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Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

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Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#511

Post by glandium »

ryao wrote: post #288
saltminer wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that C++ development has been effectively hijacked by the "no ABI breakage, ever"/backwards compatibility at all costs crowd certainly speaks to this. https://herecomesthemoon.net/2024/11/two-factions-of-cpp/ There are a lot of pre-compiled binaries floating about that are depended on by lots of enterprise software whose source code is long gone, and these are effectively locked to x86_64 chips until the cos…

They had ABI breakage when C++11 support was implemented in GCC 5 and that was extremely painful. Honestly, I still wish that they had avoided it.

You can still use the old ABI with -D_GLIBCXX_USE_CXX11_ABI=0

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#512

Post by ryao »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #448
etempleton wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is all very true and why I think a merger between AMD and Intel is even possible. Nvidia and Intel is also a possible merger, but I actually think there is more regulatory concern with NVIDIA and how big and dominant they are becoming.

Intel and Samsung could be interesting, especially if it would get Samsung to open up more. Samsung would get better GPUs and x86, Intel gets access to the phone market and then you end up with things like x86 Samsung tablets that can run both Windows or Android. Could also be Intel and Micron. Then you end up with full stack devices with Intel CPUs and Micron RAM and storage, and the companies have partnered in the…

Samsung has its own leading edge fabrication plants. Merging the two would drop the number of leading edge foundries from 3 to 2.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#513

Post by ryao »

Wytwwww wrote: post #266
xbar wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like to address the aside for completeness' sake. An x86 monopoly in the late 80s was a thing, but not now. Today, there are sufficient competitive chip architectures with cross-compatible operating systems and virtualization that x86 does not represent control of the computing market in a manner that should prevent such a merger: ARM licensees, including the special case of Apple Silicon, Snapdragon, NVIDIA SOCs…

> An x86 monopoly in the late 80s was a thing, but not now And then in the 2000s after AMD64 pretty much destroyed all competing architectures and then in the 2010s Intel itself effectively was almost a monopoly (outside of mobile) with AMD being on the verge of bankruptcy.

Itanium’s hype killed the competing architectures. AMD64 then took over since it was cost effective and fast.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#514

Post by zamadatix »

phkahler wrote: post #94
etempleton wrote: post #64

I feel like this is a mistake. Pat's strategy is aggressive but what the company needs. Intel's stock is jumping at this announcement, but I look at it as a bad signal for Intel 18a. If 18a was looking to be a smash hit then I don't think Pat gets retired. If 18a is a success then it is an even more short-sighted decision by the board. What this likely means is two-fold: 1. Intel 18a is being delayed further and/or t…

>> If 18a is not ready I think the best case scenario for Intel is a merger with AMD. Aside from the x86 monopoly that would create, I don't think Intel has much of value to AMD at this point other than the fabs (which aren't delivering). IMHO if Intel is failing, let them fail and others will buy the pieces in bankruptcy. This would probably benefit several other companies that could use 22nm and up fab capacity and…

I wonder how big a downside an x86 monopoly would actually be these days (an M4 MacBook being the best perf/watt way to run x86 Windows apps today as it is) and how that compares to the downsides of not allowing x86 to consolidate efforts against rising competition from ARM CPUs.

The problem with the "use the GPU in a SoC" proposition is everyone that makes the rest of a SoC also already has a GPU for it. Often better than what Intel can offer in terms of perf/die space or perf/watt. These SoC solutions tend to coalesce around tile based designs which keep memory bandwidth and power needs down compared to the traditional desktop IMR designs Intel has.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#515

Post by cogman10 »

roenxi wrote: post #487
cogman10 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, what both companies would need to be competitive in the GPU sector is a cuda killer. That's perhaps the one benefit of merging Antel can more easily standardize something.

This meme comes up from time to time but I'm not sure what the real evidence for it is or whether the people repeating it have that much experience actually trying to make compute work on AMD cards. Every time I've seen anyone try the problem isn't that the card lacks a library, but rather that calling the function that does what is needed causes a kernel panic. Very different issues - if CUDA allegedly "ran" on AMD…

> Every time I've seen anyone try the problem isn't that the card lacks a library, but rather that calling the function that does what is needed causes a kernel panic.

Do you have experience with SYCL? My experience with OpenCL was that it's really a PITA to work with. The thing that CUDA makes nice is the direct and minimal exercise to start running GPGPU kernels. write the code, compile with nvcc, cudaed.

