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Nvidia buys $5B in Intel

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Re: Nvidia buys $5B in Intel

#371

Post by rasz »

lacy_tinpot wrote: post #323
evanjrowley wrote: post #211

Nvidia's stake in Intel could have terrible consequences. First, it is in Nvidia's interest to kill Intel's Arc graphics, and that would be very bad because it is the only thing brighing GPU prices down for consumers. Second, the death of Intel graphics / Arc would be extremely bad for Linux, because Intel's approach to GPU drivers is the best for compatibility, wheras Nvidia is actively hostile to drivers on Linux.…

Not necessarily true. This might be a Microsoft funding a bankrupt Apple kind of moment. American competition isn't a zero sum, and it's in Nvidias' best interest to keep the market healthy.

Microsoft wasnt funding bankrupt Apple, Microsoft was settling lawsuit with Jobs just on the cusp of DOJ monopoly lwasuit. Microsoft was stealing and shipping Apple QuickTime sourcecode.

https://www.theregister.com/1998/10/29/microsoft_paid_apple_...

> handwritten note by Fred Anderson, Apple's CFO, in which Anderson wrote that "the [QuickTime] patent dispute was resolved with cross-licence and significant payment to Apple." The payment was $150 million

Re: Nvidia buys $5B in Intel

#372

Post by dsr_ »

random3 wrote: post #332
evanjrowley wrote: post #211

Nvidia's stake in Intel could have terrible consequences. First, it is in Nvidia's interest to kill Intel's Arc graphics, and that would be very bad because it is the only thing brighing GPU prices down for consumers. Second, the death of Intel graphics / Arc would be extremely bad for Linux, because Intel's approach to GPU drivers is the best for compatibility, wheras Nvidia is actively hostile to drivers on Linux.…

If only antitrust laws would exist

and be enforced

Re: Nvidia buys $5B in Intel

#373

Post by burnte »

mschuster91 wrote: post #361
burnte wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And at that scale, the console manufacturers want to squeeze every vendor as hard as they can... and Intel didn't see the need to engage in a bidding war with AMD that would have given them a sizable revenue but very little profit margin compared to selling Xeon CPUs to hyperscalers where Intel has much more leverage to command higher prices and thus higher margins. And so that gave AMD an opening, and with that op…

> and they handed market to AMD that AMD used to be a better market competitor. AMD isn't precisely a market competitor. The server and business compute market is still firmly Intel and there isn't much evidence of that changing unless Apple drops M series SoCs to the wide open market which Apple won't do. Intel could probably release a raging dumpster fire and still go strong, oh wait, that's what they've been doing…

> The server and business compute market is still firmly Intel and there isn't much evidence of that changing

This is not true anymore, as it IS changing, and very rapidly. AMD has shot up to 27.3% of the server market share, which they haven't had since the Opteron days 20 years ago. Five years ago their server market share was very small single digits. They're half of desktops, too. https://www.pcguide.com/news/no-amd-and-intel-arent-50-50-in...

Re: Nvidia buys $5B in Intel

#374

Post by dijit »

bee_rider wrote: post #307
evanjrowley wrote: post #211

Nvidia's stake in Intel could have terrible consequences. First, it is in Nvidia's interest to kill Intel's Arc graphics, and that would be very bad because it is the only thing brighing GPU prices down for consumers. Second, the death of Intel graphics / Arc would be extremely bad for Linux, because Intel's approach to GPU drivers is the best for compatibility, wheras Nvidia is actively hostile to drivers on Linux.…

Apparently it is 5% ownership. Does that give them enough leverage to tank Intel’s iGPUs? That would seem weird to be. Intel’s iGPUs are an incredibly good solution for their (non-glamorous) niche. Intel’s dGPUs might be in a risky spot, though. (So… what’s new?) Messing up Intel’s iGPUs would be a huge practical loss for, like, everyday desktop Linux folks. Tossing out their dGPUs, I don’t know if it is such a huge…

5% of Ubisoft was all it took for Tencent to have very deep reaching ramifications.

They were felt at an IC level.

Re: Nvidia buys $5B in Intel

#375

Post by smegger001 »

YeahThisIsMe wrote: post #303
lawlessone wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happens now if one of these companies implodes? does it pull everything with it?

Why would anything that isn't Intel implode? And what's "everything"?

a plateauing in AI development leading to another AI Winter causing dotcom bubble 2 electric boogaloo.

Re: Nvidia buys $5B in Intel

#376

Post by jszymborski »

paganel wrote: post #189
jszymborski wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This $5 billion investment feels more like the result of back-channel discussions with the US government where they "politely" ask NVIDIA to help out Intel in exchange for less restrictions selling chips to China. Stinks of Mussolini-style Corporatism to me.

That's how post-WW2 France was actually rebuilt. You could also see big hints of that in the US WW2 economic effort, which couldn't have been done without the Government taking a direct hold of things and instituting central-ish planning.

You're speaking of what is referred to as neo-corporatism [0] and it's a tripartite, democratic process, not the fascist sort where everything is within and for the benefit of the state [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism#Neo-corporatism

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism#Fascist_corporatis...

