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What's wrong with Intel, and how to fix it: Former principal engineer unloads

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Re: What's wrong with Intel, and how to fix it: Former principal engineer unloads

#101

Post by supernova87a »

glangdale wrote: post #28
supernova87a wrote: post #12

This is purely a total outsider's opinion, so I caveat that and please don't get all offended if I'm totally wrong. Sometimes it's really difficult to tell the difference between a crackpot theorist and a good equities analyst. Watching this guy's video, it's hard to tell which he comes off as more. He's just coherent and convincing enough that as an outsider I could believe his collection of observations. But the pr…

Francois is a smart guy, but there's a range of opinions on the matters he raises. We argue a good deal on Twitter ("constructive confrontation" between former Intel Principal Engineers :-) ). He put together the video pretty quickly so don't dismiss it just for lack of polish. Personally, I argue with him a lot on AVX-512. I think AVX-512 is a Good Thing (or will be shortly - the first instantiation in Skylake Serve…

Since you sound quite expert -- I would love to learn from you (or others), at a beginner's level:

Is the design + production of a chip an exercise in optimizing the combination of:

-- size of die (and therefore overall cost/yield?)

-- power consumption

-- number / type / purpose of compute and memory subcomponents packed into the area

-- speed

Is that basically the envelope that you're doing an optimization within, and until a technology jump, even Intel/AMD/ARM-based are all simply choosing values between these dimensions? And each different choice of parameters within these basically goes after a certain segment of user?

Thanks!

Re: What's wrong with Intel, and how to fix it: Former principal engineer unloads

#102

Post by tails4e »

glangdale wrote: post #30
tails4e wrote: post #24

I've always wondered, if I compile an application and don't specify the architecture as explicitly having AVX, just say x86 64bit, will alternate code paths be in the binary for processors with AVX? Or alternatively, if I do specify AVX support on the command line, then what happens if the binary runs on a CPU without AVX? The reason I ask is I use commercial tools for circuit simulation, and they run on a wide range…

Answer is generally no; you have to compile something with specific flags for a given architecture, and you will normally only get one path. There may be exceptions for some libraries which may do clever stuff, but generally you pick your level of machine support (usually low ) and live with it. Note that there are many new machines (Atoms and low-brand stuff like "Pentium" branded CPUs - even recent ones based on Co…

This is interesting, the use case I was thinking about is EDA SW, which is very expensive and performance (runtime) can be days in some cases. In the tool installs I only ever see i386 and x86_64. In curious if the EDA vendors have compiled for the lowest common denomnator for these two basic architectures. If so it would seem like they are leaving a lot of performance potential on the table. Is there any tool that explores and executable and reports if vector instructions are present and follows dependencies (like ldd)?

Re: What's wrong with Intel, and how to fix it: Former principal engineer unloads

#103

Post by tuatoru »

PaulHoule wrote: post #86
supernova87a wrote: post #12

This is purely a total outsider's opinion, so I caveat that and please don't get all offended if I'm totally wrong. Sometimes it's really difficult to tell the difference between a crackpot theorist and a good equities analyst. Watching this guy's video, it's hard to tell which he comes off as more. He's just coherent and convincing enough that as an outsider I could believe his collection of observations. But the pr…

A curious aspect of this is that Intel has been doing very well financially despite having been failing technologically for a long time (if you buy the old story that Intel's process lead was at the center of it's market leadership.) High-volume production helped Intel crush SPARC, Alpha and most of other other high-end CPU architectures in the 1990s. Today ARM is the volume leader that threatens to overtake Intel in…

> A curious aspect of this is that Intel has been doing very well financially despite having been failing technologically for a long time.

So did IBM, for a long time. Current revenues are the product of past effort.

Re: What's wrong with Intel, and how to fix it: Former principal engineer unloads

#104

Post by tuatoru »

glangdale wrote: post #28
supernova87a wrote: post #12

This is purely a total outsider's opinion, so I caveat that and please don't get all offended if I'm totally wrong. Sometimes it's really difficult to tell the difference between a crackpot theorist and a good equities analyst. Watching this guy's video, it's hard to tell which he comes off as more. He's just coherent and convincing enough that as an outsider I could believe his collection of observations. But the pr…

Francois is a smart guy, but there's a range of opinions on the matters he raises. We argue a good deal on Twitter ("constructive confrontation" between former Intel Principal Engineers :-) ). He put together the video pretty quickly so don't dismiss it just for lack of polish. Personally, I argue with him a lot on AVX-512. I think AVX-512 is a Good Thing (or will be shortly - the first instantiation in Skylake Serve…

> partly due to Intel's fecklessness in promoting SIMD - including gratuitous fragmentation - e.g. a new Comet Lake machine with Pentium branding doesn't even suport AVX2 and has it fused off

So, Intel's problem is that it is now run by marketing droids, not engineers.

Re: What's wrong with Intel, and how to fix it: Former principal engineer unloads

#105

Post by glangdale »

supernova87a wrote: post #101
glangdale wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Francois is a smart guy, but there's a range of opinions on the matters he raises. We argue a good deal on Twitter ("constructive confrontation" between former Intel Principal Engineers :-) ). He put together the video pretty quickly so don't dismiss it just for lack of polish. Personally, I argue with him a lot on AVX-512. I think AVX-512 is a Good Thing (or will be shortly - the first instantiation in Skylake Serve…

Since you sound quite expert -- I would love to learn from you (or others), at a beginner's level: Is the design + production of a chip an exercise in optimizing the combination of: -- size of die (and therefore overall cost/yield?) -- power consumption -- number / type / purpose of compute and memory subcomponents packed into the area -- speed Is that basically the envelope that you're doing an optimization within,…

I am not a hardware design expert, but... yes. Everyone makes their choice between speed, power consumption and cost. I attended a event once at Intel where someone told the anecdote that, "If someone comes to me and says, gee, I'd like a chip that runs faster, consumes less power and is cheaper to make I tell them 'you are overpaid for whatever it is that you do'".

