Intel to Release Discrete Graphics Card in 2020 • Hacker News Board

Re: Intel to Release Discrete Graphics Card in 2020

#21

Post by aneutron » Wed, Jun 13, 2018, 3:32 AM UTC

There was an article written by a guy from the Larrabee team, where he explained how the projet wasn't a failure, in the sense that management wanted a processing beast and that's what they got, not a GPGPU.

But what's interesting is that in the article, he said that the Intel GFX dep. were "begging to let them build a GPGPU", and he might have been exagerating but he made it seem like all they needed was to slap some ROPs and texture units on that thing.

That makes me question wether we'll be seeing a brand new architecture, or an Intel HD unleashed edition with some GDDR5.

Re: Intel to Release Discrete Graphics Card in 2020

#22

Post by simcop2387 » Wed, Jun 13, 2018, 3:35 AM UTC

I really hope they don't do weird market segmentation stuff with their virtual gpu support. They've got the best support for doing that with qemu/kvm currently. Amds sr-iov support exists but the hardware support isn't very widespread still. No idea about the Nvidia side of things.

Re: Intel to Release Discrete Graphics Card in 2020

#23

Post by nl » Wed, Jun 13, 2018, 3:36 AM UTC

lozaning wrote: post #16

nl wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to [1] if you have 15c/kWh electricity you can make about $1/day with a 1080ti on Bitcoin . This of course doesn't cover the cost of the card for over a year. Other coins are slightly more profitable though. [1] https://crypt0.zone/calculator/s/most-profitable-coin-to-min...

What these calculators never seem to account for is difficulty factor. That dollar-a-day today rapidly approaches zero as more and more people bring more equipment online. No way you're making a dollar a day 600 days from now.

Yeah, I agree.

Re: Intel to Release Discrete Graphics Card in 2020

#24

Post by rangibaby » Wed, Jun 13, 2018, 3:43 AM UTC

siberianbear wrote: post #18

I remember the first time Intel tried this, in 1998, when they introduced the i740 AGP card. [1][2] The data sheet is still out there if you know where to look. [3] It made everyone in the industry from S3, Matrox, ATI, Nvidia and 3dfx all tremble. In the end, it flopped. [1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/202/3 [2] https://assets.hardwarezone.com/2009/reviews/video/v2740tv/v... [3] https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rc…

I had an i740 and it was OK. It ran games from the era without complaint: https://youtu.be/x8sZ3kazUaU

Re: Intel to Release Discrete Graphics Card in 2020

#25

Post by kristianp » Wed, Jun 13, 2018, 3:43 AM UTC

melling wrote: post #8

deweller wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Graphics cards aren't used to mine bitcoin any more. Only chips that are made specifically for mining bitcoin (ASICs) are used in mining rigs.

When did that change? I still see it mentioned. https://venturebeat.com/2018/02/11/nvidia-ceo-cryptocurrency... https://www.techradar.com/news/best-mining-gpu

Years ago. Your first link says crypto mining, not Bitcoin mining. Other coins with different mining algorithms to bitcoin.

Re: Intel to Release Discrete Graphics Card in 2020

#26

Post by petecox » Wed, Jun 13, 2018, 3:56 AM UTC

Call me a conspiracist but Intel strategically are roadmapping an exit of the IGP market? Perhaps a new focus on high performance OpenCL computing, if the returns on low-power IGP are diminished, viz:

(1) The Vega partnership with AMD (2) thunderbolt eGPUs (3) Apple PowerVR-less in A1x chips (4) Adreno on budget Win 10 devices.

Headless desktop motherboards, with Intel Inside laptops and NUCs utilizing Vega graphics would be my prediction.

Re: Intel to Release Discrete Graphics Card in 2020

#27

Post by nl » Wed, Jun 13, 2018, 4:46 AM UTC

aneutron wrote: post #21

There was an article written by a guy from the Larrabee team, where he explained how the projet wasn't a failure, in the sense that management wanted a processing beast and that's what they got, not a GPGPU. But what's interesting is that in the article, he said that the Intel GFX dep. were "begging to let them build a GPGPU", and he might have been exagerating but he made it seem like all they needed was to slap som…

There was an article written by a guy from the Larrabee team, where he explained how the projet wasn't a failure, in the sense that management wanted a processing beast and that's what they got, not a GPGPU.

Great. Except the kind of parallel processing Larrabee was supposed to provide isn't something anyone wanted.

It's a half-pregnant architecture. Not parallel enough to compete with GPUs, not enough single thread performance to compete with Intel's own CPUs.

Re: Intel to Release Discrete Graphics Card in 2020

#28

Post by voxadam » Wed, Jun 13, 2018, 6:57 AM UTC

aneutron wrote: post #21

There was an article written by a guy from the Larrabee team, where he explained how the projet wasn't a failure, in the sense that management wanted a processing beast and that's what they got, not a GPGPU. But what's interesting is that in the article, he said that the Intel GFX dep. were "begging to let them build a GPGPU", and he might have been exagerating but he made it seem like all they needed was to slap som…

I think the article that you're thinking of is "Why didn't Larrabee fail?" by Tom Forsyth.

http://tomforsyth1000.github.io/blog.wiki.html#

Re: Intel to Release Discrete Graphics Card in 2020

#29

Post by ksec » Wed, Jun 13, 2018, 7:32 AM UTC

I am wondering if GPU design are basically approaching the end and limited by smaller node and bandwidth. We don't see better performance per die / transistors any more . And hasn't been so for many years. The gain seems to be small.

Given Intel has had the lead in transistor density for years, and will continue to do so for at least a few more years, I wonder why Intel hasn't jump into this earlier.

The largest obstacle in GPU is actually the software and driver support. Especially in gaming. Middleware Engines has made this 10x easier. but it is still a fairly hard problem.

I wish they would call their new silicon as AGP; Advanced Graphics Processor. :P

Re: Intel to Release Discrete Graphics Card in 2020

#30

Post by imtringued » Wed, Jun 13, 2018, 10:10 AM UTC

userbinator wrote: post #17

This was one of their previous attempts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel740 I hope these GPUs will be far better documented and have very good open-source drivers --- Intel has historically been much more open than ATI/AMD or nVidia at releasing public developer information.

Intel is also much more open than ARM. If you want to use the GPU on ARM SBCs you are at the mercy of the manufacturer to release proprietary GPU drivers that usually are only compatible with an old kernel version that has custom patches to support that specific SBC.