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What's wrong with Intel, and how to fix it: Former principal engineer unloads

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Re: What's wrong with Intel, and how to fix it: Former principal engineer unloads

#81

It is a bit odd that there is no mention of the awful security problems like Spectre and Meltdown which mostly hit Intel and was very poorly handled by them. As a consumer i care way more about my CPU actually working as advertised and not some Specre mitigation killing the performance. The price performance ratio of AMD is just better, nobody cares about some weird extension if i can have a Threadripper with a bazil…

> It is a bit odd that there is no mention of the awful security problems like Spectre and Meltdown which mostly hit Intel and was very poorly handled by them.

I recall him mentioning exactly this.

Re: What's wrong with Intel, and how to fix it: Former principal engineer unloads

#82
I disagree that Intel has "lost focus" to the detriment of its core competencies, after all, Intel is a large company that spends billions on R&D every quarter. Rather I call it Intel expanding its focus to expand its addressable market to include 5G, AI, autonomous driving, advanced memory, software-defined networking, etc. I think Francois is focused on Intel being a CPU manufacturing company, when Intel sees itself as a data-processing company.

It's important to note that these aren't totally unrelated pushes (a la Google X), but rather all of the new areas leverage Intel's core competency in silicon manufacturing. (Though, many of these products are due to be fabbed at TSMC, according to rumors.)

"Xeon should dump unused core space" - Intel already does this. Intel has two CPU microarchitectures - Sunny Cove[1] (used for desktops, laptops, workstations, and beefy servers) and Tremont[2] (used for low-power clients and specialized servers). Tremont ditches the AVX instructions. Notably, Tremont is used in specialized server SoCs that target the storage, networking, and IoT/embedded markets.

Could Intel differentiate its product lineup even more? At the core level, one should ask, Are there IPs that should be added to Tremont or subtracted from Sunny Cove? Can some IPs be added at the SoC level?

[1]: https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/intel/microarchitectures/sunny_...

[2]: https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/intel/microarchitectures/tremon...

Re: What's wrong with Intel, and how to fix it: Former principal engineer unloads

#83
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As somebody noted, when you have cornered a large part of the market, you don't feel as much technical pressure, and success in selling becomes key. So sales and MBAs start to run the show, because it makes the business sense, and while doing so risk to lose the sight of the technological advances that made the dominant position possible. Intel's founder, Andy Grove, used to say: "Only the paranoid survive". (He pers…

This seems to be a reasonable explanation. Even with sales and MBAs running the show, they know that they will always need something competitive to sell. For the longest time Intel relied on shrinking dies and single-threaded performance advantage. They didn't continue to race ahead with shrinking and as noted AVX-512 is not the hit to save them. They need more but may have misjudged that or believed too much of thei…

What happened to Tizen?

Re: What's wrong with Intel, and how to fix it: Former principal engineer unloads

#84
post #49

Whining about "MBAs" is almost always technical person speak for general discontent about company direction, often from the non-business parts. You don't see complaints about CEOs of Apple, Google, or Microsoft much, though they all have MBAs.

MBAs improve numbers, engineers create new products. The mentality of MBA crowd is to get the numbers right eat the cake and when things go sideways move on to a new job. Intel is a hardware tech business, its a complicated space that needs deep knowledge to understand it before you shape the future of it. Technical people might not be the only ones that should run business but they should be the core of it. I have s…

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Re: What's wrong with Intel, and how to fix it: Former principal engineer unloads

#85

Speaking of AVX-512: I find it very odd, that they still produce deaktop CPU's without AVX (not even AVX2) at all (10th gen Celerons), yet they are pushing AVX-512 into laptops at the same time.

They produced a few low volume 10nm laptop parts so they could say 10nm has finally shipped. They can’t produce enough volume to move their whole product line over.

Re: What's wrong with Intel, and how to fix it: Former principal engineer unloads

#86

This is purely a total outsider's opinion, so I caveat that and please don't get all offended if I'm totally wrong. Sometimes it's really difficult to tell the difference between a crackpot theorist and a good equities analyst. Watching this guy's video, it's hard to tell which he comes off as more. He's just coherent and convincing enough that as an outsider I could believe his collection of observations. But the pr…

A curious aspect of this is that Intel has been doing very well financially despite having been failing technologically for a long time (if you buy the old story that Intel's process lead was at the center of it's market leadership.)

High-volume production helped Intel crush SPARC, Alpha and most of other other high-end CPU architectures in the 1990s. Today ARM is the volume leader that threatens to overtake Intel in performance.

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Intel has segmented the market in ways that have been long-term harmful. The idea is that they look at every little feature and show that hyperscalers can get $5000 of value from feature X on the chip, so they fuse it off unless they pay $4999 for the special edition. Everybody else pays in die area, development costs, etc.

Intel's I/O choices have long been about controlling the PC platform and when you see all of the "Game of Thrones" mergers involving companies like Marvel and Mellanox so much of it has to do with that. Intel has long been stingy with PCIe lanes -- on paper it might look like you have a lot of lanes but when you deal with the motherboard and (usually less than i9) CPU in from of you will find there are capricious restrictions about how you can use those lanes.