The technology jump is of course the thing that allows you to "have it all" - until it doesn't. So it's clear that the optimization of Intel's 14nm++++++ is better for speed right now than anything they have at 10nm, which is better for density and power consumption. It used to be that the shrinks were unambiguously better but we've entered a strange new world.

Honestly, from the design perspective, I'm a enthusiastic spectator - to the extent I have insider knowledge it's out of date, poorly understood and not shareable in any case.

Microarchitecture is still very important - a better uarch and get you big effects without process changes. The last unambigiously successful one of these was Broadwell to Skylake. I think it will be fascinating to see the backport of Sunny Cove to 14nm ("Rocket Lake") as the difference between Rocket and Comet Lakes will give us a great natural experiment in how much microarchitecture changes matter without the usual distractions of process changes.

That used to be the "tick" in "tick/tock" but the uarch change is much bigger than usual and the process changes from Comet to Rocket will (I think) be quite small.

Re: What's wrong with Intel, and how to fix it: Former principal engineer unloads

#106

Post by nine_k »

karmakaze wrote: post #21
nine_k wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As somebody noted, when you have cornered a large part of the market, you don't feel as much technical pressure, and success in selling becomes key. So sales and MBAs start to run the show, because it makes the business sense, and while doing so risk to lose the sight of the technological advances that made the dominant position possible. Intel's founder, Andy Grove, used to say: "Only the paranoid survive". (He pers…

This seems to be a reasonable explanation. Even with sales and MBAs running the show, they know that they will always need something competitive to sell. For the longest time Intel relied on shrinking dies and single-threaded performance advantage. They didn't continue to race ahead with shrinking and as noted AVX-512 is not the hit to save them. They need more but may have misjudged that or believed too much of thei…

I find Clear Linux quite nice, but I don't know if it could replace the lost CPU revenue :-\

Re: What's wrong with Intel, and how to fix it: Former principal engineer unloads

#107

Post by BeeOnRope »

PaulHoule wrote: post #98
BeeOnRope wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not missing the point as I was responding to whether AVX-512 is useful in practice. It is. It is some badly designed extensions where the earlier ones were great: it's arguably better than the earlier ones. Now adoption has been poor and there is a chicken-and-egg effect as you point out, but that's separate from the question of whether AVX-512 is useful in practice. It is. The point about tradeoffs is well taken…

AVX-512 isn't "bad in practice" but in the context of AVX-128, AVX-256, and AVX-1024 it is a very bad practice because the inconstant availability of the vector unit means that it doesn't get used, or you use a least-common denominator of what worked on Atom 10 years ago. Look on the bright side: if you don't use AVX-512 you have 10% extra heat sink and heat soak on your CPU so you can turbo higher. AVX-512 makes the…

Yes, although this gets better with time.

People who care enough to want to use these units have figured out CPU dispatch by now, too.

Re: What's wrong with Intel, and how to fix it: Former principal engineer unloads

#108

Post by rstuart4133 »

gok wrote: post #49

Whining about "MBAs" is almost always technical person speak for general discontent about company direction, often from the non-business parts. You don't see complaints about CEOs of Apple, Google, or Microsoft much, though they all have MBAs.

It seems to me when the company is stable, and the efficiencies come mostly from organising a large workforce MBA's do well. That is what they have been trained to do. Presumably that is what the like doing.

But that all goes to pot when the technology is changing so fast, the battle between companies becomes a battle about who advances technology fastest. In a battle fought over engineering, the engineers have a home ground advantage.

It's impossible not to notice that Apple, Google, Microsoft and Facebook were all founded by true nerds and when you here their leaders speak, most engineers feel right at home with their reasoning. When Microsoft changed their leadership to a non-nerd, it started to wither and die. Fortunately for them, they fixed that.

Re: What's wrong with Intel, and how to fix it: Former principal engineer unloads

#109

Post by glangdale »

tails4e wrote: post #102
glangdale wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Answer is generally no; you have to compile something with specific flags for a given architecture, and you will normally only get one path. There may be exceptions for some libraries which may do clever stuff, but generally you pick your level of machine support (usually low ) and live with it. Note that there are many new machines (Atoms and low-brand stuff like "Pentium" branded CPUs - even recent ones based on Co…

This is interesting, the use case I was thinking about is EDA SW, which is very expensive and performance (runtime) can be days in some cases. In the tool installs I only ever see i386 and x86_64. In curious if the EDA vendors have compiled for the lowest common denomnator for these two basic architectures. If so it would seem like they are leaving a lot of performance potential on the table. Is there any tool that e…

On Linux, you can turn on the performance counters systemwide and watch instruction counts of various types of instructions tick up, if you want. I don't know how to do this on Windows.

I imagine you could also use any number of disassembly tools to peer at the instructions - looking for xmm/ymm/zmm in the textual output would be the giveaway.

Re: What's wrong with Intel, and how to fix it: Former principal engineer unloads

#110

Post by valuearb »

supernova87a wrote: post #12

This is purely a total outsider's opinion, so I caveat that and please don't get all offended if I'm totally wrong. Sometimes it's really difficult to tell the difference between a crackpot theorist and a good equities analyst. Watching this guy's video, it's hard to tell which he comes off as more. He's just coherent and convincing enough that as an outsider I could believe his collection of observations. But the pr…

There are no good equity analysts. If they were good they’d run their own funds.
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