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Intel CEO: 'The entire industry is motivated to eliminate the CUDA market'

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Re: Intel CEO: 'The entire industry is motivated to eliminate the CUDA market'

#371

Post by tester756 »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #296
tester756 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>finds a CEO who is as technical and strategic, as opposed to the bean-counters Did you just call Gelsinger a "non-technical"? wow, how out of touch with reality >Gelsinger first joined Intel at 18 years old in 1979 just after earning an associate degree from Lincoln Tech.[9] He spent much of his career with the company in Oregon,[12] where he maintains a home.[13] In 1987, he co-authored his first book about program…

Gelsinger is a typical hardware engineer out of his depth competing against what is effctively a software play. This is a recurring theme in the industry where you have successful hardware companies with strong hardware focused leadership fail over time because they don't get software. I used to work at Nokia Research. The problem was on full display during the period Apple made it's entry into mobile. We had plenty…

>Gelsinger is a typical hardware engineer out of his depth competing against what is effctively a software play. This is a recurring theme in the industry where you have successful hardware companies with strong hardware focused leadership fail over time because they don't get software.

He spent almost decade on VMware which is... software company that significantly grew during his time

>just like they failed to get into the mobile market (they tried, with Nokia even), their efforts to enter this market are also crippled by their software ineptness.

Microsoft, which is software company failed at it too.

Re: Intel CEO: 'The entire industry is motivated to eliminate the CUDA market'

#372

Post by anon291 »

_8j50 wrote: post #269
anon291 wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cuds api and language are easy. Nvidia has dozens of cuda offshoot projects that are harder.

If it's easy why don't they support it instead of watch billions of dollars fly away I wonder. If whatever cuda program you build would run the same on intel or amd, do those offshoot projects really matter?

Hip is basically cudas language and is almost source compatible. I believe they have a tool to convert between them. Really minimal hit.

The problem is most people are using NVIDIA libraries which ship with proprietary binary blobs, so good luck running that on your AMD GPU. Until they make all these extra libraries as well, they're SOL.. NVIDIA has zero reason to port all their IP to AMD or Intel.

One would imagine that they already have internal ports of their software to both these platforms to do benchmarking. Again, the technical problem is simply one of software.

Going back to the topic at hand. CUDA language and runtime are easy. Both amd and Intel have competitors here. They don't have the libs. The libraries contain thousands of variants of hand optimized code. Good luck.

Re: Intel CEO: 'The entire industry is motivated to eliminate the CUDA market'

#373

Post by tw04 »

madaxe_again wrote: post #342
tw04 wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What exactly do you think Intel was going to write CUDA for? Their GPU products have been on the market less than 2 years, and they're still trying to get their arms wrapped around drivers. Them understanding what was coming doesn't mean they have a magic wand to instantly have a fully competitive product. You can't write a CUDA competitor until you've gotten the framework laid. The fact they invested so heavily in t…

That’s my point though - they’re catching up, not leading, which rather implies that they absolutely missed a beat, and don’t therefore understand where the market is going before it goes there.

“Nobody gets it’s the software”

If they didn’t get it’s the software, they wouldn’t catch up.

You didn’t say they were late to the party, you said they don’t understand what needs to happen. My point is they understand exactly what needs to happen they just didn’t have the technology to even start to tackle the problem until recently.

Re: Intel CEO: 'The entire industry is motivated to eliminate the CUDA market'

#374

Post by AnthonyMouse »

pjmlp wrote: post #366
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nah, POSIX on servers is only relevant enough for language runtimes and compilers, which then use their own package managers and cloud APIs for everything else. Those things are a different level of abstraction. The cloud API is making POSIX system calls under the hood, which would allow the implementation of the cloud API to be ported to different POSIX-compatible systems (if anybody cared to). > There is a reason…

Hardly as many recent TCP/IP features aren't fully exposed by POSIX socket API, rather OS specific APIs. Security and asynchronous servers are also hardly implemented with raw POSIX APIs. POSIX also doesn't have anything to say about hypervisors, containers, kubernetes infrastructure, or unikernels. Nor it says anything about infrastructure written in Go, Java, .NET, Rust, C++.

> Hardly as many recent TCP/IP features aren't fully exposed by POSIX socket API, rather OS specific APIs.

It's the same API. Some of the calls have OS-specific flags that can be passed as options. The way this often goes is that the flag then gets added to a future version of the standard.

> POSIX also doesn't have anything to say about hypervisors, containers, kubernetes infrastructure, or unikernels.

You keep listing different layers of abstraction. When the host goes to open the disk image file for the guest, pretty good chance it's using open(2) etc.

> Nor it says anything about infrastructure written in Go, Java, .NET, Rust, C++.

It's extremely common for C++ code to use C system calls directly, or thin wrappers around them, e.g. to have a socket class that calls close(2) in the destructor. Likewise for other languages:

https://docs.rs/posix-socket/latest/posix_socket/

You can say this "isn't POSIX" because the POSIX standard describes using it in C, but meanwhile the same library implementation and anything using it would be able to run on any POSIX system.

Re: Intel CEO: 'The entire industry is motivated to eliminate the CUDA market'

#375

Post by code_biologist »

krapp wrote: post #235
code_biologist wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Long ago, under a different account, I emailed dang about removing some comment content that became too identifying only years after the comments in question. He did so and was very gracious about it. dang, you're cool af and you make HN a great place!

