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Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

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Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#131

Post by drawkbox »

Intel has always been a great research company. They are responsible for OpenCV[1] and largely the entire augmented reality craze is from that sponsored work. They are an important part of technological progression in the last couple decades, they even made Apple sales pick up with intel chips (creating a killer *nix dev machine for a time '06ish) before the iPhone came along.

It would be a shame if the bean counters got them into this with drawing back r&d and are now taking r&d away. The engineers are definitely not in control at Intel today, hard to quantify research projects and developer/engineer outreach to non engineers. These types of moves have been known to kill off companies.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCV

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#132

Post by rbanffy »

bsder wrote: post #91
anodin3 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>When an ARM chip reaches the performance of a Xeon, it'll draw about as much power as a Xeon. There is absolutely no reason to reach that conclusion.

Power goes as C v^2 f. At best. That doesn't change. If you look at a particular technology node, one of the best correlations of power consumption is chip area. It's pretty much a straight line. Now, that has probably changed a bit with how aggressively we turn chip areas off nowadays. So, we probably have to alter that to power consumption vs active chip area--but it's still a fixed line for a technology node.

Speaking of chip area, one possible path is designing ISAs that require less silicon to efficiently decode, reorder and retire.

It'd be, of course, totally incompatible with what we have now.

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#133

Post by ghaff »

jacquesm wrote: post #127
ghaff wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But do you really believe that by taking "a really hard look at how we cook this stuff up" software engineers can double performance (in the sense of effective work) every 18 months? We can absolutely turn the dial toward more effort on software such as algorithms/compiled languages/etc. but color me unconvinced that there's exponential growth possibilities there.

Yes, I really believe that. And the reason why is probably not going to be very popular here but I believe that we took a wrong turn at some point in the past two or three decades that made us concentrate on the wrong thing. In the mid 80's there was a fairly strong push to substantially improve the quality of software, rather than the quantity. And when the web happened that all got flushed down the toilet and we no…

I actually hope you're right. As you (approximately) wrote in another comment, "you canna change the laws of physics." CMOS has been a very special technology but it's obviously reaching the end of its life.

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#134

Post by bsder »

rbanffy wrote: post #132
bsder wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Power goes as C v^2 f. At best. That doesn't change. If you look at a particular technology node, one of the best correlations of power consumption is chip area. It's pretty much a straight line. Now, that has probably changed a bit with how aggressively we turn chip areas off nowadays. So, we probably have to alter that to power consumption vs active chip area--but it's still a fixed line for a technology node.

Speaking of chip area, one possible path is designing ISAs that require less silicon to efficiently decode, reorder and retire. It'd be, of course, totally incompatible with what we have now.

We call that MIPS or Alpha, and it lost to x86 compatibility.

Whose only competitor is ARM, which is little better in terms of decoding complexity.

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#135

Post by jacquesm »

ghaff wrote: post #133
jacquesm wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I really believe that. And the reason why is probably not going to be very popular here but I believe that we took a wrong turn at some point in the past two or three decades that made us concentrate on the wrong thing. In the mid 80's there was a fairly strong push to substantially improve the quality of software, rather than the quantity. And when the web happened that all got flushed down the toilet and we no…

I actually hope you're right. As you (approximately) wrote in another comment, "you canna change the laws of physics." CMOS has been a very special technology but it's obviously reaching the end of its life.

There are some exotic processes that give better performance but the economies of scale aren't there yet and the cost of production is probably always going to be much higher than that of Silicon, which is after all a very abundant element on Earth.

There was a fantastic video about IC manufacturing linked here on HN a while ago, I'm not sure if I'll be able to find it.

edit: Hah, found it :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGFhc8R_uO4

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#136

Post by Scuds »

dom0 wrote: post #108
anodin3 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>When an ARM chip reaches the performance of a Xeon, it'll draw about as much power as a Xeon. There is absolutely no reason to reach that conclusion.

