature. Couldn't performance then be improved by cooling?

Yes, you're correct and I probably should have mentioned that.

I don't think it will matter much though. Whether you have to remove input power as heat or expend power to cool likely won't make a whole lot of difference. Just that the delta-t will be a lot larger and so it may actually cost more to keep that ultra-cool machine ultra-cool.

Maybe future data-centers will be used to pre-heat the water that goes into the turbines that power the electricity plant, in some kind of perverse version of a perpetuum mobile.

You'd need to make up for the difference lost on each cycle with extra fuel.

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#118

Post by m_mueller »

Gibbon1 wrote: post #110
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…

It was a bit of an eye opener when I saw an old NT 4.0 server again. I think it had around 500 Mhz and 128MB, i.e. quite a beast for its time. All clicks had immediate on-screen results, a real pleasure to navigate, felt like a 90FPS game. Same was true even for something like iPhone 3GS and iOS3. Nowadays processors are so fast that software doesn't need to be optimized much anymore, and this is what we got. Upside is we can soon have true cross platform GUI apps that are smooth everywhere - until the next big platform like AR comes.

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#119

Post by ZephyrP »

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.

I have heard that Electrons move about a millimeter second (although electromagnetic emanations propagate at the speed of light). This is allegedly the benefit of 'optical' computing.

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#120

Post by jacquesm »

ansible wrote: post #115
kcorbitt wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 infla…

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. The entire computer industry, well, the entire technology industry is founded on compute power becoming cheaper each year. What happens to these billion-dollar companies when that is no longer the case? Will Intel's investors be OK with it when they announce…

> The entire computer industry, well, the entire technology industry is founded on compute power becoming cheaper each year.

No, we've just gotten used to it. So now, like any junkie with a bad habit we're going to have to get used to doing without that. Or deal with the increased electricity bill.

> The board of directors will respond to pressure from the investors (or get replaced), and will replace company leadership if needed to continue advancement in technology.

Company leadership being replaced is not going to magically change the laws of nature.

At some point even Intel investors will have to accept that there are such things as physical laws and nature doesn't care one bit about your quarterly earnings reports.

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