Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

pcworld.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 117 posts

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

#91

Post by inawarminister »

Scaless wrote: post #56
dathinab wrote: post #54

I'm not knowing how much of this things are true, but isn't it ironic that AMD has more benefits from SMT because they have less pipeline optimizations (and similar), but exactly this pipeline optimizations (and similar) seem to be at least partially at fault for some of the Specter style attacks and make it harder to put more cores into the system (as this additional optimizations are likely need more silicon space.…

You are more or less describing the architecture of the PlayStation 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_technical_specif... The problem with this type of system is both the software and OS have to be aware of what is or isn't a "main thread" job. You have to architect your whole program around job systems to spread your data between the main thread and sub-processes which was a major complaint of gamedevs…

Wasn't Linux installable in early PS3s, and some labs (US military?) used stacks of PS3s as distributed superishcomputers? I wonder if anyone had analysed general computing performance in CELLs...

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

#92

Post by lokedhs »

danpalmer wrote: post #79
lokedhs wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue isn't with MBA's per se. They can certainly be valuable to a company. The problem is when the MBA's control the direction of the company as opposed to advising it.

I think it's even more than that, it's when MBA believe that a company can do well by just being "good at business", rather than good at what their business actually does.

Yes, that's definitely part of it. But wouldn't you say that such MBA's are bad MBA's?

Isn't a good MBA supposed to not just understand business, but also everything that enables business to exist (i.e. product development, research, etc)?

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

#94

Post by Const-me »

pantalaimon wrote: post #59
glangdale wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, I should note that an interest in large SIMD is not confined to Intel - the ARM world is (slowly) heading towards SVE (or so my friends from that quarter assure me). So it's not just a partisan pro-Intel or pro-x86 thing on my part.

RISC-V is also adding Vector extensions. The cool thing about those is that they are variable length, so code can take advantage of newer hardware / degrade gracefully on less capable one. https://gms.tf/riscv-vector.html

> so code can take advantage of newer hardware / degrade gracefully on less capable one

I never user variable-length SIMD on CPUs, but I have substantial experience with current SIMD up to AVX2, and GPGPUs. I’m not sure I like that variable-length stuff.

1. Variable-length SIMD is only suitable for vertical operations. Many useful algorithms are only possible to vectorize with shuffles and such.

2. With registers size unknown to compilers, it’s impossible to create a calling convention to pass data in registers, as opposed to RAM. RAM is slow on modern hardware, and is becoming slower over time (in relation to compute speed; nanoseconds are fine). GPUs are OK with that because they are massively multithreaded, they switch threads instead of waiting for data from memory. CPUs can’t do that, they only have 2 hardware threads per core.

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

#95

Post by TomVDB »

PaulHoule wrote: post #86
supernova87a wrote: post #12

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…

I don’t understand your point that Nvidia (or ATI) would have gone under if it weren’t for deep learning or crypto.

Crypto on GPU was only a relatively short lived flash in the pan, and deep learning has only been a meaningful revenue generator in the past 5 years or so.

GPUs were doing just fine without that.

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

#96

Post by FullyFunctional »

kasabali wrote: post #51
FullyFunctional wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://browser.geekbench.com/processor-benchmarks Even normalizing for the frequency isn't enough to explain the difference

You need to look at turbo frequencies. Geekbench runs at turbo speed almost all the time.

Like I said, I did account for that

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

#97

Post by PaulHoule »

TomVDB wrote: post #95
PaulHoule wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don’t understand your point that Nvidia (or ATI) would have gone under if it weren’t for deep learning or crypto. Crypto on GPU was only a relatively short lived flash in the pan, and deep learning has only been a meaningful revenue generator in the past 5 years or so. GPUs were doing just fine without that.

Demand for crypto bent the demand curve at a time when GPU manufacturers needed cash and an optimistic outlook to tell investors.

The astonishing thing was the long life of the 10-series; if the 10-series was an airplane it would be the 737. Hardware innovation has usually gone faster with GPUs, but the long life of the 10-series realized that performance because software had a chance to catch up.

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

#98

Post by PaulHoule »

BeeOnRope wrote: post #16
FullyFunctional wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure AVX-512 is wonderful and you can easily produce examples where it makes loops go N times faster. That unfortunately is missing the point. Microprocessors implementation is an extremely careful balance and effectively everything is a trade off. The area, power, and complexity of features comes at a non-zero cost to code that doesn't use it. The fact that AVX-512 isn't on every processor AND the performance be…

I'm not missing the point as I was responding to whether AVX-512 is useful in practice. It is. It is some badly designed extensions where the earlier ones were great: it's arguably better than the earlier ones. Now adoption has been poor and there is a chicken-and-egg effect as you point out, but that's separate from the question of whether AVX-512 is useful in practice. It is. The point about tradeoffs is well taken…

AVX-512 isn't "bad in practice" but in the context of AVX-128, AVX-256, and AVX-1024 it is a very bad practice because the inconstant availability of the vector unit means that it doesn't get used, or you use a least-common denominator of what worked on Atom 10 years ago.

Look on the bright side: if you don't use AVX-512 you have 10% extra heat sink and heat soak on your CPU so you can turbo higher. AVX-512 makes the chip easier to cool.

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

#99

Post by justinclift »

PaulHoule wrote: post #74
bosswipe wrote: post #27

None of that matters as long as Intel can't ship their 10nm and 7nm nodes. This guy doesn't seem to have an opinion on what's wrong at the fabs but that is the big life or death question for Intel right now.

I am glad to hear Intel is dabbling at TMSC (they have a plan B if not an actual business plan) but it is painful to see Intel talking as if nothing was wrong while congressmen are waking up to the reality that we might not be making chips in the us anymore. And that's what is scary. Intel is failing left and right but the rap track from Intel sounds like an ad for Disneyland.

Wonder if the fabs being developed in China are or will be competitive to Intel in the ~near future?

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

#100

Post by TomVDB »

PaulHoule wrote: post #97
TomVDB wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t understand your point that Nvidia (or ATI) would have gone under if it weren’t for deep learning or crypto. Crypto on GPU was only a relatively short lived flash in the pan, and deep learning has only been a meaningful revenue generator in the past 5 years or so. GPUs were doing just fine without that.

Demand for crypto bent the demand curve at a time when GPU manufacturers needed cash and an optimistic outlook to tell investors. The astonishing thing was the long life of the 10-series; if the 10-series was an airplane it would be the 737. Hardware innovation has usually gone faster with GPUs, but the long life of the 10-series realized that performance because software had a chance to catch up.

There’s a steady ~2 year cadence at which new GPU families are introduced. The 10 series was nothing out of the ordinary.

Kepler - Maxwell: 28 months

Maxwell - Pascal: 20 months

Pascal - Turing: 25 months

Turing - Ampere: ?, but rumors have if for sometime September, so ~25 months

And Nvidia has never been in need of cash.

The crypto boom was just a nice extra boost, followed by a nasty bust.

One could very argue that the crypto boom was a net negative.

Post reply on HN