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Intel Fights for Its Future

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Re: Intel Fights for Its Future

#101

Post by baybal2 »

deepnotderp wrote: post #88
baybal2 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Novumind, they showed their engineering samples few months ago. And yes, they got quite close to their initial promise of 3 teraflops per watt. Cambricon - possibly a scam, though also claims performance on an equal level with moderately sound technical approach. They never released much info other than fancy CG videos.

Uhhh. NovuMind only does 3x3 convolutions. Literally a hard burnt ASIC. Also, the TPU's efficiency is close. (Btw both their "FLOPs/watt " numbers are useless, they don't account for utilization) And Cambricon... well, I'll just leave it at that...

I don't think that relevant. For running NNs, this is pretty much all what you need from an asic hardware - raw floating point matrix multiplications per second. And measuring how much power it takes for it to do so is a good measure of power efficiency.

Re: Intel Fights for Its Future

#102

Post by wastedhours »

ternaryoperator wrote: post #4

This article makes it seem that being a major player in mobile is the only way Intel could survive. Mobile is a decelerating market, while cloud and servers, where Intel has a huge lead is an expanding market and profitable. In 2017, Intel's revenue hit an all-time high, as it did the year before, and its stock is an all time high. This is not a company "fighting for its future."

Doubling down on market you know well is a lot easier than spotting a new one. Judging by their dabbles in both mobile and IoT hardware they're areas of interest (whether seriously or just scare tactics to show they could move into the area notwithstanding) - but the perception is they missed the boat.

What happens if they don't spot the next server/cloud market, like they didn't spot mobile?

Re: Intel Fights for Its Future

#103

Post by PaulHoule »

hawkice wrote: post #30
oblio wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To leverage their synergies.

To be fair, that is the response to all 'Why is X acquiring Y?' questions, and it's a terrible answer. M&A is hard to do right -- most fail, and a staggering percent have all the surplus delivered to the seller instead of the buyer. See: https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and-cor... The real answer would speak to why (Intel thinks) this deal is not like the average, unsuccessful deal, and specifical…

Actually about 70% of corporate acquisitions more or less achieve their goals. As for the other 30% it often is a disaster.

Re: Intel Fights for Its Future

#104

Post by deepnotderp »

baybal2 wrote: post #101
deepnotderp wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uhhh. NovuMind only does 3x3 convolutions. Literally a hard burnt ASIC. Also, the TPU's efficiency is close. (Btw both their "FLOPs/watt " numbers are useless, they don't account for utilization) And Cambricon... well, I'll just leave it at that...

I don't think that relevant. For running NNs, this is pretty much all what you need from an asic hardware - raw floating point matrix multiplications per second. And measuring how much power it takes for it to do so is a good measure of power efficiency.

Pretty sure the novumind chip has hard coded the Winograd 3x3 convolution algorithm.

Re: Intel Fights for Its Future

#105

Post by hugs »

Years ago, during a fund-raising tour of Silicon Valley VC firms for my previous company, we also pitched Intel Capital (their in-house VC arm). Their feedback to our pitch was that our SaaS service was "too compute intensive" and therefore they passed.....

Intel thought we used too many CPUs?!.....

All these years later, I'm still in disbelief. I do realize that VCs often are uncomfortable giving the real reason they're passing, but "too many CPUs" was a first for me. (And my company is still around and making more than $25MM/year, thank you very much.)

Re: Intel Fights for Its Future

#106

Post by baybal2 »

deepnotderp wrote: post #84
baybal2 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except they wouldn't. It took Apple a decade to up their silicon to a level where it is now. For most of that time, their activity was a money sink for them. And even today, even with some of the best talent in IC design one can get in USA (PA Semi and its veteran designers from HP, Sun, Freescale, and whatever else was remaining of American semi industry), their chips are still half outsourced, 70% external IP if yo…

You do realize that David Patterson is heading up Google's hardware efforts, right? Hardly clueless and inexperienced... And what Chinese fabless was that?

>David Patterson

Surely, he is a top cadre, and an accomplished academician. The number of his students serving on CTO level jobs is in double digits.

