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0xbear

Enemy of my enemy is my friend. With this Intel achieves several goals:

1. Stave off the stiff competition from Zen APUs.

2. Support a small competitor to keep the DOJ off their tail.

3. Bankroll an alternative to CUDA which they could piggyback on later when their own stuff is shipping.

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I hope (3) comes true, but I have my doubts.

So do I. Competition is better for everybody, including the competitors.

The reason why I have doubts is that Intel has proven to be a rather weak competitor in anything other than multi- (but not many-) core x86. And their haphazard software strategy seems to be a major factor here. Especially the way Larrabee/Xeon Phi has gone so far, their push for OpenCL is IMO too little too late. Instead, OpenMP was promoted, with the vectorization basically brushed off as the magic the compiler will do for you... well it won't, and if it doesn't, you have no way to compete against Nvidia GPUs. Time will show whether they've now recognised this and work together with AMD in an effective way, but yeah...

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