You're being very obsequious about having to personally get approval from a moderator to do on your behalf something every other forum lets you do on your own by default.

Our ancestor commenter Qwertious wants a maximally immutable comment history and you advocate a maximally mutable comment history. Who's right?

There's a wide range of acceptable answers. Don't participate in a forum if you don't like their policy. Measured by overall forum quality HN has a decent enough approach.

Re: Intel CEO: 'The entire industry is motivated to eliminate the CUDA market'

#376

Post by natbennett »

tester756 wrote: post #370
natbennett wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you read carefully you’ll see the comment is “as technical and strategic.” That’s very different from “non-technical.” He was clearly capable of leading a team to develop a new processor but that’s not the issue here.

What makes you think that he is not strategic? I believe his vision/strategy is really sound

Again, if you read carefully you’ll see that the phrase is “as strategic.”

I’ll have to take your word for it on his vision/strategy though. I worked for him at VMware and never saw him articulate one.

Re: Intel CEO: 'The entire industry is motivated to eliminate the CUDA market'

#377

Post by alexey-salmin »

SilverBirch wrote: post #359
alexey-salmin wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Otellini wasn't an engineer but still he made the historical x86-mac deal, pushed like crazy for x86-android and owned the top500 with xeon phi. The downfall began with Krzanich who had no goal besides raising the stock price and no strategy other than cutting long-term projects and other costs that got in the way. What a shame.

>owned the top500 with xeon phi. This is interesting - because what I heard (within Intel at the time, circa 2015) was Xeon Phi was a disaster. The programming model was bad and they couldn't sell them.

It definitely had its downsides, but holding TOP1 for 6 lists (3 years straight) was an achievement. Biggest issues weren't in engineering IMO.

GPUs also have a weird programming model and yet here we are. I think in the end what mattered the most was the strategic failure to address the low-end market with Phi. When the right time came everyone did CUDA because everyone already had a GPU -- basically the same reason why x86 won the server market against SPARC decades ago.

In the meanwhile came the 2015 US export ban, then loss of interest by the management right before matrix multiplication stopped being an HPC problem and came into every segment in the form of ML.

Based on what we know now probably the best strategy was to bet everything on Intel Graphics and leverage the widespread of built-in graphics while it was dominated by Intel. From there it was possible to eat Nvidia's lunch in hi-end and HPC too. However in 2010 it wasn't certain at all. No one was talking about AI, the buzzword of the time was "big data" which relied on conventional computing methods. Deep learning revolution didn't happen yet, even GBDTs weren't a thing, ML was about linear regression. MPP architectures were confined to physics simulation and 3d graphics (which is a physics simulation of a sort).

Re: Intel CEO: 'The entire industry is motivated to eliminate the CUDA market'

#378

Post by alexey-salmin »

vkazanov wrote: post #310
jauntywundrkind wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They seemed exceedingly hard to use well but interestingly capable & full of promise. And they were made in a much more primitive software age. I'd love to hear about what didn't work. OpenMP support seemed ok maybe but OpenMP is just a platform, figuring out software architectures that's mechanistically sympathetic to the system is hard. It would be so interesting to see what Xeon Phi might have been if we had Calci…

Well... Back then in my shop they would just assign programmers to things, together with a couple of mathematicians. Math guys came up with a list of algorithms to try for a search engine backend. What we needed was matrix multiplication and maybe some decision tree walking (that was some time ago, trees were still big back then, NNs were seen as too compute-intensive for no clear benefits). So we thought that it mig…

By any chance, Yandex?

Re: Intel CEO: 'The entire industry is motivated to eliminate the CUDA market'

#379

Post by vkazanov »

alexey-salmin wrote: post #378
vkazanov wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well... Back then in my shop they would just assign programmers to things, together with a couple of mathematicians. Math guys came up with a list of algorithms to try for a search engine backend. What we needed was matrix multiplication and maybe some decision tree walking (that was some time ago, trees were still big back then, NNs were seen as too compute-intensive for no clear benefits). So we thought that it mig…

By any chance, Yandex?

Nope but close enough :-)

Re: Intel CEO: 'The entire industry is motivated to eliminate the CUDA market'

#380

Post by foobiekr »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #96
foobiekr wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just Intel. Open initiatives and consortiums (the phase two of the same) are always the losers ganging up hoping that it will give them the leg up they don't have. If you're older you'll have seen this play out over and over in the industry - the history of Unix vs. Windows NT from the 1990s was full of actions like this, networking is going through it again for the nth time (this time with UltraEthernet) an…

You're just listing the ones that didn't knock it out of the park. TCP/IP completely displaced IPX to the point that most people don't even remember what it was. Nobody uses WINS anymore, even Microsoft uses DNS. It's rare to find an operating system that doesn't implement the POSIX API. The past is littered with the corpses of proprietary technologies displaced by open standards. Because customers don't actually wan…

TCP/IP was neither a consortium nor an open initiative. You’re missing the critical point. When TCP showed up there weren’t losers or anything else. It has no relationship to the problem I am describing.

Routing is what killed IPX/SPX and that was going to happen anyway. I am a former Netware admin and it was the post-LAN environment that killed IPX as well as pre-IP NetBEUI and all the rest.

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