The fact that Google went so far with cadres, and said to be throwing high six digit salaries even on people who came to the unit fresh out of universities clearly signifies the extend of their efforts and commitment. Their intent seem to be to bang money on it until it works, no matter the cost.

>Hardly clueless and inexperienced...

I never challenged the technical expertise per se. I'm saying that a generic web/dotcom/clickfarm business can't be normally turned into an engineering company of an inherently different nature, regardless of how much money will be banged on the exercise.

People say that for the past 5 years, the TPU unit was running effectively, like a research institute of some kind: regular workshops with academicians, amount of research works written exceeding the amount of code, and so on.

TPU unit people did their job splendidly, but Google's managerial unit that authorized the whole affair seem to me to be having hard time wrapping their mind around the question on how and what to do with it.

On the other hand, Ren Wu, being originally a semi engineer, had a very clear idea what he wants from the very start: off-the-shelf i/o ip, axi bus, wide registers, sram fifo, directly register fed matrix multiplication units, and predominantly synchronous operation. Voila. No talkshops, company being turned into research institute, or six digit salary cadres what so ever. The chip might well be a one man project.

Re: Intel Fights for Its Future

#107

Post by sitepodmatt »

gruez wrote: post #81
SlowBro wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clarification: Only 32 but apps. Not 64 bit apps, which the Windows world has almost fully moved to. And I’m sure they would run at reduced performance as well.

most non-compute intensive programs still are compiled for 32-bit, or have 32 bit versions available. also, visual studio still defaults to 32 bit when creating a new c++ project.

You can even get Slack for Windows in 32-bit, although I suspect you'd hit the nasty 4gb limitation pretty quickly

Re: Intel Fights for Its Future

#108

Post by mastazi »

cm2187 wrote: post #87
IshKebab wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but the upgrade cycle won't stay short for long, just like it hasn't for desktops. Give it 10 years and people will be keeping their phones until they break. Also anyone can make an ARM CPU so the margins are thin, whereas with x86 CPUs Intel will basically only ever have one competitor - AMD. They want to find another monopoly.

Something you keep in your pocket along with your keys, that will be dropped ten times, and on which you will regularly sit will inevitably have a shorter life than a laptop. And for the rare people who take good care of their smartphone, there is the matter of non replaceable batteries on a non fixable device.

On the other hand, all of the above are also reasons why - one could argue - the mobile market is going to be commoditized more and more.

Re: Intel Fights for Its Future

#109

Post by qplex »

mcintyre1994 wrote: post #51
hkmurakami wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even today I see an increasing number of friends moving from 2 years cycles to 3 year cycles. The "killer app" for smartphone refresh rates staying low are (1) battery degradation and (2) forced OS updates for app updates, which in turn slows the phone down to compel an update[1]. [1] I'm actually curious if OS updates slow down older phones these days. This was the case 5 years ago but perhaps things have changed/

I have an iPhone 6S - I'd say OS updates do slow the phone down, but they also tend to be really buggy and generally rubbish for a while. I think it's probably more bad engineering and software quality than anything nefarious.

My experience with Android is the opposite, it's gradually better and faster with every release.

Re: Intel Fights for Its Future

#110

Post by karpodiem »

aleem wrote: post #18
ternaryoperator wrote: post #4

This article makes it seem that being a major player in mobile is the only way Intel could survive. Mobile is a decelerating market, while cloud and servers, where Intel has a huge lead is an expanding market and profitable. In 2017, Intel's revenue hit an all-time high, as it did the year before, and its stock is an all time high. This is not a company "fighting for its future."

The headline is definitely sensationalist but there are threats and missed opportunities on Intel's horizon and past. The lure of mobile is the upgrade cycle as those are much shorter. The same, short upgrade cycles were a boon for intel in the hey day of desktops/laptops. The bigger threat the article fails to focus on is ARM. Singularity for apps has always hinged on write-once-run-everywhere. Intel hasn't been abl…

All I want is a single socket CPU and a motherboard that supports ECC/isn't total garbage. AMD has said it's on the motherboard manufacturers, and I haven't been able to get a straight answer as to whether ECC works as it should on motherboards that support Ryzen - https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/80wpd1/ryzen_2_ecc_sup...
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