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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'

#81

Post by Ericson2314 »

Ericson2314 wrote: post #80
muricula wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://www.aheadcomputing.com/post/everyone-deserves-a-bett... sheesh, even the company's own writing is kinda folksy too.

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

#82

Post by pstuart »

cjbgkagh wrote: post #49
pstuart wrote: post #44

If Intel were smart (cough), they'd fund lots of skunkworks startups like this that could move quickly and freely, but then be "guided home" into intel once mature enough.

That creates a split between those who get to work on skunk works and those stuck on legacy. It’s very possible to end up with a google like situation where no-one wants to keep the lights on for old projects as doing so would be career suicide. There have been some attempts at other companies at requiring people to have a stake in multiple projects in different stages of the lifecycle but I’ve never seen a stable ve…

Those are valid problems, however, they are not insurmountable.

There's plenty of people who would be fine doing unexciting dead end work if they were compensated well enough (pay, work-life balance, acknowledgement of value, etc).

This is ye olde Creative Destruction dilemma. There's too much inertia and politics internally to make these projects succeed in house. But if a startup was owned by the org and they mapped out a path of how to absorb it after it takes off they then reap the rewards rather than watch yet another competitor eat their lunch.

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

#83

Post by touisteur »

wtallis wrote: post #78
otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wondering how you'd classify Gaudi, tenstorrent-stuff, groq, or lightmatter's photonic thing.

Calling something a GPU tends to make people ask for (good, performant) support for opengl, Vulkan, direct3d... which seem like a huge waste of effort if you want to be an "AI-coprocessor".

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

#84

Post by [deleted] »

zozbot234 wrote: post #71
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.

[deleted]

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

#85

Post by wtallis »

touisteur wrote: post #83
wtallis wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wondering how you'd classify Gaudi, tenstorrent-stuff, groq, or lightmatter's photonic thing. Calling something a GPU tends to make people ask for (good, performant) support for opengl, Vulkan, direct3d... which seem like a huge waste of effort if you want to be an "AI-coprocessor".

> Wondering how you'd classify Gaudi, tenstorrent-stuff, groq, or lightmatter's photonic thing.

Completely irrelevant to consumer hardware, in basically the same way as NVIDIA's Hopper (a data center GPU that doesn't do graphics). They're ML accelerators that for the foreseeable future will mostly remain discrete components and not be integrated onto Xeon/EPYC server CPUs. We've seen a handful of products where a small amount of CPU gets grafted onto a large GPU/accelerator to remove the need for a separate host CPU, but that's definitely not on track to kill off discrete accelerators in the datacenter space.

> Calling something a GPU tends to make people ask for (good, performant) support for opengl, Vulkan, direct3d... which seem like a huge waste of effort if you want to be an "AI-coprocessor".

This is not a problem outside the consumer hardware market.

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

#86

Post by kvemkon »

zozbot234 wrote: post #76
kvemkon wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ba…

Sure, not for BLAS Level 1 and 2 operations. But not even for Level 3?

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

#87

Post by mbreese »

pstuart wrote: post #44

If Intel were smart (cough), they'd fund lots of skunkworks startups like this that could move quickly and freely, but then be "guided home" into intel once mature enough.

Or fund a lot of CPU startups that were tied back to Intel for manufacturing/foundry work. Sure, they could be funding their next big CPU competitor, but they'd still be able to capture the revenue from actually producing the chips.

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

#88

Post by Szpadel »

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…

that's exactly why Intel proposed x86S

that's basically x86 without 16 and 32 bit support, no real mode etc.

CPU starts initialized in 64bit without all that legacy crap.

that's IMO great idea. I think every few decades we need to stop and think again about what works best and take fresh start or drop some legacy unused features.

risc v have only mandatory basic set of instructions, as little as possible to be Turing complete and everything else is extension that can be (theoretically) removed in the future.

this also could be used to remove legacy parts without disrupting architecture

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

#89

Post by ahartmetz »

leetrout wrote: post #42
ahartmetz wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah sure, but the question remains if it's going to be a huge amount of small cores or a moderate amount of huge cores. What it can't be is something like the Mill if they implement the RISC-V ISA.

For those that don't know about the Mill see https://millcomputing.com/ I came to this thread looking for a comment about this. I've been patiently following along for over a decade now and I'm not optimistic anything will come from the project :(

Yeah, I guess not at this point, but the presentations were very interesting to watch. According to the yearly(!) updates on their website, they are still going but not really close to finishing a product. Hm.

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

#90

Post by saati »

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…

But history showed exactly the opposite, if you don't have an already existing software ecosystem you are dead, the transistors for implementing x86 peculiarities are very much worth it if people in the market want x86.
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