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Top researchers leave Intel to build startup with 'the biggest, baddest CPU'

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Re: Top researchers leave Intel to build startup with 'the biggest, baddest CPU'

#71

Post by zozbot234 »

zackmorris wrote: post #63

I hope they design, build and sell a true 256-1024+ multicore CPU with local memories that appears as an ordinary desktop computer with a unified memory space for under $1000. I've written about it at length and I'm sure that anyone who's seen my comments is sick of me sounding like a broken record. But there's truly a vast realm of uncharted territory there. I believe that transputers and reprogrammable logic chips…

If you have 256-1024+ multicore CPUs they will probably have a fake unified memory space that's really a lot more like NUMA underneath. Not too different from how GPU compute works under the hood. And it would let you write seamless parallel code by just using Rust.

Re: Top researchers leave Intel to build startup with 'the biggest, baddest CPU'

#72

Post by kvemkon »

kvemkon wrote: post #65
johnklos wrote: post #50

One of the biggest problems with CPUs is legacy. Tie yourself to any legacy, and now you're spending millions of transistors to make sure some way that made sense ages ago still works. Just as a thought experiment, consider the fact that the i80486 has 1.2 million transistors. An eight core Ryzen 9700X has around 12 billion. The difference in clock speed is roughly 80 times, and the difference in number of transistor…

Would be interesting to compare transistor count without L3 (and perhaps L2) cache. 16-core Zen 5 CPU achieves more than 2 TFLOPS FP64. So number crunching performance scaled very well. It is weird, that the best consumer GPU can 4 TFLOPS. Some years ago GPUs were an order of magnitude and more faster than CPUs. Today GPUs are likely to be artificially limited.

E.g. AMD Radeon PRO VII with 13.23 billion transistors achieves 6.5 TFLOPS FP64 in 2020 [1].

[1] https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/radeon-pro-vii.c3575

Re: Top researchers leave Intel to build startup with 'the biggest, baddest CPU'

#73

Post by constantcrying »

jmclnx wrote: post #4

>AheadComputing is betting on an open architecture called RISC-V I wish them success, plus I hope they do not do what Intel did with its add-ons. Hoping for an open system (which I think RISC-V is) and nothing even close to Intel ME or AMT. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Active_Management_Techno...

>Hoping for an open system (which I think RISC-V is) and nothing even close to Intel ME or AMT.

The architecture is independent of additional silicon with separate functions. The "only" thing which makes RISC-V open are that the specifications are freely available and freely usable.

Intel ME is, by design, separate from the actual CPU. Whether the CPU uses x86 or RISC-V is essentially irrelevant.

Re: Top researchers leave Intel to build startup with 'the biggest, baddest CPU'

#74

Post by saulpw »

asplake wrote: post #43
saulpw wrote: post #19

The traitorous four.

> The traitorous eight was a group of eight employees who left Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in 1957 to found Fairchild Semiconductor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitorous_eight

Thanks, I guess that particular history and analogy would not be known universally :)

Re: Top researchers leave Intel to build startup with 'the biggest, baddest CPU'

#75

Post by PopePompus »

epx wrote: post #69
johnklos wrote: post #50

One of the biggest problems with CPUs is legacy. Tie yourself to any legacy, and now you're spending millions of transistors to make sure some way that made sense ages ago still works. Just as a thought experiment, consider the fact that the i80486 has 1.2 million transistors. An eight core Ryzen 9700X has around 12 billion. The difference in clock speed is roughly 80 times, and the difference in number of transistor…

Aren't 99,99999% of these transistors used in cache?

Gosh no. Often a majority of the transistors are used in cache, but not 99%.

Re: Top researchers leave Intel to build startup with 'the biggest, baddest CPU'

#76

Post by zozbot234 »

kvemkon wrote: post #65
johnklos wrote: post #50

One of the biggest problems with CPUs is legacy. Tie yourself to any legacy, and now you're spending millions of transistors to make sure some way that made sense ages ago still works. Just as a thought experiment, consider the fact that the i80486 has 1.2 million transistors. An eight core Ryzen 9700X has around 12 billion. The difference in clock speed is roughly 80 times, and the difference in number of transistor…

Would be interesting to compare transistor count without L3 (and perhaps L2) cache. 16-core Zen 5 CPU achieves more than 2 TFLOPS FP64. So number crunching performance scaled very well. It is weird, that the best consumer GPU can 4 TFLOPS. Some years ago GPUs were an order of magnitude and more faster than CPUs. Today GPUs are likely to be artificially limited.

> 16-core Zen 5 CPU achieves more than 2 TFLOPS FP64. So number crunching performance scaled very well.

These aren't realistic numbers in most cases because you're almost always limited by memory bandwidth, and even if memory bandwidth is not an issue you'll have to worry about thermals. Theoretical CPU compute ceiling is almost never the real bottleneck. GPU's have a very different architecture with higher memory bandwidth and running their chips a lot slower and cooler (lower clock frequency) so they can reach much higher numbers in practical scenarios.

Re: Top researchers leave Intel to build startup with 'the biggest, baddest CPU'

#78

Post by wtallis »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #56
wtallis wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arithmetic co-processors didn't disappear so much as they moved onto the main CPU die. There were performance advantages to having the FPU on the CPU, and there were no longer significant cost advantages to having the FPU be separate and optional. For GPUs today and in the foreseeable future, there are still good reasons for them to remain discrete, in some market segments. Low-power laptops have already moved entire…

By "GPU" they probably mean "matrix multiplication coprocessor for AI tasks", not actually a graphics processor.

That doesn't really change anything. The use cases for a GPU in any given market segment don't change depending on whether you call it a GPU.

And for low-power consumer devices like laptops, "matrix multiplication coprocessor for AI tasks" is at least as likely to mean NPU as GPU, and NPUs are always integrated rather than discrete.

Re: Top researchers leave Intel to build startup with 'the biggest, baddest CPU'

#79

Post by mousethatroared »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #64
johnklos wrote: post #50

One of the biggest problems with CPUs is legacy. Tie yourself to any legacy, and now you're spending millions of transistors to make sure some way that made sense ages ago still works. Just as a thought experiment, consider the fact that the i80486 has 1.2 million transistors. An eight core Ryzen 9700X has around 12 billion. The difference in clock speed is roughly 80 times, and the difference in number of transistor…

> If a Ryzen takes 1,250 times the transistor for one core, does one core run 1,250 times (even taking hyperthreading in to account) faster than an i80486 at the same clock? 500 times? 100 times? Would be interesting to see a benchmark on this. If we restricted it to 486 instructions only, I'd expect the Ryzen to be 10-15x faster. The modern CPU will perform out-of-order execution with some instructions even run in p…

[dead]

Re: Top researchers leave Intel to build startup with 'the biggest, baddest CPU'

#80

Post by Ericson2314 »

muricula wrote: post #28
constantcrying wrote: post #10

The article is so bad. Why do they refuse to say anything about what these companies are actually trying to make. RISC-V Chips exist, does the journalist just not know? Does the company refuse to say what they are doing?

The article is written for a different audience than you might be used to. oregonlive is the website for the newspaper The Oregonian, which is the largest newspaper in the state of Oregon. Intel has many of its largest fabs in Oregon and is a big employer there. The local news is writing about a hip new startup for a non-technical audience who know what Intel is and why it's important, but need to be reminded what a…

TBH this is a bad sign about job sprawl.

The fact that California housing pushed Intel to Oregon probably helped lead to its failures. Every time a company relocates to get cost of living (and thus payroll) costs down by relocating to a place with fewer potential employees and fewer competing employers, modernity slams on the breaks.

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