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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

#181

Post by dom0 »

rbanffy wrote: post #130
dom0 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

True, IBM and Fujitsu/Sun are still competitive in some niches, but not on power efficiency and not for general purpose application. Last time I looked IBM was 3-5 times worse perf/Watt in SAP benchmarks. Of course IBM is still an option in these specialized applications if you just need that raw power, but no one's going to run a data centre on that silicon.

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#182

Post by scottlegrand2 »

yvdriess wrote: post #124
scottlegrand2 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So like I said, they didn't sufficiently think over the memory subsystem?

GPUs can transpose matrices in shared memory and register space in several different ways that are all efficient. I'm guessing that you are describing the transposed matrices required for calculating deltas and weight gradients here? If so, then I see, it's more than just the fact it has one-tenth the bandwidth of a consumer GPU it's just a less flexible architecture in the first place. One would hope they fix that for the second generation TPU which I assume they're working on already. That said I've yet to encounter a network that requires double-precision math to converge. Have you?

Half Precision can be tricky, but the same trick Nervana uses (dynamic fixed point) can be emulated in software and it has been used for graphics for decades. I specifically made use of it in an OpenGL engine 20 years ago for high resolution texture sampling.

As for Nervana IP, IMO they need to ship something soon or NVIDIA'S going to ship a GPU on par with it.

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#183

Post by bhouston »

wolfgke wrote: post #180
rbanffy wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry. I was comparing both sides as an analogy why FPGA's won't be available on mass-market CPUs anytime soon. The reason Itanium never achieved the mass acceptance Intel expected is because, even with Windows running on it, it never ran x86 software at a reasonable price/performance point. Java was Sun's attempt to make SPARC viable by breaking with the ISA compatibility problem. Today, with Linux, JVM, .NET Core a…

> The reason Itanium never achieved the mass acceptance Intel expected is because, even with Windows running on it, it never ran x86 software at a reasonable price/performance point. That was one (and surely important) reason. There were lots of others reasons > http://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/csep590/06au/projec... (seriously: everybody interested in the history of Itanium should read this text), for exampl…

There seems to be alot of ideas in VLIW that is used by GPUs to get high degrees of parallelism and a hiding of the cost of conditionals.

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#184

Post by Zaak »

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.

If you had a "sufficiently smart compiler" you wouldn't need register renaming and instruction reordering, but such a compiler has consistently failed to appear. That's a big part of the whole Itanium fiasco.

If you want your CPU to run fast, you have to pipeline instructions and you need caches that can run at full CPU speed. It's easy to design a CPU without all the complexity, but it will be slow. No one knows how to do both simple and fast. It's probably impossible.

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#185

Post by ansible »

jacquesm wrote: post #120
ansible wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 leaders…

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

Well, that's just it, we haven't hit the physical limits of computing yet. But we are indeed close to the limits of what is practical with CMOS photo-lithography.

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.

This acceptance process will be quite painful, and someone, some way, some how will step in to promise greater returns.

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#186

Post by ansible »

ghaff wrote: post #129
ansible wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

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.

I look at these yuuuuge teams at Intel working on their processors, and what kind of returns are we getting on that investment? How much are they, in comparison, investing in molecular nanotechnology related research?

I look at this, and it is mostly software-ish things:

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/education/highered/re...

There is some hardware stuff, further down the page, and some talk of the post-CMOS world. But I don't see enough. In my view, they're not placing nearly enough emphasis on the foundational technologies they need for their business.

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#187

Post by ghaff »

ansible wrote: post #186
ghaff wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

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. I look at these yuuuuge teams at Intel working on their processors, and what kind of returns are we getting on that investment? How much are they, in comparison, investing in molecular nanotechnology related research? I look at this, and it is mostly soft…

Not being privy to the details of Intel's R&D budget I don't really have an opinion on how their dollars are allocated. I will say that development tends to benefit from large teams more than speculative future research. I'm sure a very large proportion of their R&D budget goes to where revenue is going to come from over the next few years.

It's also the case that Intel has become less forthcoming on their semiconductor research directions so I wouldn't necessarily expect there to be a lot of information on their website.

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#188

Post by dom0 »

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.

NUMA is used, when it is actually needed, which is not that often. Most other stuff gets by without requiring NUMA enlightenment (if you think competent parallel software developers are hard to come by... finding competent NUMA people will make you reconsider that assessment).

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#189

Post by rocqua »

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.

You need really big radiators for that. In space, waste heat is a huge problem.

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#190

Post by ocschwar »

asah wrote: post #164
jacquesm wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ?

Or my BeagleBone card, which is now my home data server.
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