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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

#151

Post by wolfgke »

bhouston wrote: post #67
rbanffy wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not before mainstream software supports it. We had 64-bit with Alpha, MIPS, SPARC, but 64-bit x86 only happened when it could run 32-bit x86 code flawlessly and it only got mass adoption when Windows went 64-bit.

We only got Intel 64 bit CPUs once AMD got them first and people starting to buy them.

> We only got Intel 64 bit CPUs once AMD got them first and people starting to buy them.

Intel came first with Itanium (June 2001: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Itanium&oldid=775...), which clearly is a 64 bit CPU. The first x86-64 CPU by AMD got released in April 2003 (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=X86-64&oldid=7754...) and Intel's first x86-64 CPU came out June 2004 (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=X86-64&oldid=7754...).

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#152

Post by AlfonsoP »

akuma73 wrote: post #38
komali2 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People always talk about Moore's Law falling apart, and it seems like people didn't see it coming. I mean, I didn't, I'm just a guy that reads a lot of scifi. But I always assumed whiz-bang mathematicians had already figured out, I dunno, the threshold at which a processor can be nanosized, or like how big a processor could become before the distances became too great that due to the speed of light further computatio…

Have a look at this photo: http://m.eet.com/media/1169843/120906_intel_22_3.jpg That's a fin of a modern transistor (Intel 22nm). The dots in the photo are atoms . It's fair to say that Moore's law is nearing an end or has already ended.

Think outside the box. Current chips have gates on a dozen metal layers measuring ~1µm, but you could scale to 10,000 layers at ~1mm. Sure there are many unsolved challenge to build 10,000 layers, but there is still PLENTY of space for Moore's law to continue in this 3rd dimension...

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#153

Post by rgbrenner »

fgonzag wrote: post #150
rgbrenner wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That remains to be seen. I just built a new PC and put an i7 in it. The Ryzen 1800x is more expensive than an i7-7700k, while having worse performance. Obviously AMD makes cheaper versions where that comparison doesn't hold.. but the advantage for AMD here isn't clear cut, and so there's no reason to believe there will be a mass migration to AMD. Besides I've heard this kind of rhetoric about AMDs cpus before.. and y…

I went the other way with the 1700. Though I do game it's not my main motivation. This is a workstation first and foremost. And every benchmark I saw the 7700K got crushed by the 1700 (in linux productivity benchmarks). If you are gamer, the 7700K is the right choice though.

The fact that there are some workloads that amd is good for and others where it falls short only reinforces my point.. which is that the selling proposition for amd hasn't changed.

They haven't unseated intel with that strategy in 40 years... and they aren't going to do it today either.

Ryzen is a good start. But to unseat intel they needed a clear performance advantage and/or additional products that match intels other major product lines with similar or better performance.. and demonstrate they can do that over the long term.

In other words, it's going to take them years

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#154

Post by akuma73 »

AlfonsoP wrote: post #152
akuma73 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have a look at this photo: http://m.eet.com/media/1169843/120906_intel_22_3.jpg That's a fin of a modern transistor (Intel 22nm). The dots in the photo are atoms . It's fair to say that Moore's law is nearing an end or has already ended.

Think outside the box. Current chips have gates on a dozen metal layers measuring ~1µm, but you could scale to 10,000 layers at ~1mm. Sure there are many unsolved challenge to build 10,000 layers, but there is still PLENTY of space for Moore's law to continue in this 3rd dimension...

I assume you mean stacking transistors? This has been tried, and there are serious thermal issues. Where does the heat go in the intermediate layers?

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#155

Post by copperx »

Someone wrote: post #121
rbanffy wrote: post #58

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 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.

I would think that, nowadays, reading and writing memory are major bottlenecks, too, to the extent that spending time decoding instructions can be a gain if it allows for a denser instruction stream. For machine learning applications, I don't think the end game is to have complex CPUs, though. Assuming that brains have managed to find more than a local optimum and that our understanding of them is somewhat accurate,…

> Does the brain even have instruction decoders?

I can't even begin to understand this question. It makes no sense at all.

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#156

Post by kec »

AlfonsoP wrote: post #152
akuma73 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have a look at this photo: http://m.eet.com/media/1169843/120906_intel_22_3.jpg That's a fin of a modern transistor (Intel 22nm). The dots in the photo are atoms . It's fair to say that Moore's law is nearing an end or has already ended.

Think outside the box. Current chips have gates on a dozen metal layers measuring ~1µm, but you could scale to 10,000 layers at ~1mm. Sure there are many unsolved challenge to build 10,000 layers, but there is still PLENTY of space for Moore's law to continue in this 3rd dimension...

If you could solve both the heat dissipation and yield problems that 3D chips have you would be a very, very rich man.

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#157

Post by gonzo »

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…

> 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.

Intel acquired Digital's StrongARM unit as part of a settlement for a patent infringement suit.

https://www.cnet.com/news/intel-digital-settle-suit/

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#158

Post by wtallis »

Zaak wrote: post #139
rbanffy wrote: post #58

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 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.

But that portion of the power budget hasn't shifted at all back toward the computational units. It's been taken over by register renaming and instruction reordering and all manner of caches.

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#159

Post by gonzo »

trhway wrote: post #78
mtgx wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. reminds Sun in 1998 and the onward years when SPARC was like North Korea border patrol in preventing any x86 penetration into Sun even though it was clear that x86 was the future.

Sorry?

The Sun 386i "Roadrunner" was launched in 1988.

A release of Solaris for PC compatibles began shipping in 1993.

In 2002, Sun introduced its first general purpose x86 system, the LX50.

In 2003, Sun announced a strategic alliance with AMD to produce x86/x64 servers based on AMD's Opteron processor; this was followed shortly by Sun's acquisition of Kealia, a startup founded by original Sun founder Andy Bechtolsheim, which had been focusing on high-performance AMD-based servers. Hardware began shipping in 2004.

Re: Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled

#160

Post by doublerebel »

drawkbox wrote: post #131

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…

My experience is that also Willow Garage is listed as the main author on many of the (still current) AR tooling, but I don't know the story between them and Intel. It's an incredible amount of open source work that enables the startup I'm doing now, I can only hope to contribute as much back/forward from our company.
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