OpenCL had just a weird dance to perform to get a kernel running. Find the OpenCL device using a magic filesystem token. Ask the device politely if it wants to OpenCL. Send over the kernel string blob to compile. Run the kernel. A ton of ceremony and then you couldn't be guarenteed it'd work because the likes of AMD, Intel, or nVidia were all spotty on how well they'd support it.

SYCL seems promising but the ecosystem is a little intimidating. It does not seem (and I could be wrong here) that there is a defacto SYCL compiler. The goals of SYCL compilers are also fairly diverse.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#516

Post by atq2119 »

vinyl7 wrote: post #506
tasuki wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If people thought Windows Vista sucked it was because Intel "supported" it by releasing integrated GPUs which could almost handle Windows Vista but not quite. What does an OS need a GPU for? My current laptop only has integrated Intel GPU. I'm not missing Nvidia, with its proprietary drivers, high power consumption, and corresponding extra heat and shorter battery life...

Composiors are generally switching to being gpu accelerated, not to mention apps will do their own gpu accelerated UIs just because the OS ui systems are all junk at the moment

And by "are generally switching" you're really trying to say "generally switched a decade ago".

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#517

Post by doctorpangloss »

efitz wrote: post #455

Dear Intel Executive Search Team, Hi! CEOing has always been a hobby of mine, but with the recent news, I thought this would be a great opportunity for us to synergize. Sure, I don’t have much experience in the chip making world but I did buy a Pentium when I built my own computer. I also have never run a multinational company but I visited several other countries on a Disney cruise. Let me lay it out- you would get…

You joke, but the media-to-leadership pipeline is coming for US business.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#518

Post by nine_k »

999900000999 wrote: post #456
nine_k wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intel has no GPU. Intel has no mobile processors / SOCs. These seem to be the drivers of growth nowadays. And their CPUs have hard time competing with AMD now. I'm not sure that the 3 years which Geslinger had were enough to turn the tide.

>Intel has no GPU. I own one, Arc isn't the best, but it's still able to compete with lower end Nvidia and AMD GPUs. They ended up having to mark them down pretty drastically though. I actually owned an Intel Zenphone about 8 years ago. Aside from being absolutely massive, it was decent. I think Intel got arrogant. Even today, with all the benchmarks showing Intel isn't any faster than AMD, Intel is still more expens…

Yes. Intel might have a GPU, and maybe even a phone SOC, if they tried hard enough. Intel's integrated GPU cores are quite decent; I had high hopes on Arc eventually becoming the third major discrete offering. Alas.

Intel indeed rested too long on their laurels from early 2000s. It's one of the most dangerous things for a company to do.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#519

Post by mewse-hn »

JohnBooty wrote: post #422
bubblethink wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The only stupid thing they did was not getting into GPUs earlier Intel has been "getting into" GPUs for two decades now going back to Larrabee. They are just not good at it.

What is holding Intel back, there? Engineering chops? AMD and nVidia already patented too much of the good stuff? Too much existing code optimized for AMD and nVidia quirks?

Extreme outsider perspective but they seemed like dilettantes. They'd dip their toe into doing GPUs and then cancel the project every couple years.

A few weeks ago Gelsinger even commented he saw "less need for discrete graphics in the market going forward" - just seemed like a very Intel thing to say

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#520

Post by sitkack »

vinyl7 wrote: post #506
tasuki wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If people thought Windows Vista sucked it was because Intel "supported" it by releasing integrated GPUs which could almost handle Windows Vista but not quite. What does an OS need a GPU for? My current laptop only has integrated Intel GPU. I'm not missing Nvidia, with its proprietary drivers, high power consumption, and corresponding extra heat and shorter battery life...

Composiors are generally switching to being gpu accelerated, not to mention apps will do their own gpu accelerated UIs just because the OS ui systems are all junk at the moment

We are at the perfect moment to re-embrace software rasterizers because CPU manufacturers are starting to add HBM and v-cache.

An 8K 32bpp framebuffer is ... omg 126MB for a single copy. I was going to argue that a software rasterizer running on vcache would be doable, but not for 8k.

For 4k, with 32MB per display buffer, it could be possible but heavy compositing will require going out to main memory. 1440p would be even better at only 15MB per display buffer.

For 1440p at 144Hz and 2TB/s (vcache max), best case is an overdraw of 984 frames/frame

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