[HN Gopher] Intel's Ponte Vecchio: Chiplets Gone Crazy ___________________________________________________________________ Intel's Ponte Vecchio: Chiplets Gone Crazy Author : rbanffy Score : 109 points Date : 2023-09-25 07:39 UTC (15 hours ago) (HTM) web link (chipsandcheese.com) (TXT) w3m dump (chipsandcheese.com) | baq wrote: | > With that in mind, Ponte Vecchio is better seen as a learning | experience. Intel engineers likely gained a lot of experience | with different process nodes and packaging technologies while | developing PVC | | _cough_ An expensive lesson, I'm sure. | hinkley wrote: | Cheaper than Itanium I bet. | failuser wrote: | Itanium killed enough competitors by sheer announcement that | it might have been a positive for Intel in the end. | jahav wrote: | Sure, but position of Intel back then was very different than | today. | | Being dethroned and free cash flow negative is rather bad I | am told. | nwiswell wrote: | Does this feel a lot like Xeon Phi v3.0 to anybody else? | | Intel's strategy here is baffling to me. Rather than keep trying | to improve their existing line of coprocessors (and most | critically, keep accumulating key talent), they kill off the | program, scatter their talent to the four winds, wait a couple | years, and then launch another substandard product. | mastax wrote: | I think Intel's strategy, in a broad sense, makes sense. Xeon | Phi succeeded in a few tiny niches, but they need a real GPGPU | in order to compete in the broader market this decade. They | tried to make their microarchitecture broadly similar to their | competitors' to reduce risk and improve software compatibility. | They knew their architecture (and software) wouldn't be as good | as their experienced competitors' but thought that at the high | end they could use their advanced packaging technology as an | advantage. In hindsight that was maybe over-ambitious if it | caused the substantial delays (I don't think we know that for | certain but it's a good guess) but maybe it will pay dividends | in the next product. You do have to take some risks when you're | in last place. | nwiswell wrote: | I just don't understand why they would keep shutting programs | down rather than doing course corrections toward a more | competitive GPGPU. This behavior stretches all the way back | to Larrabee in 2010. | | If I was a betting man, I would bet that this project is dead | inside 36 months. And if I was a GPU designer, I'd | accordingly not touch Intel with a barge pole. They've | painted themselves into a corner. | | I personally know GPU experts who left Intel for Nvidia | because of this. I can't imagine they would consider going | back at this point. | brokencode wrote: | This is typical of Intel's weak leadership and focus on short | term profits instead of long term success. | | Just look at how they dragged their feet in transitioning to | EUV because it was too expensive. This contributed to large | delays in their 10 and 7 nm processes and a total loss in their | process leadership. | | And look at how many billions they poured into making a 5G | modem only to give up and sell their IP to Apple. | | Or how they dragged their feet in getting into mobile, then | came out with Atom way too late to be successful in the market. | They essentially gave the market to ARM. | | Optane is another recent example. Cool technology, but if a | product is not a smashing success right away, Intel throws in | the towel. | | There's no real long term vision that I can see. No resilience | to challenges or ability to solve truly difficult problems. | tester756 wrote: | >Optane is another recent example. Cool technology, but if a | product is not a smashing success right away, Intel throws in | the towel. | | Wasn't the actual (partial) reason that they didnt have a | place to actually create them since Micron sold the fab? | | https://www.extremetech.com/computing/320932-micron- | ends-3d-... | brokencode wrote: | From my understanding, the problem was that it wasn't | selling well enough and they decided to cut their losses. | | I'm not saying that Optane was a hill they needed to die | on, but it's just another example of their failed | leadership and decision making. | | Look at how AMD is pursuing and largely succeeding with | their vision of using chiplets in their CPUs and GPUs to | enable significantly higher core counts at a lower cost. | | Or how Nvidia is innovating with massive AI supercomputers, | ray tracing, and DLSS. | | What is Intel's vision? In what way are they inventing the | next generation of computing? It seems to me that their | company objective is just to play catch up with AMD and | Nvidia. | wtallis wrote: | I think it's fair to say that Optane was not merely "not a | smashing success" but was completely uneconomical. Intel | was essentially using Optane products as loss leaders to | promote platform lock-in, and had limited uptake. Micron | made only the smallest token attempt to bring 3D XPoint to | market before bailing. Clearly neither partner saw a way | forward to reduce the costs drastically to make it | competitive as a high-volume product. | qwytw wrote: | > They essentially gave the market to ARM | | They also had the best ARM chips for years with | StrongARM/Xscale (using their own cores). Which they killed | because obviously Atom was going to be much better and lock | in everyone into x86... | [deleted] | brrrrrm wrote: | > This is likely a compiler issue where the v0 += acc * v0 | sequence couldn't be converted into a FMA instruction. | | Err, is the ISA undocumented/impossible to inspect in the | execution pipeline? Seems like an important thing to verify/fix | for a hardware benchmark... | tremon wrote: | Yes, at least for as far as I know. The actual micro-ops | resulting from the instruction stream are invisible. You can | count the number of uops issued and partly deduce how the | instructions were decoded, but not view the uops themselves. | wtallis wrote: | From the preceding paragraph: | | > We weren't able to get to the bottom of this because we don't | have the profiling tools necessary to get disassembly from the | GPU. | touisteur wrote: | And that's all I need to know about replacing all NVIDIA | stuff. I know it's pretty hard to get there, but Intel should | know that having a serious general purpose computing thing | means solid compilers, toolchains, optimized libraries, and a | whole lot of mindshare (as in 'a large number of people | willing to throw their time to test your stuff'). | ndneighbor wrote: | I am an Intel shill lately but I think it's more of a time | thing rather than the desire to keep stuff a secret. | They've been pretty good about open documentation on the | stuff that matters (like this) such as OpenVINO. | touisteur wrote: | I was a bit annoyed about the OpenVINO reference, because | I felt they closed most of the things about myriad-x and | the SHAVE arch. And last time I tried OpenVINO on | TigerLake I was left with a very thick pile of | undebuggable, uninspectable opencl-y stuff, very bad | taste in my mouth. | | I mean OpenVINO's perf is up there on Intel CPUs and it's | a great optimising compiler, I've thrown a lot of weird | stuff in there and it didn't crap out with complaints | about unsupported layers or unsupported combination of | layers. It also has an OK batching story (as opposed to | TVM last time I checked...) if you're ready to perform | some network surgery. | | I also feel it's very bad at reporting errors, and | stepping through with gdb is one of the worst | experiences... BUT but yeah most of the code is available | now. | | Now if they could stop moving shit around, and renaming | stuff, it'd be great. Hoping they settle on 'OneAPI' for | some time. | bigbillheck wrote: | SHAVE was such a cool architecture, it's too bad about | all the secrecy. | colejohnson66 wrote: | Is the Intel Xe ISA even publicly documented? I've searched | before and I can't find a PDF detailing the instruction set. | AMD releases them,[0] but I can't find anything from Intel | (or Nvidia for that matter). | | [0]: RDNA2 ISA: | https://www.amd.com/content/dam/amd/en/documents/radeon- | tech... | wmf wrote: | https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/docs/graphics-for- | li... (Alchemist is a variant of Xe) | kcb wrote: | Intel( and AMD) need to get their high end GPUs offered by a | cloud provider. Total non-starter until then. | ds wrote: | The potential for intel to explode is definitely there if intel | executes with its AI demand. | | I suppose one unknown catalyst with intel is what happens in | taiwan/china. If things get crazy over there, suddenly intel | seems alot more valuable as the 'US' chip maker (they produce | roughly 75% in the US iirc). If the gov starts to even more | heaivly subsidize non-reliance on asia, intel could find major | gains if TSMC/samsung get shut out. | | I mean, just look at the market caps- Intel is worth 6x less than | nvidia despite historically having the same or greater gross | revenue (not counting the most recent quarter of course). | eklitzke wrote: | Absolutely. We're still in early days, but the products that | Intel has announced in this space are impressive, and if they | execute well they should be able to capture a significant | amount of market share. That isn't to say that they will be the | majority or dominant player in this space, but even capturing | 10% or 20% of the datacenter GPU market in the next few years | would be a win for Intel. | | Intel is also well known for inking long-term deals with major | discounts for big customers (Google, Facebook, etc.) that can | commit to purchasing large amounts of hardware, whereas Nvidia | doesn't really have the same reputation. It's conceivable that | Intel could use this strategy to help bootstrap their server | GPU business. The Googles and Facebooks of the world are going | to have to evaluate this in the context of how much additional | engineering work it is to support and debug multiple GPU | architectures for their ML stack, but thinking long- | term/strategically these companies should be highly motivated | to negotiate these kinds of contracts to avoid lock-in and get | better discounts. | washadjeffmad wrote: | I was surprised by how poorly poised Intel was to act on the | "Cambrian explosion" of AGI late last year. After the release | of their Intel Arc GPUs, it took almost two quarters for their | Intel Extensions for PyTorch/TensorFlow to be released, to | middling support and interest, which hasn't changed much, | today. | | How many of us learned ML using Compute Sticks, OpenVINO and | OneAPI or another of their libraries or frameworks, or their | great documentation? It's like they didn't really believe in it | outside of research. | | What irony is it when a bedrock of "AI" fails to dream? | version_five wrote: | Maybe I'm thinking about it too simply but yeah I agree. | | Language models in particular are very similar architectures | and effectively a lot of dot products. And running them on | GPU's is arguably overkill. Look at llama.cpp for the way the | industry is going. I want a fast parallel quantized dot | product instruction on a CPU, and I want the memory bandwidth | to keep it loaded up. Intel should be able to deliver that, | with none of the horrible baggage that comes from CUDA and | nvidia drivers. | bsder wrote: | > The potential for intel to explode is definitely there if | intel executes with its AI demand. | | Nope. Intel doesn't get "It's the software, stupid." | | Intel is congenitally unable to pay software people more than | their engineers--and they treat their engineers like crap, | mostly. And they're going to keep getting beaten black and blue | by nVidia for that. | mastax wrote: | I think Intel is doing relatively well on the software side, | given how short a time frame we're talking about. OneAPI is | in the same ballpark as AMD and on a better trajectory, I | think. They're competing for second place, remember. | | The more disappointing thing for me is that they bought like | 5 AI startups pretty early on and have basically just shut | most of them down. Maybe that was always the plan? See which | ones develop the best and consider the rest to be acqui- | hires? But I think it's more likely just fallout from Intel's | era of flailing around and acquiring random crap. | varelse wrote: | [dead] | hnav wrote: | Per the article, this is on TSMC's 5nm node, though it does | seem that Intel has some level of support from the US govt | since it's the only onshore player there. | dyingkneepad wrote: | So the author compares it with a bunch of other GPUs, but: what | about the price? I mean yeah H100 looks better in the graphs, but | does it cost the same? | wmf wrote: | I don't know if there even is a price. Maybe Intel is just | giving them out for free. | [deleted] ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-09-25 23:00 UTC)