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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

#161

Post by ww520 »

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.

NUMA style architecture has been existed for a long while now. It doesn't seem to take over the world.

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#162

Post by [deleted] »

drawkbox wrote: post #131

Intel has always been a great research company. They are responsible for OpenCV[1] and largely the entire augmented reality craze is from that sponsored work. They are an important part of technological progression in the last couple decades, they even made Apple sales pick up with intel chips (creating a killer *nix dev machine for a time '06ish) before the iPhone came along. It would be a shame if the bean counters…

[deleted]

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#163

Post by trhway »

gonzo wrote: post #159
trhway wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. reminds Sun in 1998 and the onward years when SPARC was like North Korea border patrol in preventing any x86 penetration into Sun even though it was clear that x86 was the future.

Sorry? The Sun 386i "Roadrunner" was launched in 1988. A release of Solaris for PC compatibles began shipping in 1993. In 2002, Sun introduced its first general purpose x86 system, the LX50. In 2003, Sun announced a strategic alliance with AMD to produce x86/x64 servers based on AMD's Opteron processor; this was followed shortly by Sun's acquisition of Kealia, a startup founded by original Sun founder Andy Bechtolshe…

it would be very helpful to understand whether you know what you're talking about if you also stated whether you've been there or not :) I spent there about a decade.

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#164

Post by asah »

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…

> there may come a time when a 10 year old computer is just as powerful as one you buy today

You mean like my 2012 laptop, upgraded to 16GB RAM, which is perfectly good at web browsing, Google docs and html/python/postgres dev ?

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#165

Post by chronic940 »

gonzo wrote: post #157
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…

> 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. Intel acquired Digital's StrongARM unit as part of a settlement for a patent infringement suit. https://www.cnet.com/news/intel-digital-settle-suit/

And since then, has Digital Strong ARM produced anything? You are further proving his point.

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#166

Post by adrianratnapala »

LgWoodenBadger wrote: post #145
visionscaper wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

More likely a Harvard machine, i.e. one where the instruction memory is distinct from the data memory.

It is essentially what modern cores have with a their split caches, except those things are called "caches" because the architecture then has a lot of machinery for pretending to be a von Neumann Machine with a huge memory. This pretending is done because that's the kind of machine that software expects.

But the first unices ran on machines with memories only as big as a modern L1-cache. Moreover, networking and parallelism are everyday issues for software now. It will be interesting to see if software evolves to explicitly recognise that it is really running on a network of small machines + a hierarchy of big external storage devices, of which DRAM is just one.

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#167

Post by adrianratnapala »

ww520 wrote: post #161
visionscaper wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

NUMA style architecture has been existed for a long while now. It doesn't seem to take over the world.

But the practical case for it should grow as long transistor counts increase while the speed of light doesn't.

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#168

Post by adrianratnapala »

wtallis wrote: post #158
Zaak wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back in the 80s, instruction decode was a large part of the logic in a CPU (thus the motivation for RISC). Currently, it's a tiny fraction. It's been many years since a simpler instruction set was useful for reducing the complexity of the CPU.

But that portion of the power budget hasn't shifted at all back toward the computational units. It's been taken over by register renaming and instruction reordering and all manner of caches.

But is RISC the solution to that problem? Having lots of registers helps, I guess. But the amd64 already has quite a lot.

These problems seem to be what VLIW architectures like tried to to solve. Is that sort of architecture going to make a comeback? Will even that help?

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#169

Post by komali2 »

komali2 wrote: post #92
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…

>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?

I'm just curious, people. I know​nothing about this.

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#170

Post by wtallis »

adrianratnapala wrote: post #167
ww520 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NUMA style architecture has been existed for a long while now. It doesn't seem to take over the world.

But the practical case for it should grow as long transistor counts increase while the speed of light doesn't.

And NUMA-like architectures on a single CPU die have been increasingly common between Intel's multiple ring busses on larger Xeons and AMD's 4-core clusters on Ryzen. Even per-core L2 caches violate the assumption that a given memory address is equally accessible from any processor core. You can't pretend that memory is all equidistant from the processor cores unless you want everything running equally slow.
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