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Comment by ksec | Hacker News Reader

This is like, "Hell has frozen over" kind of news

Am I the only one who smell this as very "Apple" wanted?

I dont think AMD will be giving up any GFX secret, more likely this is AMD shipping Intel a Mobile Gfx Die to be integrated within the same CPU package.

But in any case, Why not just have Intel ship a Mobile CPU without iGPU and a Separate GPU.

And AMD, why now? When Zen is doing great, has great roadmap and potential, along with much better GFx then Intel. Why?

Edit: OK, I didn't read carefully, while this is WSJ, it is still a rumor, nothing has confirmed.... yet.

Edit2: It is confirmed now.

Edit3: Yes AMD will be shipping die to Intel, and it is EMIB at work. https://www.pcworld.com/article/3235934/components-processor...

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This is actually a smart move for AMD, and here's why.

These chips from Intel are going to be the super-high top end mobile chips in laptops that cost serious money, and have a rumoured 45w TDP.

Raven Ridge on the other hand is a traditional AMD APU, albeit with a decent CPU component - it's not going after the same market segment at all, it's going after the segment where you want to maybe do some light e-sports gaming.

This way, AMD gets both bites of the cherry - they get to sell their APUs with Zen, and they also get to target the super top end.

Also smart move for Intel. Frees them up to concentrate on CPU functionality and clean offloading to accelerators. This IMHO is the key, without something better than CAPI, CCIX, NVlink, then these are just accelerators. Putting them in as actual compute devices on same level as the CPU will take some actual guts and innovation.

Kyle Bennet leaked this almost a year ago:

https://hardforum.com/threads/from-ati-to-amd-back-to-ati-a-...

If you don't read hardforum you should!

Doesn't look like a rumor:

https://newsroom.intel.com/editorials/new-intel-core-process...

> But in any case, Why not just have Intel ship a Mobile CPU without iGPU and a Separate GPU.

Power, manufacturing costs, integration and testing costs, design size...

> Am I the only one who smell this as very "Apple" wanted?

Why would Apple care about NVIDIA? They're already beating them in the kind of performance that matters on products Intel will be competing for.

Apple wants low powered, thin, but powerful chips.

In other words, exactly what everyone who uses chips wants.

That's not true at all. Cost is king. Only flagship products care about pushing size down.

My theory on why Apple prefers AMD over nVidia:

AMD hardware at a specific price point is more powerful than nVidia hardware at the same price point. However, nVidia has superior drivers that eliminates the difference.

And since Apple prefers to use their own drivers, nVidia loses their main point of differentiation.

But of course the "Apple" drivers for video cards are basically vendor drivers with Apple doing QA & release management. But the driver is nVidia's secret sauce, they're not going to show it to Apple, since Apple is now a very competitive GPU manufacturer. At some point Apple will probably put their own GPU's inside Macs, so nVidia doesn't want to give them a head start.

AMD cares less about giving Apple a head start because they care more about the short term than the long and competing against nVidia.

AMD forked over the driver code, NVIDIA doesn’t let Apple handle the drivers and pushed CUDA which apple didn’t want anything to do with.

As for the performance per buck thing it’s not accurate. For gaming and 3D applications AMD has a huge bottleneck in thier geometry pipeline which causes the to underperform in games especially pre VEGA. NVIDIA also used tile rasterization and shader output caching on die to increase performance this is something that AMD adopted only with VEGA.

Pure flops don’t mean much even for compute.

The new Vega boards lag nvidias 1080ti apart for some edge cases of interest to cryptocurrencies

Though to be fair, they also are significantly cheaper than the 1080ti. Well, if you can find one at MSRP at least.

Quite they are all being snapped up by miners

Coding with Vulkan directly seems to eliminate the nvidia perf advantage in many cases, so...is it still the hardware or the software lagging?

Vs. coding for nvidia or vs. coding for DirectX independent of card-maker?

Looking at AMD’s server strategy, hey are going directly at NVidia, nvidia just doesn’t know it yet. They Epyc line is built for heavy PCIe comma and low comms overhead from NIC to GPGPU. Of course, guess which gpgpu works best with them?

> And AMD, why now? When Zen is doing great...

Well, last time AMD had an upper hand on the CPU's technical features, they tried taking Intel into a fight and couldn't handle it. Why would the same thing have a different result now?

It is much smarter to not have a full-on direct fight.

They could handle it and beat them at several key points (1 ghz barrier, first to ship x86-64, first to integrate memory controller, not to mention eating the p4 for lunch performance wise), but Intel cheated and our justice department let them. The US refused to do anything, and the EU went at it a decade after the facts.

I agree with your conclusion that fighting head on right now would not be smart when they have nvidia on one side and arm on the other. But not with your assertion that "AMD failed to defeat Intel products in the market" the last time.

How they failed is of little relevance, since there is no reason to believe this time things would be different. (In fact, I would expect the US gov to be more corrupt now, not less.)

Yes it is of relevance, since the EU made it clear if Intel tried it again not only would they act much much more swiftly, but they would also be very tough.

This.

I'd love AMD to bloody Intel's nose (Intel deserves it after their payola anti-competitive behavior against AMD in the 2000's), but it's clear that Intel is too big to fail.

So AMD can win by helping Intel win.

It is not good in the long run for consumers, but it's probably the right move for AMD today.

I assume AMD is making these moves to get their products back out there where consumers read their name even when (web-)stores predominantly stock Intel products (I think it's called "mindshare").

I also hope this is the start of a long journey where AMD chips away bit by bit at Intel (near-)monopoly in the CPU market.

Yes, definitely both mindshare and piggybacking on Intel's existing product pipelines. Playing sidecar to Intel means getting in and getting the spotlight with every major computer manufacturer, where right now they are struggling to get put into pre-assembled systems.

Intel wouldn't be willing to do something like this without the all too plausible now threat of a customer moving to a full AMD stack. There are still reasons to prefer Intel in some cases but nobody has to feel like Intel is the only choice any more.

It has been rumored for quite awhile. Chiplets from multiple vendors and on package memory (HBM) will be the way all future high end chips will be built. The key to getting this right is getting the handoff between devices at a systems level and extending the virtual memory fabric cleanly to these devices. The win for these is that you get the best hardware out there on A high bandwidth low latency substrate. AMD has better GPU hardware than Nvidia (Nvidia just has better drivers). Intel still has an edge on CPU physical implementation so, why not combine. I fully expect to see custom accelerators (TPU-like things in he near future) incorporated as well. If companies like IBM and Arm were smart they’ll be entering the space too, selling IP to put over EMIB. Suspect IBM is already there :), Arm probably not.

> And AMD, why now? When Zen is doing great, has great roadmap and potential, along with much better GFx then Intel. Why?

Why not now? Why not generate additional income from the sale of these Intel/AMD CPUs instead of relying on just Zen?

This way, AMD can make money both when a Zen and a Core CPU is sold.

yep hell has indeed frozen over.

No. This is not. Source: I know someone who worked at AMD before and this is not a remote possibility. Employees have been talking about this possibility openly inside the company. Why? Simply because the GPU is a HW black box that anybody can use (including the competitors). At least that's how I understood it.

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