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Intel Stockpiling 10nm Chips

arstechnica.com

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Re: Intel Stockpiling 10nm Chips

#51

Post by baybal2 »

dfrage wrote: post #28
baybal2 wrote: post #24

Intel is very likely to miss holidays with 10nm. OEM manufacturers in South China, are screaming murder, and even ones who were Intel shops for decades like Weibu are jumping the ship. Intel is losing China big time. I'd say, a lot would've been fine even if Intel gave them existing 14nm chips, but since all 14nm capacity is gobbled by server chips, it's not gonna happen. I believe Intel is making a huge error by pri…

Two conflicting thoughts on that: - If the big wholesale Xeon buyers and users qualify AMD chips and start buying a lot of them, Intel will find that landscape a lot more competitive, this is a more "sticky" market than OEM products for consumers. - They could be betting that AMD will lose the plot again, as they've done throughout their corporate history, e.g. after the 486, and after K8. The OEM consumer market is…

My own experience tells me of things being quite opposite of this. Big hosting providers care little for what runs in their servers for as long as it's fast (they always can pass costs onto their clients without loosing much, especially bigger ones)

In OEM, things are dominated by much more complex dynamics in between supply chain, factories, and clients.

Intel had no problem with Taiwanese, as a lot of TW companies had relationship with Intel since the "Desktop First" era, but in mainland, Intel had to fight a bloody battle for the fresh and juicy laptop and tablet markets for the last decade, with kickbacks, blackjack, and hookers. Their position here was never strong to begin with.

Re: Intel Stockpiling 10nm Chips

#52

Post by zitterbewegung »

mjfl wrote: post #3

What are Intel and other semiconductors planning to pivot to when they can no longer reduce process size at a reasonable pace (i.e. now)? Is there a plan, or is it an existential wall?

Looking at ARM they have the Big little architecture (little processors for more efficient energy usage and big processors for when you need the performance). Putting more emphasis on less power hungry ways to get similar performance or otherwise.

Also putting more specialized parts like GPUs, FPGAs, ML accelerators either near or on the die. the A12 is a good example of this. Also, Intel's buyout of Xilinx shows that FPGAs can be put on die or near it. You could even put storage on the SOC.

Then there are the more esoteric methods like Quantum Computing.

Re: Intel Stockpiling 10nm Chips

#53

Post by glangdale »

Const-me wrote: post #48
rayiner wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> GPU of my desktop PC computes 11 TFlops, that's 4+ orders of magnitude faster. But they’re much lower quality (less flexible) FLOPs. If you don’t have much data parallelism or heavy conditional logic for each datum, you’re not going to come close to 11 teraflops.

If you don’t have much data parallelism or have heavy conditional logic, you won't come close to 1GFlops on that CPU either. These 2 FLOPs/cycle are for SSE i.e. 4-wide vector math without any conditions or branches. Update: also, for other tasks, GPU flops are of higher quality than CPU. VRAM bandwidth is ridiculous, much higher than system RAM, computations that are bound by RAM bandwidth will be much faster. GPUs…

I think it's safe to say that these flops are different. One is not higher quality than the other. It's possible to conjure up examples where one is more fit for purpose (double-precision and irregular tasks on CPU), massive memory access for GPU. Both architectures have different types of cache which also complicates matters. An example that tortures the CPU (by being 'not much data parallelism or heavy conditional logic') will torture the GPU much worse, but this example will likely not really be "flop" dependent in any case.

Re: Intel Stockpiling 10nm Chips

#54

Post by Rexxar »

tedunangst wrote: post #5

Stockpiling chips so partners can test them later? If the point is to validate designs, wouldn't you want to do the testing before the stockpiling?

Maybe it's a mistake. It would be more logical if it was " [...] and it's currently building a stockpile of 10nm processors while waiting for PC OEMs to test and validate."

Re: Intel Stockpiling 10nm Chips

#55

Post by benrbray »

vbezhenar wrote: post #40
sliken wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New? Using epoxy to make batteries hard to replace and other tweaks to make other unreliable parts hard to replace. Popular recent choices are keyboards and backlights.

Not everyone uses Macbooks. There are plenty of laptops with easily replaceable batteries and sane keyboards. Not even talking about real computers, where you can replace everything without any tools.

But at the same time, I'm considering replacing my 2015 HP laptop because my "A" key stopped working, and the cost to replace the keyboard is 25% the cost of a new laptop, which I'll need anyway in another year or two even if the keyboard were fixed.

