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Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

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Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#541

Post by bluGill »

burnte wrote: post #433
bluGill wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe in the 80s all those vendors were making the same intel design in their own fab. I don't think any of them did the design on their own. In the 90s some of them had their own designs.

Some were straight second sources but they all had the license to do what NEC, AMD, and OKI did, which is alter the design and sell these variants. They all started doing that with the 8086. There were variants of the 8086, 8088, and 80186, I'm unaware of variants of the 80188, or 80286 although there were still multiple manufacturers, I had a Harris 286 at 20MHz myself. Then with the 386 there were more custom varia…

At what point do we call a tweak to an original design different enough to count it... K5 and K6 where clearly new designs. The others were mostly intel with some changes. I'm going to count the rest as minor tweaks and not worth counting otherwise - but this is a case where you can argue there the line is and so others need to decide where they stand (if they care)

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#542

Post by [deleted] »

badsandwitch wrote: post #323
tonyhart7 wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#543

Post by ryao »

7speter wrote: post #427
paulpan wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disagree on "failed on GPU" as it depends on the goal. Sure Intel GPUs are inferior to both Nvidia and AMD flagship offerings, but they're competitive at a price-to-performance ratio. I'd argue for a 1st gen product, it was quite successful at opening up the market and enabling for cross-selling opportunities with its CPUs. That all said, I suspect the original intent was to fabricate the GPUs on IFS instead of TSMC…

The issue with the GPUs is that their transistor to performance ratio is poor. The A770 has as many transistors as about a 3070ti but only performs as well as a 3060 (3060ti on a good day). So with that, they are outsourcing production of these chips to TSMC and using nearly cutting edge processes (battlemage is being announced tomorrow and will use either TSMC 5 or 4), and the dies are pretty large. That means they…

The A770 actually has more transistors than the RTX 3070 Ti:

RTX 3070 Ti: 17,400 million transistors

A770: 21,700 million transistors

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/geforce-rtx-3070-ti.c3...

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/arc-a770.c3914

It has taken Nvidia decades to figure out how to use transistors as efficiently as it does. It was unlikely for Intel to come close with their first discrete GPU in decades.

That said, it is possible that better drivers would increase A770 performance, although I suspect that reaching parity with the RTX 3070 Ti would be a fantasy. The RTX 3070 Ti has both more compute and more memory bandwidth. The only advantage the A770 has on its side is triple the L2 cache.

To make matters worse for Intel, I am told that games tend to use vendor specific extensions to improve shader performance and those extensions are of course not going to be available to Intel GPUs running the same game. I am under the impression that this is one of the reasons why DXVK cannot outperform the Direct3D native stack on Nvidia GPUs. The situation is basically what Intel did to AMD with its compiler and the MKL in reverse.

In specific, information in these extensions is here:

https://gpuopen.com/amd-gpu-services-ags-library/ https://developer.nvidia.com/rtx/path-tracing/nvapi/get-star...

Also, I vaguely recall that Doom Eternal used some AMD extension that was later incorporated into vulkan 1.1, but unless ID Software updated it, only AMD GPUs will be using that. I remember seeing AMD advertising the extension years ago, but I cannot find a reference when I search for it now. I believe the DXVK developers would know what it is if asked, as they are the ones that told me about it (as per my recollection).

Anyway, Intel entered the market with the cards stacked against it because of these extensions. On the bright side, it is possible for Intel to level the playing field by implementing the Vulkan extensions that its competitors use to get an edge, but that will not help it in Direct3D performance. I am not sure if it is possible for Intel to implement those as they are tied much more closely with their competitors’ drivers. That said, this is far from my area of expertise.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#544

Post by tonyhart7 »

hn3er1q wrote: post #492
tonyhart7 wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> only grown semiconductor fabs left on US soil not sure what a "grown" semiconductor fab is but follow this link and sort by location https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricat... The number of homegrown companies with fabs is greater than 1

okay, I forgot about texas instruments but lets not kidding ourselves here Intel is literally run pretty much (consumer and bussiness) the most here

it would create so much loses not just by security but also effect on economy would be so high

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#545

Post by AdrianB1 »

mylies43 wrote: post #408
microtonal wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Broadcom/Apple takeover of Intel sounds much more reasonable. Out of curiosity, what would make Intel interesting to Apple? Apple already acquired Intel's modem business and they have their own CPU and GPU.

