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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

#141

Post by ghaff »

kccqzy wrote: post #116
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.

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

Yes but that was a cost and engineering issue. The size of atoms is a lot more fundamental. EUV buys you a little more but you still bump into the size of atoms and quantum effects pretty quickly.

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#142

Post by pjscott »

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

The key problem with the TPU architecture for training is that its on-die buffer space is fairly limited and its memory bandwidth is currently nowhere near that of a GPU. This matters if you've got a lot of intermediate buffers that need to be alive at the same time for backpropagation. Also, there's the less fundamental matter of convenience: while there are some clever ways to train with limited precision gradients, it's not yet as easy as not doing that.

One style of training that would be a good fit for the current TPU architecture is some of the recent work on reinforcement learning without gradients:

https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.03864

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#143

Post by Symmetry »

jacquesm wrote: post #117
Symmetry wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 per…

Or we could put future datacenters in space behind sunshades and get them really cold by default.

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#144

Post by jacquesm »

Symmetry wrote: post #143
jacquesm wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 per…

Or we could put future datacenters in space behind sunshades and get them really cold by default.

Bandwidth might leave something to be desired.

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#145

Post by LgWoodenBadger »

visionscaper wrote: post #109
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.

Well, the core with its own memory is still a Von Neumann machine, is it not?

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#146

Post by Animats »

ZephyrP wrote: post #119
Animats wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not quite.[1] Propagation in most interconnects is about half the speed of light, because real-world wires have capacitance. (As low as 25% for CAT 5 cable, as high as 90% for open-wire antenna feeds.) Optical fiber runs about 70% of the speed of light. On-chip interconnects run 30%-60% of the speed of light. So there's some propagation delay improvement with optical interconnects, but it's a factor of about 2, not some huge improvement.

[1] http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/all-aboard-/4426188/Rul...

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#147

Post by wtallis »

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…

A factor of 360 is closer than I would have guessed. But that's still at least 8 doublings of compute efficiency. We've never had concrete roadmaps that far out—that would be like scheduling the introduction of FinFETs while Pentium 2s were first hitting the shelves. Nobody's ever been able to predict that far in advance which fabrication technologies will end up being economical at scale and required at which node. (Just look at how well the industry has coped with having to put off EUV so many times.) With the looming end of silicon scaling, those thermodynamic limits certainly don't look any less out of reach.

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#148

Post by wolfgke »

orionblastar wrote: post #138
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…

If I ran Intel, I'd keep both x86 and ARM chips and make a motherboard using x86 and ARM chips to work together with shared memory. The ARM could be given tasks to do that free up the x86 chip to make the system run faster. Plus ARM operating systems could be run in a virtual machine using the ARM chip to develop or test apps out.

> The ARM could be given tasks to do that free up the x86 chip to make the system run faster.

What advantage does using an ARM core for this have over simply using an x86 core?

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#149

Post by wolfgke »

bsder wrote: post #134
rbanffy wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking of chip area, one possible path is designing ISAs that require less silicon to efficiently decode, reorder and retire. It'd be, of course, totally incompatible with what we have now.

We call that MIPS or Alpha, and it lost to x86 compatibility. Whose only competitor is ARM, which is little better in terms of decoding complexity.

> Whose only competitor is ARM, which is little better in terms of decoding complexity.

T32 indeed has this problem, but not A32. With ARMv8 ARM released the A64 instruction set, which is designed new from ground up and is to my knowledge also not hard to decode. Nevertheless decoding complexity is not that relevant anymore. What is much harder and involves more die area is (super-)pipelining the execution, out-of-order execution etc. But even all this together: What consumes most die area are typically the caches.

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#150

Post by fgonzag »

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 went the other way with the 1700. Though I do game it's not my main motivation. This is a workstation first and foremost. And every benchmark I saw the 7700K got crushed by the 1700 (in linux productivity benchmarks).

If you are gamer, the 7700K is the right choice though.

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