Re: Intel Stockpiling 10nm Chips

#56

Post by newusertoday »

zitterbewegung wrote: post #52
mjfl wrote: post #3

What are Intel and other semiconductors planning to pivot to when they can no longer reduce process size at a reasonable pace (i.e. now)? Is there a plan, or is it an existential wall?

Looking at ARM they have the Big little architecture (little processors for more efficient energy usage and big processors for when you need the performance). Putting more emphasis on less power hungry ways to get similar performance or otherwise. Also putting more specialized parts like GPUs, FPGAs, ML accelerators either near or on the die. the A12 is a good example of this. Also, Intel's buyout of Xilinx shows tha…

intel bought altera not xilinx. xilinx is still independent company

Re: Intel Stockpiling 10nm Chips

#57

Post by Const-me »

glangdale wrote: post #53
Const-me wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don’t have much data parallelism or have heavy conditional logic, you won't come close to 1GFlops on that CPU either. These 2 FLOPs/cycle are for SSE i.e. 4-wide vector math without any conditions or branches. Update: also, for other tasks, GPU flops are of higher quality than CPU. VRAM bandwidth is ridiculous, much higher than system RAM, computations that are bound by RAM bandwidth will be much faster. GPUs…

I think it's safe to say that these flops are different . One is not higher quality than the other. It's possible to conjure up examples where one is more fit for purpose (double-precision and irregular tasks on CPU), massive memory access for GPU. Both architectures have different types of cache which also complicates matters. An example that tortures the CPU (by being 'not much data parallelism or heavy conditional…

They're different but the differences are quite complex.

CPUs can be faster for RAM bandwidth-bound code, if there's not that much data and it fits in caches at least L3, CPU cache bandwidth is very good.

GPUs can be faster for heavily conditioned code. If it's the condition on RAM value, a CPU will stall or mispredict branches, both slow, a GPU will switch to another hardware thread which is very fast.

Despite these differences, I find flops quite useful in practice to compare performance of different computers across architectures of generations. Computers compute, flops measure how fast they do.

Re: Intel Stockpiling 10nm Chips

#58

Post by quickben »

Const-me wrote: post #44
pault wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My impression is that they know moore's gravy train is over and they're scrambling to figure out new tricks to allow them to sell a new generation of processors every year. Personally, while I'm a little disappointed that processors 20 years from now might not be 4+ orders of magnitude faster than the one I have now, I wouldn't mind being able to buy a computer and not have to worry about upgrading it for 10 years (I…

Processors are not that fast yet, but computers as a whole are. 20 years ago we had Pentium 3 500MHz, 2 FLOPs/cycle, 1 GFlops. GPU of my desktop PC computes 11 TFlops, that's 4+ orders of magnitude faster. For CPUs alone it's indeed less impressive, $500 for that P3 inflated to $760, the comparable modern CPU is Threadripper 2920X, 16 flops/cycle * 12 cores * 3.5 GHz = 672 GFlops.

That comparison can not be directly made as the 'O' in "FLOPS" is different.

Re: Intel Stockpiling 10nm Chips

#59

Post by robdachshund »

pault wrote: post #13
mjfl wrote: post #3

What are Intel and other semiconductors planning to pivot to when they can no longer reduce process size at a reasonable pace (i.e. now)? Is there a plan, or is it an existential wall?

My impression is that they know moore's gravy train is over and they're scrambling to figure out new tricks to allow them to sell a new generation of processors every year. Personally, while I'm a little disappointed that processors 20 years from now might not be 4+ orders of magnitude faster than the one I have now, I wouldn't mind being able to buy a computer and not have to worry about upgrading it for 10 years (I…

I wouldn't necessarily say it's dead. Keep in mind that Intel hasn't had to compete with AMD since thru released bulldozer, so instead of R&D we got 8 years of die shrinks and speculation hacks (that are now disabled due to meltdown and spectre). Intel hasn't done much of anything in terms of processor development for nearly a decade. That's why even sandy bridge chips are still useable.

Re: Intel Stockpiling 10nm Chips

#60

Post by 0-_-0 »

robert_foss wrote: post #19
steve19 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Semiaccurate is anti-Intel, they are not a bias free source of information.

That may or may not be, but what certainly is true is that Intel's public messaging about 10nm production has been much less accurate than that of SemiAccurate.

You could even say that it was less than semi-accurate
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