Microsoft switched to Wayland (well, WDDM, Microsoft's Wayland-like framework) with Windows Vista and that was based on having a GPU that could do bulk operations on pixel rectangles.

Intel was mortified that a ATI or NVIDIA GPU would become necessary to the PC experience so they created Intel Integrated "Graphics" that approached the minimum performance required for Vista. If it hadn't been for deep learning and crypto mining, NVIDIA might have gone under. If it hadn't been for the merger with AMD and the SoC(s) for the Xbox and Playstation, we might not AMD GPUs.

Intel did not want to see a transition to PCI4 or an increase in memory bandwidth because they didn't sell products that could take advantage of it. NVIDIA did, so they pushed NVLink. Be it GPU, FPGA, or ASIC, you can't have a revolution in performance unless your workload is crazy compute-heavy or you have a revolution in memory and I/O bandwidth.

Re: What's wrong with Intel, and how to fix it: Former principal engineer unloads

#87
post #34
post #24

I've always wondered, if I compile an application and don't specify the architecture as explicitly having AVX, just say x86 64bit, will alternate code paths be in the binary for processors with AVX? Or alternatively, if I do specify AVX support on the command line, then what happens if the binary runs on a CPU without AVX? The reason I ask is I use commercial tools for circuit simulation, and they run on a wide range…

Depends on the compiler. Gcc compiles to the lowest common denominator while icc offers "Processor dispatch technology performs a check at execution time to determine which processor the application is running on and use the most suitable code path for that processor. Compatible, non-Intel processors will take the default optimized code path." For HPC they will always compile to use the full set of instructions and s…

> If you run something with instructions your processor doesn't have it will crash.

I would be very surprised if the processor itself crashed. I haven't encountered it in actuality so far, but as far as I'm aware, illegal instructions raise an interrupt that the OS can catch. On Unix, this should result in the corresponding user space process receiving SIGILL.

It appears that SIGILL is actually preemptible. Could this be used as a poor man's CPU feature detection mechanism?

Re: What's wrong with Intel, and how to fix it: Former principal engineer unloads

#88

This is purely a total outsider's opinion, so I caveat that and please don't get all offended if I'm totally wrong. Sometimes it's really difficult to tell the difference between a crackpot theorist and a good equities analyst. Watching this guy's video, it's hard to tell which he comes off as more. He's just coherent and convincing enough that as an outsider I could believe his collection of observations. But the pr…

Francois is a smart guy, but there's a range of opinions on the matters he raises. We argue a good deal on Twitter ("constructive confrontation" between former Intel Principal Engineers :-) ). He put together the video pretty quickly so don't dismiss it just for lack of polish. Personally, I argue with him a lot on AVX-512. I think AVX-512 is a Good Thing (or will be shortly - the first instantiation in Skylake Serve…

"...SIMD is underutilized in general purpose workloads... Daniel Lemire and I built simdjson to show the power of SIMD in a non-traditional domain..."

To your point, the recently front-paged simdjson writeup made me regret ignoring SIMD. I had dabbled in 3D graphics and matrix math stuff in the 90s and somehow continued to associate those extensions with that kind of work.

My bad.

Thank you for daylighting this stuff.

Re: What's wrong with Intel, and how to fix it: Former principal engineer unloads

#89
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on the compiler. Gcc compiles to the lowest common denominator while icc offers "Processor dispatch technology performs a check at execution time to determine which processor the application is running on and use the most suitable code path for that processor. Compatible, non-Intel processors will take the default optimized code path." For HPC they will always compile to use the full set of instructions and s…

> If you run something with instructions your processor doesn't have it will crash. I would be very surprised if the processor itself crashed. I haven't encountered it in actuality so far, but as far as I'm aware, illegal instructions raise an interrupt that the OS can catch. On Unix, this should result in the corresponding user space process receiving SIGILL. It appears that SIGILL is actually preemptible. Could thi…

I meant the process crash not the CPU, you are correct. Also, my gcc knowledge is outdated.

People have mapped out the millions of "undocumented instructions" by trapping SIGILL.

Re: What's wrong with Intel, and how to fix it: Former principal engineer unloads

#90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Francois is a smart guy, but there's a range of opinions on the matters he raises. We argue a good deal on Twitter ("constructive confrontation" between former Intel Principal Engineers :-) ). He put together the video pretty quickly so don't dismiss it just for lack of polish. Personally, I argue with him a lot on AVX-512. I think AVX-512 is a Good Thing (or will be shortly - the first instantiation in Skylake Serve…

I'm sold, and not sold. Having parsed terabytes of JSON, I was impressed by your work. Regexps and other operations are common-place, and if libraries like yours were in broad use, I could definitely see the appeal. I'm sold on this as a technical pathway to performance. Problem is, I do it in Python. I have a hard time laying out the breadcrumbs between simdjson and hyperscan, and practical, general-purpose code run…

> Where Intel had great theoretical performance, but software didn't keep up?

> For this to make a dent, Intel would need to hire a teach of engineers so Firefox and Chrome both took advantage of the new instructions.

That's more or less Intel's standard practice with its Intel compiler suite and MKL-and-similar libraries.

If there are performance gains from SIMD being left on the table, some of it is on Intel for not building the middle tooling necessary to make it easy.

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