Can't they make a GPU instead? Please save us!
I hope to see dedicated GPU coprocessors disappear sooner rather than later, just like arithmetic coprocessors did.
Top researchers leave Intel to build startup with 'the biggest, baddest CPU'
21–30 of 142 posts
Re: Top researchers leave Intel to build startup with 'the biggest, baddest CPU'
#22Bring back the architecture madness era of the 80s/90s.
Re: Top researchers leave Intel to build startup with 'the biggest, baddest CPU'
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
A GPU is a very different beast that relies much more heavily on having a gigantic team of software developers supporting it. A CPU is (comparatively) straightforward. You fab and validate a world class design, make sure compiler support is good enough, upstream some drivers and kernel support, and make sure the standard documentation/debugging/optimization tools are all functional. This is incredibly difficult, but…
> make sure compiler support is good enough Do compilers optimize for specific RISC-V CPUs, not just profiles/extensions? Same for drivers and kernel support. My understanding was that if it's RISC-V compliant, no extra work is needed for existing software to run on it.
The major compilers optimize for microarchitecture, yes. Here's the tablegen scheduling definition behind LLVM's -mtune=sifive-670 flag as an example:
https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/blob/main/llvm/lib/Targ...
It's not that things won't run, but this is necessary for compilers to generate well optimized code.
Re: Top researchers leave Intel to build startup with 'the biggest, baddest CPU'
#24Can't they make a GPU instead? Please save us!
I hope to see dedicated GPU coprocessors disappear sooner rather than later, just like arithmetic coprocessors did.
Arithmetic co-processors didn't disappear so much as they moved onto the main CPU die. There were performance advantages to having the FPU on the CPU, and there were no longer significant cost advantages to having the FPU be separate and optional.
For GPUs today and in the foreseeable future, there are still good reasons for them to remain discrete, in some market segments. Low-power laptops have already moved entirely to integrated GPUs, and entry-level gaming laptops are moving in that direction. Desktops have widely varying GPU needs ranging from the minimal iGPUs that all desktop CPUs now already have, up to GPUs that dwarf the CPU in die and package size and power budget. Servers have needs ranging from one to several GPUs per CPU. There's no one right answer for how much GPU to integrate with the CPU.
Re: Top researchers leave Intel to build startup with 'the biggest, baddest CPU'
#25This is more a bad look for Intel than anything truly exciting since they refuse to produce any details lol
Re: Top researchers leave Intel to build startup with 'the biggest, baddest CPU'
#26As someone who knows almost nothing about CPU architecture, I've always wondered if there could be a new instruction set, better suited to today's needs. I realize it would require a monumental software effort but most of these instruction sets are decades old. RISC-V is newer but my understanding is it's still based around ARM, just without royalties (and thus isn't bringing many new ideas to the table per say)
Re: Top researchers leave Intel to build startup with 'the biggest, baddest CPU'
#27Can't they make a GPU instead? Please save us!
I hope to see dedicated GPU coprocessors disappear sooner rather than later, just like arithmetic coprocessors did.
That was one of the ideas behind Larrabee [1]. You can run Mesa on the CPU today using the llvmpipe backend.
Re: Top researchers leave Intel to build startup with 'the biggest, baddest CPU'
#28The article is so bad. Why do they refuse to say anything about what these companies are actually trying to make. RISC-V Chips exist, does the journalist just not know? Does the company refuse to say what they are doing?
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 CPU actually is.
Re: Top researchers leave Intel to build startup with 'the biggest, baddest CPU'
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
A GPU is a very different beast that relies much more heavily on having a gigantic team of software developers supporting it. A CPU is (comparatively) straightforward. You fab and validate a world class design, make sure compiler support is good enough, upstream some drivers and kernel support, and make sure the standard documentation/debugging/optimization tools are all functional. This is incredibly difficult, but…
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.
Re: Top researchers leave Intel to build startup with 'the biggest, baddest CPU'
#30As someone who knows almost nothing about CPU architecture, I've always wondered if there could be a new instruction set, better suited to today's needs. I realize it would require a monumental software effort but most of these instruction sets are decades old. RISC-V is newer but my understanding is it's still based around ARM, just without royalties (and thus isn't bringing many new ideas to the table per say)
I think the ideal would be something like a Xilinx offering, tailoring the CPU- regarding cache, parallelism and in hardware execution of hotloop components, depending on the task.
Your CPU changes with every app, tab and program you open. Changing from one core, to n-core plus AI-GPU and back. This idea, that you have to write it all in stone, always seemed wild to me.