[HN Gopher] Intel's Ponte Vecchio: Chiplets Gone Crazy
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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]
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