Comment by rphlx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rphlx | Hacker News Reader

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I agree with your general thrust though I think you are overstating a few points significantly.

> Skylake has born SIX new product lines; Goldmont, Goldmont Plus

Goldmont, Goldmont Plus are Atom products and are not "Skylake-derived" in any really major sense.

> zero presence in mobile

This is true only if you disregard the traditional laptop and newer convertible and chromebook markets. More importantly, Intel has an admittedly-indirect but financially very significant presence in the mostly-ARM cell phone and tablet markets, in that the backend for pretty much every cellphone app runs on an x86_64 server core somewhere. Every cell phone and tablet sold helps sell a modest fraction of an x86_64 core too.

> little presence in HPC/AI

Again, every major HPC/AI deployment that I've heard of still has a huge number of Intel cores. Though - as with the cell phone and tablet markets - you can definitely fault Intel for not capturing these markets in their entirety; they certainly had the talent, IP and the capital to do so, but they screwed up strategically in a way that will almost certainly become a cliched business school study at some point, if it's not already.

Regarding HPC I think people here are missing the real problem for Intel: Yes, they still have a strong showing in Top500 systems. But this could easily change soon because there is not that much keeping system developers from switching to AMD, potentially rven ARM. At the same time NVIDIA is essentially in a hard to replace position because an increasing percentage of applications is written to get their FLOPS from their GPUs instead of Intel‘s offerings.

The way Intel tries to fight back I find questionable. Both their MIC lineups and many-core Xeons suffer from a crucial flaw: Almost laughably low memory bandwidth when compared to NVIDIA, even compared to Epic. They rely so heavily on caching that it would require tremendous software efforts to get even in the range of 50% of the performance of GPU ports - I‘d argue it‘s significantly more difficult and less performance portable to do that rather than just do a basic GPU implementation, even with manually handled data transfers.

Add to this the increasingly successful efforts by GPU makers to automate data handling and Intel‘s attractiveness only dwindles further.

And now people are told that they might loose 20% performance? There‘s applications that use these chips like it were real-time systems (because it‘s the only thing financially possible for them). For these use cases, 20% will hurt, a lot.

/rant

There might be other reasons Intel isn't doing it the nVidia way. Patents are good at blocking progression for example.

Looking at the patent landscape of 3D memory [1] I don't really see the issue that Intel would be facing. First of all, as a chip maker they seem to have completely withdrawn from the base level science in memory in the first place, which probably hurts them from getting favourable patent deals - but this seems to be a management level blunder, maybe an overreaction to the Pentium 4 proprietary RAM flop.

In any case it would IMO be better to just now license 3D memory at market cost rather than just sitting on the hands and let HPC markets fade away.

Remember, it has historically only taken 8-10 years for HPC developments to scale down to people's pockets - it could well be that the next iPads outperform what Intel can offer as x86 based laptops, which will not be a good look for software developers deciding which platform they should choose for the next potential killer app.

[1] http://www.wipo.int/edocs/plrdocs/en/lexinnova_plr_3d_stacke...

>Pentium 4 proprietary RAM flop

You mean RDRAM?

yes. even googling it everyone just talked about DDR back then, that‘s why I couldn‘t find it anymore.

There‘s applications that use these chips like it were real-time systems (because it‘s the only thing financially possible for them). For these use cases, 20% will hurt, a lot.

Applications that use these chips in a realtime capacity don’t share hardware with other apps, so it will be possible to deploy them on unpatched machines, even if inconvenient. Those workloads are also not big on context switching and so not affected much by the patch.

I think cloud hosting providers will hurt the most, because that tends to be a context-switch-heavy workload, and their pricing model assumes a certain level of performance per core. They’ll mix in AMD in significant quantities just to diversify and avoid getting burned in the same way. They’re probably also the biggest market for intel’s server line.

This incident will seriously hurt intel even if they handle it perfectly, which they’re not doing.

Yes, that's a good point. The sharing of hardware over the internet (aka the 'cloud') is the most critical market here. Though, I think there's a lot of cross pollination between cloud and HPC markets - if AMD is financially successful with Zen they'll be able to pour more R&D money into fortifying their position. The question is of course whether that's going to be enough - Intel came back and beat out all competition after their last big loss of market share (~2005, 95nm process spawning AMD64 / Opteron). I'd argue that the Intel of 2018 is not the Intel of 2005. From what I'm hearing/reading, they've had an ongoing brain drain from being too much focused on short term profits versus taking real risks in developing new technologies as well as putting up the finances to actually secure and test their cash cows.

But this could easily change soon because there is not that much keeping system developers from switching to AMD, potentially rven ARM

Right, you can very easily imagine a machine whose CPU merely marshals and dispatched work to compute elements, be they GPUs, FPGAs, ASICs, TPUs, whatever. You don’t need an all-singing all-dancing Xeon for that...

… Or a Threadripper.

> the backend for pretty much every cellphone app runs on an x86_64 server core somewhere

Intel is not the entirety of x86_64 servers, and as the GP notes, AMD is going in the better direction with Zen for serving all those requests than Intel is at the moment.

As an aside, because it doesn't really matter to the point, x86_64 is actually an AMD extension that Intel licenses from them.[1]

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64#Licensing

I agree there is a good chance they will lose a material share over the coming 1-2 years to epyc, but at the moment, the x86_64 server market is almost 100%-Intel.

Old Opterons are still around too. Heck, cheap dedicated servers at Hetzner are repurposed desktop Athlon 64s :D

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