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What's wrong with Intel, and how to fix it: Former principal engineer unloads

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Re: What's wrong with Intel, and how to fix it: Former principal engineer unloads

#41

Post by atq2119 »

dman wrote: post #25
atq2119 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AVX-512 really has two parts. It widens vectors to 512 bits, but it also makes the instruction set much more orthogonal and clean. It also adds masking of lanes. These latter parts are what's really useful about AVX-512. The widening of the vectors is just an area tradeoff that depends a lot on the particular workload.

Unfortunately there is a clock penalty to using AVX-512 and it is only available on a small part of the chips that Intel ships (For the longest time it was only available on Xeons). AMD does not support AVX-512 yet. As a result no one really had the incentive to add support for it outside HPC where people have control of both the workload and the hardware it runs on. To further complicate matters there are multiple v…

Right, that's kind of the point. They should have made the cleaned up and extended instruction set available everywhere at least for 256-bit vectors. That would have made the good, non-trade-off parts that people actually liked pervasive.

Re: What's wrong with Intel, and how to fix it: Former principal engineer unloads

#42

Post by dijit »

BeetleB wrote: post #6
PhantomGremlin wrote: post #3

From the article: Piednoel didn’t spare words for Intel’s culture, which he said has changed drastically and promotes MBAs over those with technical prowess. The current CEO is a finance / MBA type, so it's no surprise that the current culture favors that. In Intel's defense, the previous CEO was a process engineer. But, unfortunately, he couldn't keep his weiner in his pants. He also was probably the wrong choice as…

The previous CEO, who was a process engineer, was the one who brought the current CEO to Intel. It is widely believed the reasons for his firing were merely a pretext - they felt he was performing poorly and wanted to find an excuse to get rid of him. His focus definitely wasn't on CPUs - just look at all the acquisitions under his watch, and the focus away from CPUs into everything else (AI, autonomous vehicles, etc…

The previous CEO was trying to diversify the company because CPU dominance has diminishing returns.

Obviously this has backfired tremendously, as we now see the rise of ARM in the processor space and even AMD to conquer x86.

But intel still make the best consumer networking cards! For whatever that is worth.

Re: What's wrong with Intel, and how to fix it: Former principal engineer unloads

#43

Post by lagadu »

dman wrote: post #25
atq2119 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AVX-512 really has two parts. It widens vectors to 512 bits, but it also makes the instruction set much more orthogonal and clean. It also adds masking of lanes. These latter parts are what's really useful about AVX-512. The widening of the vectors is just an area tradeoff that depends a lot on the particular workload.

Unfortunately there is a clock penalty to using AVX-512 and it is only available on a small part of the chips that Intel ships (For the longest time it was only available on Xeons). AMD does not support AVX-512 yet. As a result no one really had the incentive to add support for it outside HPC where people have control of both the workload and the hardware it runs on. To further complicate matters there are multiple v…

The chip family variants problem can't be overstated, it's ridiculous. For example the laptop I bought last year with a flagship latest gen cpu has far more support than the flagship latest gen desktop cpu that I bought two months ago.

For reference: https://twitter.com/InstLatX64/status/1131489307473174528/ph...

Re: What's wrong with Intel, and how to fix it: Former principal engineer unloads

#44

Post by goatinaboat »

nine_k wrote: post #8
PhantomGremlin wrote: post #3

From the article: Piednoel didn’t spare words for Intel’s culture, which he said has changed drastically and promotes MBAs over those with technical prowess. The current CEO is a finance / MBA type, so it's no surprise that the current culture favors that. In Intel's defense, the previous CEO was a process engineer. But, unfortunately, he couldn't keep his weiner in his pants. He also was probably the wrong choice as…

As somebody noted, when you have cornered a large part of the market, you don't feel as much technical pressure, and success in selling becomes key. So sales and MBAs start to run the show, because it makes the business sense, and while doing so risk to lose the sight of the technological advances that made the dominant position possible. Intel's founder, Andy Grove, used to say: "Only the paranoid survive". (He pers…

As somebody noted, when you have cornered a large part of the market, you don't feel as much technical pressure, and success in selling becomes key. So sales and MBAs start to run the show, because it makes the business sense, and while doing so risk to lose the sight of the technological advances that made the dominant position possible.

What they are really doing there is merely converting the long-term value created by the engineers into short-term numbers that look good on the quarterly accounts and pay their own bonuses. MBAs and accountants add no value at all, they are simply profiteering from what others create. And once they have sucked an engineering company dry, they move on to the next.

