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Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

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Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#321

Post by stonogo »

quotemstr wrote: post #271
cogman10 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, what both companies would need to be competitive in the GPU sector is a cuda killer. That's perhaps the one benefit of merging Antel can more easily standardize something.

There are already packages that let people run CUDA programs unmodified on other GPUs: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40970560 For whatever reason, people just delete these tools from their minds, then claim Nvidia still has a monopoly on CUDA.

Those packages only really perform with low-precision work. For scientific computing, using anything but CUDA is a painful workflow. DOE has been deploying AMD and Intel alternatives in their leadership class machines and it's been a pretty bad speedbump.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#322

Post by Wytwwww »

kgeist wrote: post #307
Wytwwww wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Individual Russian software developers might be reliable but that's hardly the point. They should've just moved them to US or even Germany or something like that if they were serious about entering the GPU market, though... e.g. There are plenty of talented engineers in China as well but it would be severely idiotic for any western company to move their core R&D there. Same applied to Russia.

Well, Intel Russia opened in 2000 back when USA and Russia were on good terms, and Putin was relatively unknown. Sure it was a mistake in hindsight...

I doubt they began working on ARC/XE drivers back in 2000. If the entire driver team being in Russia (i.e. Intel trying to save money) was truly the main reason why ARC failed on launch they really only have themselves to blame...

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#323

Post by badsandwitch »

tonyhart7 wrote: post #215
etempleton wrote: post #64

I feel like this is a mistake. Pat's strategy is aggressive but what the company needs. Intel's stock is jumping at this announcement, but I look at it as a bad signal for Intel 18a. If 18a was looking to be a smash hit then I don't think Pat gets retired. If 18a is a success then it is an even more short-sighted decision by the board. What this likely means is two-fold: 1. Intel 18a is being delayed further and/or t…

US government wouldn't let intel down, this is matter of national security (only grown semiconductor fabs left on US soil) and edge of US tech dominance

When that happens typically the company starts optimizing for sucking money from the government. From the point of view of the consumer Intel would be finished.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#324

Post by throw0101a »

Octoth0rpe wrote: post #170
xbar wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like to address the aside for completeness' sake. An x86 monopoly in the late 80s was a thing, but not now. Today, there are sufficient competitive chip architectures with cross-compatible operating systems and virtualization that x86 does not represent control of the computing market in a manner that should prevent such a merger: ARM licensees, including the special case of Apple Silicon, Snapdragon, NVIDIA SOCs…

> An x86 monopoly in the late 80s was a thing, but not now. I think you're off by 20 years on this. In the 80s and early 90s we had reasonable competition from 68k, powerpc, and arm on desktops; and tons of competition in the server space (mips, sparc, power, alpha, pa-risc, edit: and vax!). It wasn't till the early 2000s that both the desktop/server space coalesced around x86.

> It wasn't till the early 2000s that both the desktop/server space coalesced around x86.

A lot of companies killed off their in-house architectures and hopped on the Itanium bandwagon. The main two exceptions were Sun and IBM.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#325

Post by dzdt »

quotemstr wrote: post #271
cogman10 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, what both companies would need to be competitive in the GPU sector is a cuda killer. That's perhaps the one benefit of merging Antel can more easily standardize something.

There are already packages that let people run CUDA programs unmodified on other GPUs: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40970560 For whatever reason, people just delete these tools from their minds, then claim Nvidia still has a monopoly on CUDA.

And which of these have the level of support that would let a company put a multi-million dollar project on top of?

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#326

Post by kllrnohj »

mort96 wrote: post #256
kllrnohj wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> where ARM is also increasingly making inroads with more efficient designs that deliver comparable performance. ARM isn't doing any such thing. Apple & Qualcomm are, though. ARM itself if anything looks weak. Their mobile cores have stagnated, their laptop attempts complete failures, and while there's hints of life in data center it also seems mediocre overall.

This feels a bit pedantic. ARM-the-CPU-architecture is increasingly making inroads with more efficient designs that deliver comparable performance to Intel's x86 chips, thanks to Apple and Qualcomm. ARM-the-holding-company is not doing that, they just make mediocre designs and own IP.

The post I was replying to had 3 other companies mentioned or referred to (INTC, AMD, and NVDA), it seems odd that they'd suddenly have meant ARM-the-ISA instead of ARM-the-company when ISA wasn't otherwise being discussed at all.

But even if they meant ARM-the-ISA, that'd still put it in a fragile position when the 2 clear market leaders in the ARM-the-ISA space have no particular allegiance to ARM-the-ISA (Apple having changed ISAs several times already, and QCOM both being active in RISC-V and also being sued by ARM-the-company)

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#327

Post by ur-whale »

pbalcer wrote: post #296
gpapilion wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They weren’t interested in creating an open solution. Both intel and AMD have been somewhat short sighted and looked to recreate their own cuda, and the mistrust of each other has prevented them from a solution for both of them.

Disclaimer: I work on this stuff for Intel At least for Intel, that is just not true. Intel's DPC++ is as open as it gets. It implements a Khronos standard (SYCL), most of the development is happening in public on GitHub, it's permissively licensed, it has a viable backend infrastructure (with implementations for both CUDA and HIP). There's also now a UXL foundation with the goal of creating an "open standard acceler…

Actual links to the github would be much appreciated, as well a half-page tuto on how to get this up an running on a simple Linux+Intel setup.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#328

Post by Wytwwww »

mort96 wrote: post #320
Wytwwww wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The existence of an imaginary x86 monopoly in the 80s?

Oh, but xbar's interpretation of the phrase "x86 monopoly" is clearly the x86 architecture having a monopoly in the instruction set market. Under that interpretation, I don't really think it's relevant how many companies made x86 chips. I don't think xbar is necessarily wrong, I just think they're interpreting words to mean something they weren't intended so they're not making an effective argument

Did x86 have a monopoly in the 80s to begin with? If there is any period when that was true it would be the 2000s or early 2010s.

> intended so they're not making an effective argument

To be fair I'm really struggling to somehow connect the "x86 monopoly in the late 80s" with the remainder of their comment (which certainly makes sense).

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#329

Post by twoodfin »

etempleton wrote: post #228
orenlindsey wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people on this thread are underestimating how much of a hold Intel has on the chips industry. In my experience, Intel is synonymous with computer chip for the average person. Most people wouldn't be able to tell you what AMD does differently, they'd just say they're a knockoff Intel. Technologically, both companies are neck and neck. But for the average person, it's not even close.

People miss this. A lot of people will only buy Intel. Businesses and IT departments rarely buy AMD, not just out of brand loyalty, but because of the software and hardware features Intel deploys that are catered to the business market.

Intel’s board is (or should be!) in exactly the right position to assess whether this dam is springing leaks. (It is.)

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#330

Post by mandevil »

Wytwwww wrote: post #216
menaerus wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last report I read it was ~80% (Intel) vs ~20% (AMD) for PC market. And ~75% (Intel) vs ~25% (AMD) for data center servers.

> And ~75% (Intel) vs ~25% (AMD) for data center servers. IIRC their data center CPU revenue was about even this quarter so this is a bit deceptive (i.e. you can buy 1 large CPU instead of several cheaper ones).

I think data center revenue was in AMD's favor because AMD is second (obviously far behind NVidia) and Intel is third in AI accelerators, which both companies include in their data center numbers. So that pushes things in AMD's favor. I think on data center CPU's alone Intel is still ahead.
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