Hacker News Reader

Comment by jokoon | Hacker News Reader

I wonder, what makes intel chips more expensive? Is it a matter of money sunk into research? Because it seems that in terms of FLOPS per $, AMD always wins, and I have a hard time understanding that.

What makes AMD more interesting?

View on HN

Intel operates at 60% gross profit margin, AMD operates primarily in the red. In the past 15 quarters AMD had a single quarter in 2014 where it didn't suffered an operational loss (when the bulk of this generation of console royalties were paid out most likely)

> I wonder, what makes intel chips more expensive?

The fact that if you want a chip that powerful, there is only Intel. An example in GPUs are the NVIDIA Quaddro cards. If your frame needs more than 16GB memory to render, there is no other card available. So they sell the same chips packaged as a Quaddro at 5x the price of a Titan.

I believe the biggest reason the workstation/enterprise GPU lines (AMD’s too) are priced so much higher than the gaming/consumer lines is because the “certifications” for CAD[1] and 3D graphics[2] software cost a king’s ransom plus require expensive testing and validation of every individual card before it’s sold.

[1] http://www.nvidia.com/object/quadro-design-and-manufacturing...

[2] http://www.nvidia.com/object/media-and-entertainment.html

> The fact that if you want a chip that powerful, there is only Intel.

How does, e.g., POWER8 compare? (And POWER9, soon?)

That said, POWER tends to be even more expensive than this.

> How does, e.g., POWER8 compare? (And POWER9, soon?)

POWER8 is not well suited for HPC workloads as their vector instructions (VMX/AltiVec) are only 128-bit wide vs Intel's latest Skylake Xeon CPUs have vector instructions (AVX512) that are 512-bit wide.

For non HPC workloads (e.g. integer arithmetic) the POWER8 CPUs were somehow competitive with Intel's CPUs when they were first released in 2015 but today AMD and Intel's CPUs are clearly faster.

From what I can tell CPU enthusiasts were not impressed by the POWER8 CPU architecture.

It is not so much a "chip that powerful" but a "chip that correct". Gaming GPUs are allowed errors because the rendered images are known to be visual output only, whereas an engineering GPU may be used for hard analysis, which cannot afford any rounding or other classes of the acceptable errors gaming GPUs are allowed.

Are you talking about double-precision floating point math? Or are you saying the gaming chips actually have issues?

It is just complete nonsense. In fact deep learning/AI chips used for neural networks usually have reduced floating point precision because they don't need it.

Deep learning is still a fairly new and small field, scientific computing workloads are usually mostly double-precision.

We don't need it because errors in any particular value aren't important - the calculations assume an amount of inherent error greater than that produced by the hardware.

nonsense

Do you have a source for those claims? It seems highly unlikely to me that certain types of cpu's or gpu's are allowed errors to cut costs. Rounding mechanics are complicated, but I'd say a bug is a bug. As mentioned in a comment by jackmott in this thread, "engineering purposes" also often actively reduce precision for increased performance.

Double precision floating point and the addition of ECC memory.

In the case of nVidia the quadro cards are the only ones sold as manufactured by the company and are incredibly high binned.

Lots of people on this thread are conflating a few things such as ML, but I work in an industry where we deal a lot with GPUs and its certainly a fact that flipped bits are significantly more common than many think. If you do any work that requires the output to be nonvolatile then you can run into issues.

Perhaps he is referring to ECC memory - high end pro model NVIDIA cards have it, and consumer cards don’t. Here is a paper showing that there are memory errors on the consumer non-ecc cards.

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5493404/?arnumber=549340...

But for any particular version of "that powerful", the exclusivity doesn't last long. The burning need for hardware that didn't exist a couple years ago and will be mainstream in a couple more years isn't all that strong.

Other way around: AMD has to be cheaper to compete with Intel, which until now basically could charge what they wanted.

And this specific example here is clearl in the high-end enthusiast space, where whoever has the best can charge the highest price and the target market will pay it.

Costs of production rarely determine prices directly for any product - beyond setting the baseline from which the margin measures on. Market dynamics tend to do the rest (competition, market position, etc). Intel plays a role in it but not always.

There may be some that are down to the wire per unit cost (typically the cheaper ones) but I have a feeling Intel operates with plenty of margin on most of their higher end products. And plenty of them are the same chip repackaged.

For me, AMD tends to do better with multithreaded/parallel applications, but that tradeoff is at the expense of single core speeds. So mostly it depends on what you are using it for. I built a 64 core opteron server for doing physics calculations and it was probably my favorite build ever, so I can't wait to try the new AMD server lineup, this time I'll only need two CPUs to get 64 cores!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com