Re: What's wrong with Intel, and how to fix it: Former principal engineer unloads

#45

Post by fmajid »

glangdale wrote: post #28
supernova87a wrote: post #12

This is purely a total outsider's opinion, so I caveat that and please don't get all offended if I'm totally wrong. Sometimes it's really difficult to tell the difference between a crackpot theorist and a good equities analyst. Watching this guy's video, it's hard to tell which he comes off as more. He's just coherent and convincing enough that as an outsider I could believe his collection of observations. But the pr…

Francois is a smart guy, but there's a range of opinions on the matters he raises. We argue a good deal on Twitter ("constructive confrontation" between former Intel Principal Engineers :-) ). He put together the video pretty quickly so don't dismiss it just for lack of polish. Personally, I argue with him a lot on AVX-512. I think AVX-512 is a Good Thing (or will be shortly - the first instantiation in Skylake Serve…

Doesn't AVX-512 have a problem with frequency scaling?

https://blog.cloudflare.com/on-the-dangers-of-intels-frequen...

https://travisdowns.github.io/blog/2020/01/17/avxfreq1.html

Given this, and the fact Ryzen doesn't support AVX-512, I would be very wary of the technology.

Re: What's wrong with Intel, and how to fix it: Former principal engineer unloads

#46

Post by LordHeini »

It is a bit odd that there is no mention of the awful security problems like Spectre and Meltdown which mostly hit Intel and was very poorly handled by them.

As a consumer i care way more about my CPU actually working as advertised and not some Specre mitigation killing the performance.

The price performance ratio of AMD is just better, nobody cares about some weird extension if i can have a Threadripper with a bazillion cores for less money doing the same stuff. Even only for marketing reasons.

And GPUs stole the vector cake years ago anyway.

Re: What's wrong with Intel, and how to fix it: Former principal engineer unloads

#47

Post by fmajid »

tails4e wrote: post #24

I've always wondered, if I compile an application and don't specify the architecture as explicitly having AVX, just say x86 64bit, will alternate code paths be in the binary for processors with AVX? Or alternatively, if I do specify AVX support on the command line, then what happens if the binary runs on a CPU without AVX? The reason I ask is I use commercial tools for circuit simulation, and they run on a wide range…

Your libraries, e.g. BLAS may use it even if your own code doesn't.

Re: What's wrong with Intel, and how to fix it: Former principal engineer unloads

#48

Post by nicoburns »

fmajid wrote: post #45
glangdale wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Francois is a smart guy, but there's a range of opinions on the matters he raises. We argue a good deal on Twitter ("constructive confrontation" between former Intel Principal Engineers :-) ). He put together the video pretty quickly so don't dismiss it just for lack of polish. Personally, I argue with him a lot on AVX-512. I think AVX-512 is a Good Thing (or will be shortly - the first instantiation in Skylake Serve…

Doesn't AVX-512 have a problem with frequency scaling? https://blog.cloudflare.com/on-the-dangers-of-intels-frequen... https://travisdowns.github.io/blog/2020/01/17/avxfreq1.html Given this, and the fact Ryzen doesn't support AVX-512, I would be very wary of the technology.

From the comment you are replying to:

> The biggest meta-problem with AVX-512 is that due to process issues, the pause button got hit just as it appeared in a server-only, 'first cut' form. AVX2 had downclocking issues when it first appeared too - but these were rapidly mitigated and forgotten.

Re: What's wrong with Intel, and how to fix it: Former principal engineer unloads

#50

Post by tremon »

BeeOnRope wrote: post #16
FullyFunctional wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure AVX-512 is wonderful and you can easily produce examples where it makes loops go N times faster. That unfortunately is missing the point. Microprocessors implementation is an extremely careful balance and effectively everything is a trade off. The area, power, and complexity of features comes at a non-zero cost to code that doesn't use it. The fact that AVX-512 isn't on every processor AND the performance be…

I'm not missing the point as I was responding to whether AVX-512 is useful in practice. It is. It is some badly designed extensions where the earlier ones were great: it's arguably better than the earlier ones. Now adoption has been poor and there is a chicken-and-egg effect as you point out, but that's separate from the question of whether AVX-512 is useful in practice. It is. The point about tradeoffs is well taken…

To me it looks like you and the GP just have different definitions of "in practice". Your definition of "in practice" seems to exclude the (general) availability of these extensions, whereas the GP's definition specifically includes them: if, as a developer, you can't rely on certain features being available, you're forced to optimize for the non-AVX512 case anyway, and any time spent exclusively on AVX512 is additional cost for a small audience.

So, whether the instructions themselves are any good then is of secondary concern because of the other problems of Intel's own making, and you both seem to be in agreement about those.

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