Previous discussion 9 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41353155
Top researchers leave Intel to build startup with 'the biggest, baddest CPU'
91–100 of 142 posts
Re: Top researchers leave Intel to build startup with 'the biggest, baddest CPU'
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not the GPU I want per se but its ability to run ML tasks. If you can do that with your CPU fine!
Echoing the other comment, this isn't easier. I was on a team that did it. The ML team was overheard by media complaining that we were preventing them from achieving their goals because we had taken 2 years to build something that didn't beat the latest hardware from Nvidia, let alone keep pace with how fast their demands had grown.
I don't need it to beat the latest from nvidia, just be affordable, available, and have user servicable ram slots so "48gb" isn't such an ooo-ahh amount of memory
I couldn't find any buy it now links but 512gb sticks don't seem to be fantasies, either: https://news.samsung.com/global/samsung-develops-industrys-f...
Re: Top researchers leave Intel to build startup with 'the biggest, baddest CPU'
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Echoing the other comment, this isn't easier. I was on a team that did it. The ML team was overheard by media complaining that we were preventing them from achieving their goals because we had taken 2 years to build something that didn't beat the latest hardware from Nvidia, let alone keep pace with how fast their demands had grown.
I don't need it to beat the latest from nvidia, just be affordable, available, and have user servicable ram slots so "48gb" isn't such an ooo-ahh amount of memory I couldn't find any buy it now links but 512gb sticks don't seem to be fantasies, either: https://news.samsung.com/global/samsung-develops-industrys-f...
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Re: Top researchers leave Intel to build startup with 'the biggest, baddest CPU'
#94One 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?
Look up "CPU die diagram". You'll see the physical layout of the CPU with annotated blocks.
Zen 3 example: https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/jqjg8e/quick_zen3_die_...
So, more like 85%, or around 6 orders of magnitude difference from your guess. ;)
Re: Top researchers leave Intel to build startup with 'the biggest, baddest CPU'
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 mappe…
A spin-out to reacquire. I've seen a lot of outsourcing innovation via startups with much the same effects as skunk works. People at the main company become demoralized that the only way to get anything done is to leave the company, why solve a problem internally when you can do it externally for a whole more money and recognition. The causes brain drain to the point that the execs at the main company become suspicious of anyone who choses to remain long term. It even gets to the point that even after you're acquired it's better to leave and do it over again because the execs will forget you were acquired and start confusing you with their lifers.
The only way I've seen anyone deal with this issue successfully is with rather small companies which don't have nearly as much of the whole agency cost of management to deal with.
Re: Top researchers leave Intel to build startup with 'the biggest, baddest CPU'
#96Earlier 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.
That might have been true in the early 2000s when they were growing the Hillsborough Oregon campus but most new fabs are opening in Arizona for taxation and political reasons. I don't have the numbers to back it up, but based on articles about Intel layoffs I believe that Intel has been shedding jobs in Oregon for a while now.
This wiki page has a list of Intel fab starts, you can see them being constructed in Oregon until 2013, and after that all new construction moved elsewhere. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_manufacturing_si...
I can imagine this slow disinvestment in Oregon would only encourage some architects to quit an found a RISC-V startup.
Re: Top researchers leave Intel to build startup with 'the biggest, baddest CPU'
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That might have been true in the early 2000s when they were growing the Hillsborough Oregon campus but most new fabs are opening in Arizona for taxation and political reasons. I don't have the numbers to back it up, but based on articles about Intel layoffs I believe that Intel has been shedding jobs in Oregon for a while now. This wiki page has a list of Intel fab starts, you can see them being constructed in Oregon…
I am saying that all this stuff should have never left the bay area, and the bay area should have millions more people than it does today.
Arizona is also a mistake --- a far worse place for high tech than Oregon!. It is a desert real estate ponzi scheme with no top-tier schools, no history of top-tier high-skill intellectual job markets. In general the sun belt (including LA) is the land of stupid.
The electoral college is always winning out over the best economic geography, and it sucks.
Re: Top researchers leave Intel to build startup with 'the biggest, baddest CPU'
#98One 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.
Huh, consumer GPUs are doing Petaflops of floating point. FP64 isn't a useful comparison because FP64 is nerfed on consumer GPUs.
Re: Top researchers leave Intel to build startup with 'the biggest, baddest CPU'
#99I 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…
Check out the Azure HBv5 servers.
High bandwidth memory on-package with 352 AMD Zen 4 cores!
With 7 TB/s memory bandwidth, it’s basically an x86 GPU.
This is the future of high performance computing. It used to be available only for supercomputers but it’s trickling down to cloud VMs you can rent for reasonable money. Eventually it’ll be standard for workstations under your desk.
Re: Top researchers leave Intel to build startup with 'the biggest, baddest CPU'
#100Earlier 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.
Huh, consumer GPUs are doing Petaflops of floating point. FP64 isn't a useful comparison because FP64 is nerfed on consumer GPUs.
Even recent nVidia 5090 has 104.75 TFLOPS FP32.
It's useful comparison in terms of achievable performance per transistor count.