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Intel Gaudi 3 AI Accelerator

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Re: Intel Gaudi 3 AI Accelerator

#111

Post by mk_stjames »

One nice thing about this (and the new offerings from AMD) is that they will be using the "open accelerator module (OAM)" interface- which standardizes the connector that they use to put them on baseboards, similar to the SXM connections of Nvidia that use MegArray connectors to thier baseboards.

With Nvidia, the SXM connection pinouts have always been held proprietary and confidential. For example, P100's and V100's have standard PCI-e lanes connected to one of the two sides of their MegArray connectors, and if you know that pinout you could literally build PCI-e cards with SXM2/3 connectors to repurpose those now obsolete chips (this has been done by one person).

There are thousands, maybe tens of thousands of P100's you could pickup for literally I'm one of those people who finds 'retro-super-computing' a cool hobby and thus the interfaces like OAM being open means that these devices may actually have a life for hobbyists in 8~10 years instead of being sent directly to the bins due to secret interfaces and obfuscated backplane specifications.

Re: Intel Gaudi 3 AI Accelerator

#112

Post by alexey-salmin »

mrybczyn wrote: post #89
alexey-salmin wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh dear, Q6600 was so bad, I regret ever owning it

What? It was outstanding for the time, great price performance, and very tunable for clock / voltage IIRC.

Well overclocked I don't know, but out-of-the box single-core performance completely sucked. And in 2007 not enough applications had threads to make it up in the number of cores.

It was fun to play with but you'd also expect the higher-end desktop to e.g. handle x264 videos which was not the case (search for q6600 on videolan forum). And depressingly many cheaper CPUs of the time did it easily.

Re: Intel Gaudi 3 AI Accelerator

#113

Post by Dalewyn »

calaphos wrote: post #96
JonChesterfield wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is one of the secret recipes of Intel Any other examples of this? I remember the secret sauce being a process advantage over the competition, exactly the opposite of making old tech outperform the state of the art.

Intels surprisingly fast 14nm processors come to mind. Born of necessity as they couldn't get their 10 and later 7nm processes working for years. Despite that Intel managed to keep up in single core performance with newer 7nm AMD chips, although at a mich higher power draw.

Or today with Alder Lake and Raptor Lake(Refresh), where their CPUs made on Intel 7 (10nm) are on par if not slightly better than AMD's offerings made on TSMC 5nm.

Re: Intel Gaudi 3 AI Accelerator

#114

Post by alexey-salmin »

PcChip wrote: post #84
alexey-salmin wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh dear, Q6600 was so bad, I regret ever owning it

Really? I never owned one but even I remember the famous SLACR, I thought they were the hot item back then

It was "hot" but using one as a main desktop in 2007 was depressing due to abysmal single-core performance.

Re: Intel Gaudi 3 AI Accelerator

#115

Post by JonChesterfield »

mk_stjames wrote: post #111

One nice thing about this (and the new offerings from AMD) is that they will be using the "open accelerator module (OAM)" interface- which standardizes the connector that they use to put them on baseboards, similar to the SXM connections of Nvidia that use MegArray connectors to thier baseboards. With Nvidia, the SXM connection pinouts have always been held proprietary and confidential. For example, P100's and V100's…

I really like this side to AMD. There's a strategic call somewhere high up to bias towards collaboration with other companies. Sharing the fabric specifications with broadcom was an amazing thing to see. It's not out of the question that we'll see single chips with chiplets made by different companies attached together.

Re: Intel Gaudi 3 AI Accelerator

#116

Post by astrodust »

kylixz wrote: post #53

This is a bit snarky — but will Intel actually keep this product line alive for more than a few years? Having been bitten by building products around some of their non-x86 offerings where they killed good IP off and then failed to support it… I’m skeptical. I truly do hope it is successful so we can have some alternative accelerators.

I hope it pairs well with Optane modules!

Re: Intel Gaudi 3 AI Accelerator

#117

Post by astrodust »

chucke1992 wrote: post #98
alexey-salmin wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh dear, Q6600 was so bad, I regret ever owning it

Q6600 was quite good but E8400 was the best.

Q6600 is the spiritual successor to the ABIT BP6 Dual Celeron option: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABIT_BP6

Re: Intel Gaudi 3 AI Accelerator

#118

Post by JonChesterfield »

ZoomerCretin wrote: post #106
geertj wrote: post #103

I wonder if someone knowledgeable could comment on OneAPI vs Cuda. I feel like if Intel is going to be a serious competitor to Nvidia, both software and hardware are going to be equally important.

I'm not familiar with the particulars of OneAPI, but it's just a matter of rewriting CUDA kernels into OneAPI. This is pretty trivial for the vast majority of small (<5 LoC) kernels. Unlike AMD, it looks like they're serious about dogfooding their own chips, and they have a much better reputation for their driver quality.

All the dev work at AMD is on our own hardware. Even things like the corporate laptops are ryzen based. The first gen ryzen laptop I got was terrible but it wasn't intel. We also do things like develop ROCm on the non-qualified cards and build our tools with our tools. It would be crazy not to.

Re: Intel Gaudi 3 AI Accelerator

#119

Post by AnthonyMouse »

jtriangle wrote: post #66
kylixz wrote: post #53

This is a bit snarky — but will Intel actually keep this product line alive for more than a few years? Having been bitten by building products around some of their non-x86 offerings where they killed good IP off and then failed to support it… I’m skeptical. I truly do hope it is successful so we can have some alternative accelerators.

The real question is, how long does it actually have to hang around really? With the way this market is going, it probably only has to be supported in earnest for a few years by which point it'll be so far obsolete that everyone who matters will have moved on.

We're talking about the architecture, not the hardware model. What people want is to have a new, faster version in a few years that will run the same code written for this one.

Also, hardware has a lifecycle. At some point the old hardware isn't worth running in a large scale operation because it consumes more in electricity to run 24/7 than it would cost to replace with newer hardware. But then it falls into the hands of people who aren't going to run it 24/7, like hobbyists and students, which as a manufacturer you still want to support because that's how you get people to invest their time in your stuff instead of a competitor's.

Re: Intel Gaudi 3 AI Accelerator

#120

Post by alecco »

ZoomerCretin wrote: post #106
geertj wrote: post #103

I wonder if someone knowledgeable could comment on OneAPI vs Cuda. I feel like if Intel is going to be a serious competitor to Nvidia, both software and hardware are going to be equally important.

I'm not familiar with the particulars of OneAPI, but it's just a matter of rewriting CUDA kernels into OneAPI. This is pretty trivial for the vast majority of small (<5 LoC) kernels. Unlike AMD, it looks like they're serious about dogfooding their own chips, and they have a much better reputation for their driver quality.

Trivial??
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