Actually there is plenty of precedent for that conclusion. Scaling CPU cores up (=efficient but high performance cores) is super-hard -- making low-power cores is pretty simple in comparison --; almost everyone fails or failed at it. Currently there are two companies on the planet that do that sort of thing, and not so long ago it was only one. Notable names that failed hard in this are: Intel, DEC, Sun, Fujitsu, AMD…

If everything gets cracked to micro-ops anyway, how much effect does your general instruction(not SIMD/Altivec/Thumb etc) set _really_ have on performance and power consumption?

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#137

Post by slizard »

jacquesm wrote: post #122
slizard wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...but actually getting one has so far proved to be impossible. Where/when did you try buying? I didn't think it was difficult to get the 1st-gen Phi cards while they were selling them -- especially as it seemed like nobody wanted them. Admittedly I never bought any myself, my employer picked up some 31S1P from a local server OEM for testing when they were massively discounted. Note that the Knights Landing, the cu…

I tried two online vendors that were actively soliciting customers but when push came to shove they couldn't deliver. Right around the same time I ordered an FPGA dev kit and an NVIDIA board, solved the problem I was dealing with and moved on. Still, I would have very much liked to play around with the 'phi'. > Admittedly I never bought any myself, my employer picked up some 31S1P from a local server OEM for testing…

> Still, I would have very much liked to play around with the 'phi'.

Well, if you're still interested, KNL is a significantly better architecture, so you could just try now.

> That's the kind of deal I was looking at too. Maybe they were massively discounted because they were already EOL'd?

Refreshed my memory and I was wrong; there was some discussion to jump on the $125-$195/card deal Colfax had late 2014 [1] (likely dumping stock due to EOL), but we figured that they are not even worth that much. In comparison, the one card we have was actually bought just 10-11 months before for ~$1500.

[1] http://www.colfax-intl.com/nd/xeonphi/31s1p-promo.aspx

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#138

Post by orionblastar »

mtgx wrote: post #22
puzzle wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You forgot that Intel bought Nervana Systems last year, right before IDF. They develop custom ASIC processors for machine learning.

Which doesn't necessarily mean anything for Intel's future in machine learning. Intel bought an ARM chip maker before, too, and because of internal conflict of interest with the x86 group, it ended-up killing the ARM division. Will the same happen to other non-x86 groups? Who knows. But we also see that even Intel's previous "accelerator" divisions have moved focus to being "CPU-driven" as well (Xeon Phi), so we have…

If I ran Intel, I'd keep both x86 and ARM chips and make a motherboard using x86 and ARM chips to work together with shared memory. The ARM could be given tasks to do that free up the x86 chip to make the system run faster. Plus ARM operating systems could be run in a virtual machine using the ARM chip to develop or test apps out.

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#139

Post by Zaak »

rbanffy wrote: post #58
kodfodrasz wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they are not there yet...

When an ARM chip reaches the performance of a Xeon, it'll draw about as much power as a Xeon. There is no magic - computation has a minimum energy cost. What can happen is to make chips simpler in that less computation is spent in instruction decoding, tracking, scheduling and more is spent on actual execution.

Back in the 80s, instruction decode was a large part of the logic in a CPU (thus the motivation for RISC). Currently, it's a tiny fraction. It's been many years since a simpler instruction set was useful for reducing the complexity of the CPU.

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#140

Post by lightedman »

matt_wulfeck wrote: post #11

From what I gather online, intel is entering into an exestential crisis as homegrown chips and GPUs are replacing CPUs in the battle for tomorrow's data center. All of the interesting research from Google and others all have one thing in common: a custom asic processor.

I think it goes a bit deeper than that. Intel is losing the power it had as a general-purpose CPU maker. Now that technology and brains are improving, others are figuring out more efficient ways of handling specific tasks that the x86/x64 CPU used to do in an efficient manner.

And intel doesn't have these people. They don't want the embarrassment and are too entrenched in their own processes. The technology as of this year can compete or stomp intel into the ground. We can program ASICs to handle any task, just about as fast as it can handle the electron flow. The only real setback is the fact the instructions are not hard-coded in the actual physical logic. That's literally the only slow-down. Were it not for that translation layer right there, ASICs would come out on top, no problem. Specialization is the future. General purpose was good enough for 30 years, it's time to move on.

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