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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

#121

Post by Someone »

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.

I would think that, nowadays, reading and writing memory are major bottlenecks, too, to the extent that spending time decoding instructions can be a gain if it allows for a denser instruction stream.

For machine learning applications, I don't think the end game is to have complex CPUs, though.

Assuming that brains have managed to find more than a local optimum and that our understanding of them is somewhat accurate, ditching all those caches, translation buffers, etc. most of the bus bandwidth, and moving computation towards memory is the way to (eventually; we need to learn a lot before that's feasible) go for machine learning applications.

Does the brain even have instruction decoders?

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#122

Post by jacquesm »

slizard wrote: post #114
jacquesm wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cu…

I tried two online vendors that were actively soliciting customers but when push came to shove they couldn't deliver. Right around the same time I ordered an FPGA dev kit and an NVIDIA board, solved the problem I was dealing with and moved on.

Still, I would have very much liked to play around with the 'phi'.

> Admittedly I never bought any myself, my employer picked up some 31S1P from a local server OEM for testing when they were massively discounted.

That's the kind of deal I was looking at too. Maybe they were massively discounted because they were already EOL'd?

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#123

Post by niklasrde »

jacquesm wrote: post #111
ocschwar wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 larg…

> it's rare to see a machine older than that

Oh I wish. Oh I wish..

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#124

Post by yvdriess »

scottlegrand2 wrote: post #101
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…

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.

There is quite a gulf between inference and training, it is not just raw FLOPS. Inference is relatively simple data/control-flow, the weights/biases can be stored read-only and the entire network dataflow can be baked into the chip in case of FPGAs. Training adds the backpropagation step, which performs memory read-update-writes all over the place, has kernels with bad arithmetic intensity and requires SP/DP for most models to converge.

I only know of Nervana's ASIC that is promising to be used for training and Google hinted at it for future work. Does anyone know of other processor, ASIC or FPGA's that are built for training?

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#125

Post by Laforet »

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.

Custom built PC is a small slice of a shrinking market. Until AMD recaptures the server and OEM markets they won't be unseating Intel anytime soon, and they just don't have the resources to get started yet.

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#126

Post by ghaff »

jacquesm wrote: post #113
bsder wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

But do you really believe that by taking "a really hard look at how we cook this stuff up" software engineers can double performance (in the sense of effective work) every 18 months? We can absolutely turn the dial toward more effort on software such as algorithms/compiled languages/etc. but color me unconvinced that there's exponential growth possibilities there.

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#127

Post by jacquesm »

ghaff wrote: post #126
jacquesm wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But do you really believe that by taking "a really hard look at how we cook this stuff up" software engineers can double performance (in the sense of effective work) every 18 months? We can absolutely turn the dial toward more effort on software such as algorithms/compiled languages/etc. but color me unconvinced that there's exponential growth possibilities there.

Yes, I really believe that. And the reason why is probably not going to be very popular here but I believe that we took a wrong turn at some point in the past two or three decades that made us concentrate on the wrong thing. In the mid 80's there was a fairly strong push to substantially improve the quality of software, rather than the quantity. And when the web happened that all got flushed down the toilet and we now have about 500 ways to do the exact same thing, none of them very good, efficient or stable.

It's like the world just after the Cambrian explosion. Lots of room for expansion but no real plan or intelligence behind it resulting in a ton of repeat work and variations on themes that will ultimately go nowhere.

And once all that noise has died down the real work can finally begin, much more wood behind far fewer arrows.

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#128

Post by rbanffy »

wfunction wrote: post #102
rbanffy wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

If tomorrow IBM came out with a POWER8 box at a price point competitive with my Xeon E3 workhorse running full Fedora 25 or Ubuntu 17.04, I wouldn't think twice. Same goes for Oracle and SPARC. The lowest POWER goes is in the mid E5 range, which I can't justify for my home office.

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#129

Post by ghaff »

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…

CMOS process scaling has been a pretty amazing unicorn. The fact that neither Intel nor anyone else has unveiled a CMOS 2.0 isn't for lack of research. There are various possibilities but they're either tactical and limited or very much still in the Labs phase.

I agree that the consequences of compute power no longer advancing year-to-year will be significant but I can't agree this is a case of nobody's trying hard enough.

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#130

Post by rbanffy »

dom0 wrote: post #108
anodin3 wrote: post #66

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 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…

It's not unlike designing a race car. You can put a monster engine, but it'll add weight, require more fuel, add inertia which will demand a more complicated suspension and wider, heavier tires to be able to do fast curves, and so on.

The careful balance of every aspect of a modern CPU is an art very few people practice. I'd say IBM and Sun have't left this game just yet for very high performance platforms, but don't expect a Core i3 coming out of either.

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