Re: Nvidia buys $5B in Intel

#377

Post by jonbiggums22 »

to11mtm wrote: post #253
jonbiggums22 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Way back in the mid-late 2000s Intel CPUs could be used with third party chipsets not manufactured by Intel. This had been going on forever but the space was particularly wild with Nvidia being the most popular chipset manufacturer for AMD and also making in-roads for Intel CPUs. It was an important enough market than when ALi introduced AMD chipsets that were better than Nvidia's they promptly bought the company and…

> It was an important enough market than when ALi introduced AMD chipsets that were better than Nvidia's they promptly bought the company and spun down operations. This feels like a 'brand new sentence' to me because I've never met an ALi chipset that I liked. Every one I ever used had some shitty quirk that made VIA or SiS somehow more palatable [0] [1]. > Intel started releasing platforms with very little PCIe conn…

ALi was indeed pretty much on the avoid list for me for most of their history. It was only when they came out with the ULi M1695 made famous by the Asrock939dual-sata2 that they were a contender for best out of nowhere. One of the coolest boards I ever owned and was rock solid for me even with all of the weird configs I ran on it. I kind of wish I hadn't sold it even today!

I remember a lot disappointed people on forums who couldn't upgrade their cheap PCs as well, but there were still motherboards available with AGP to slot into for Intel's best products. Intel couldn't just remove it from the landscape altogether (assuming they wanted to) because they weren't the only company making Intel supporting chipsets. IIRC Intel/AMD/Nvidia were not interested in making AGP+PCIe supporting chipsets at all, but VIA/ALi and maybe SiS made them instead because it was a free for all space still. Once that went away Nvidia couldn't control their own destiny.

Re: Nvidia buys $5B in Intel

#378

Post by sabhiram »

paxys wrote: post #278
littlecranky67 wrote: post #167

This is a death blow to the Intel GPU+AI efforts and should not be allowed by the regulators. It is clear that Intel needs the downstream, low-cost GPU market segment to have a portfolio of AI chips based on chiplets, where most defective ones end up in the consumer grade GPUs based on manufacturing yield. NVidias interest is now for Intel not to enter either the GPU market, nor the AI market - which Intel was prepar…

The US government is itself a major shareholder in Intel, and has every incentive to push Intel stock over its competitors. It's almost a certainty that Nvidia was forced into this deal by the government as well. We are way beyond regulation here.

Yep, there is absolutely no problem with that at all.

Never imagined politics so obviously manipulating the talking heads with nary a care about perception.

Re: Nvidia buys $5B in Intel

#379

Post by mysteria »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #352
jpalawaga wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you have outlier needs if an rtx, the fastest consumer grade card, is not good enough for you. the intel card is great for 1080p gaming. especially if you're just playing counterstrike, indie games, etc, you don't need a beast. very few people are trying to play 4k tombraider on ultra with high refresh rate.

FWIW, my slowness is because of quantizing. I've been using Mistral 7B, and I can get 45 tokens/sec, which is PLENTY fast, but to save VRAM so I can game while doing inference (I run an IRC bot that allows people to talk to Mistral), I quantize to 8 bits, which then brings my inference speed down to ~8 tokens/sec. For gaming, I absolutely love this card. I can play Cyberpunk 2077 with all the graphics settings set to…

Hold on, you're only getting 45 tokens/sec with Mistral 7B on a 5090 of all things? That gets ~240 tokens/sec with Llama 7B quantized to 4 bits on llama.cpp [1] and those models should be pretty similar architecturally.

I don't know exactly how the scaling works here but considering how LLM inference is memory bandwidth limited you should go beyond 100 tokens/sec with the same model and a 8 bit quantization.

1. https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/discussions/15013

Re: Nvidia buys $5B in Intel

#380

Post by tart-lemonade »

bee_rider wrote: post #307
evanjrowley wrote: post #211

Nvidia's stake in Intel could have terrible consequences. First, it is in Nvidia's interest to kill Intel's Arc graphics, and that would be very bad because it is the only thing brighing GPU prices down for consumers. Second, the death of Intel graphics / Arc would be extremely bad for Linux, because Intel's approach to GPU drivers is the best for compatibility, wheras Nvidia is actively hostile to drivers on Linux.…

Apparently it is 5% ownership. Does that give them enough leverage to tank Intel’s iGPUs? That would seem weird to be. Intel’s iGPUs are an incredibly good solution for their (non-glamorous) niche. Intel’s dGPUs might be in a risky spot, though. (So… what’s new?) Messing up Intel’s iGPUs would be a huge practical loss for, like, everyday desktop Linux folks. Tossing out their dGPUs, I don’t know if it is such a huge…

Intel's iGPUs don't seem very at risk because the market for low-power GPUs isn't very profitable to begin with. As long as Nvidia is able to sell basically any chip they want, why waste engineering hours and fab time on low-margin chips? The GT 1030 (Pascal) never got a successor, so that line is as good as dead.

Even before the Pascal GTs, most of the GT 7xx cards, which you would assume were Maxwell or Kepler from the numbering, were rebadged Fermi cards (4xx and 5xx)! That generation was just a dumping ground for all the old chips they had laying about, and given the prominence of halfway decent iGPUs by that point, I can't say I blame them for investing so little in the lineup.

That said, the dGPUs are definitely somewhat at risk, but I think the risk is only slightly elevated by this investment, given that it isn't exactly a cash cow and Intel has been doing all sorts of cost-cutting lately.

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