Maybe for the fabs? It might be attractive for Apple to move production state side via Intels fabs but on the other hand I don't think Intels fabs can do what Apple wants

That would work if the fabs were competitive. For Apple, they are technologically behind.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#546

Post by AdrianB1 »

leptons wrote: post #524
alternatex wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>In the mean time, AMD/ARM already won phones, table and game consoles. Don't forget laptops. Intel has been terrible on laptops due to their lack of efficiency. AMD has been wiping the floor with them for years now. 2024 is the first year that Intel has released a laptop chip that can compete in efficiency. I hope Intel continues to invest in this category and remain neck and neck with AMD if we have any hope of hav…

I doubt most people actually care about efficiency in a laptop. My wife is my anecdotal example. She's had a mac for years but refuses to give Apple one more penny because they've been awful - had to replace her previous laptop motherboard 7 times until we finally had to sue Apple in a class action which resulted in them sending her current 2015 MBP, which has now aged-out of MacOS updates. Sucks that this computer i…

There is another angle at power efficiency: my work laptop is so bad, moderate load makes the fan spin and higher load creates a very annoying noise due to the cooling needs. All these while performance is far from stellar (compared to my desktop).

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#547

Post by rich_sasha »

tasuki wrote: post #493
PaulHoule wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intel GFX held back the industry 10 years. If people thought Windows Vista sucked it was because Intel "supported" it by releasing integrated GPUs which could almost handle Windows Vista but not quite. The best they could do with the GFX business is a public execution. We've been hearing about terrible Intel GFX for 15 years and how they are just on the cusp of making one that is bad (not terrible). Most people who'v…

> If people thought Windows Vista sucked it was because Intel "supported" it by releasing integrated GPUs which could almost handle Windows Vista but not quite. What does an OS need a GPU for? My current laptop only has integrated Intel GPU. I'm not missing Nvidia, with its proprietary drivers, high power consumption, and corresponding extra heat and shorter battery life...

There's a fancy terminal emulator written in Rust that uses GPU acceleration. I mean, it is emulating a needlepoint printer...

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#548

Post by georgeecollins »

hedora wrote: post #213
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.

Marketing campaigns only go so far. They’ve been riding the “Intel Inside” slogan for 25 years. In the mean time, AMD/ARM already won phones, table and game consoles. Server purchasing decisions aren’t made by everyday people. Intel’s roadmap in that space slipped year for year for at least 10 of the last 15 years. That leaves Intel with the fraction of the non-mac laptop market that’s made up of people that haven’t…

I work in video games and I think it is still sometimes a problem to use computers that are not based on x86 processors, both in the tool chains and software /engines. People here say that Intel has lost out on consoles and laptops, but in gaming that is because of x86 compatible AMD chips. Apple laptops were good for gaming when they had x86 and could duel boot. I see bugs people report on games made for Macs with x86 that don't work quite right with an Mx chip (though not a huge number).

A friend who worked in film post production was telling me about similar rare but annoying problems with Mx Apple computers. I feel like their are verticals where people will favor x86 chips for a while yet.

I am not as close to this as I was when I actually programmed games (oh so long ago!) so I wonder if this is just the point of view of a person who has lost touch with trends in tech.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#549

Post by downvotetruth »

fancyfredbot wrote: post #526
downvotetruth wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the B770 16GB gone and the idea for the B580 to be cheaper than current 7600 XT @ 16 GB by cutting 4 GB makes Battlemage DOA. A gamer making an investment on a card for ~3 years cares less about spending ~$30 more vs being unable to run high resolution texture packs on a gimped GPU. The XMX cores are superior for AI for a month until Blackwell with smaller 2 and 4FP units, but a month is too little lead to overc…

Maybe you are right and Battlemage is DOA. Perhaps intel know that and just want to dump inventory before announcing they will get out of the GPU business. On the other hand, maybe not. My point is that although you might think they are going to divest the GPU business in future, we don't know that for sure and it's kind of weird to present it as having already happened.

Intel's Xe2 GPU architecture works well as an efficient iGPU and has market fit there. The problem is taking it the other way to discrete high end and data center rather than the opposite as NVidia has done with GPUs and AMD with CPUs. Using the low power consumer target to experiment on architecture and new nodes that then scales to the high end has been Intel's strategy ("efficiency" cores) is logical from a foundry perspective for monolithic chips. But Intel has failed to execute in the new AI data center investment reality. Where are the GPUs from Gaudi 3? Pat: "Putting AI into all the chips, not just ones in the cloud, might be more important in the long run" maybe, but failing to win where the money is at now is a huge barrier to surviving in that long run.
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