Interesting article presenting a "war" between Intel CPU and Nvidia GPU.
I'm curious where AMD falls in this war. While it's true GPU can provide really nice theoritical TFLOPS, the cost of moving data in and out of the GPU's memory is a well known issue. This renders GPU much less attractive for real applications.
The reason I mentioned AMD is that I read some time ago about their Heterogeneous system architecture [1]. One of the HSA's goal is to get rid of the particular issue of moving that data. I wonder if this was adopted in any HPC cluster or anywhere else.
Right now AMD is fighting for its life, it's in no position to take on Intel and Nvidia in the HPC space. If their consumer Zen processors flop then AMD will likely be heading for a buyout and/or bankruptcy. Only if both Zen and Vega (their upcoming high-end GPU) are huge successes will they have the resources to mount a serious effort to capture some of the HPC market.
Eh, AMD has been doing that and custom cores as their bread and butter, seeing as they design the chips that power all the >$100 consoles from Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft, they have a good market niche that provides them with a decent market to keep the company viable.
I'm not sure of cracking a new market space would be a good idea either, just like how they aren't trying to go toe to toe with Allwinner offering H3 SOCs for $1ea with a quadcore and H.265 hardware decoding, it might not make sense to get into a 3 way war with Intel, Nvidia, etc.
Retaking or getting into another market with a single vendor or none presently would likely be more profitable, just as VIA did with their point of sale motherboards with crypto accelerators and tons of serial ports.
AMD only has so much money and talent, getting into a pissing contest is not something they are looking to do. Intel can piss harder and longer than them (just look at the contra-revenue they did with the HP Stream 7 and the $50 Walmart android tablet, Intel charged the manufacturer for the chip $X and paid them $X+Y for using said chip to compete with ARM).
The console business has razor-thin margins, there's not enough money being made there to sustain a company the size of AMD. Where that business might save them is if say Microsoft decided to buy them out to secure their supply of chips for the Xbox. The fact that it would force Sony to look elsewhere for their next-gen console wouldn't hurt I'm sure.
Sure, I'm not saying its something with huge margins, just like how Allwinner isn't getting rich with their dirt cheap SOCs. That being said, they have a few markets like that, and that is what sustains a company.
I highly doubt Microsoft or anyone will buy AMD, as it would not make financial sense, AMD already builds these chips cheaper than any of them could build them on their own, and any kind of merger would revoke AMD's x86 license, and Intel's x86-64 license, thus destroying the ecosystem.
On another note, a razor thin margin might not be glamorous, but you can run a business like that, though it will not be glamorous.
I'm not a lawyer, nor have I studied the contract, but a superficial reading would imply that complete revocation is indeed the outcome of acquisition of either party. Do you have evidence to the contrary?
5.2 (c) Termination Upon Change of Control. Subject to
the terms of, and as further set forth in, Sections 5.2(d)
and 5.2(e), this Agreement shall automatically terminate as
a whole upon the consummation of a Change of Control of
either Party.
(d) Effects of Termination.
(ii) In the event of any termination of this
Agreement pursuant to Section 5.2(c), and subject to the
provisions of Section 5.2(e), the rights and licenses
granted to both Parties under this Agreement, including
without limitation the rights granted under Section 3.8(d),
shall terminate as of the effective date of such
termination.
This is true but irrelevant - it's Mutually Assured Destruction unless they reaffirm the contract, since both AMD and Intel would literally have to stop producing x86_64 chips without it. There is no way that Intel would allow that, their business would go into freefall.
I mean, even if they did manage to wreck AMD, it doesn't get them anything particularly useful if it costs them their x86_64 duopoly/monopoly.
Not to mention that AMD's current state is absolutely perfect for intel - too weak to be a serious threat, yet viable enough so that Intel is not a completely obvious monopoly that might attract unwanted regulatory intervention.
Even if the licensing problems went away, I'm not sure it's in Intels political/legal interests to lose their only plausible competitor. AMD can't be costing them a lot of money (the real risk is slow irrelevance if ARM usage grows any more), and the risks were AMD to cease operations considerable.
That is, until some ARM-based system can at least appear competitive enough to keep justice departments (and powerful negotiating partners like apple) at bay.
He doesn't, hence why he did not link to an article where AMD, Intel or VIA's lawyers say their cross licensing agreement allows them to be bought by another company.
I thought so too, but looking at it stock recently it seems to be doing much better (especially in last year). Not sure how to interpret that. Wonder if it was mostly investors being happy they divested from that ARM microserver company, or there is genuine upswing and increased market share.
> looking at it stock recently it seems to be doing much better (especially in last year). Not sure how to interpret that.
One interpretation: NVIDIA has been doing a very good job of A) pursuing deep learning and B) talking that up on earnings calls. Even if they're not seeing much money from it right now, investors are excited that they might in the future.
This leads some investors and algos to think, "Hey, NVIDIA is doing well, and AMD is nominally in the same business as NVIDIA, so let's buy AMD because it's cheaper and therefore must represent a better value." This drives up the price of AMD stock, which is itself already prone to more volatility because of their lower market cap.
However, they are two fundamentally different companies. I hear a lot about founder-led vs non-founder-led businesses, and AMD vs NVIDIA is a good example of non-founder-led vs founder-led atm. Also, they've done a very poor job with their ATI acquisition. The ATI acquisition is why they even have a leg to compete with NVIDIA in the first place, but that train has basically left the station at this point.
Intel is in a weird position because their market cap is 10x NVIDIA's, so they need markets where they can make literally 10x more money than for NVIDIA to be interested. Victims of their own success, innovators dilemma, etc. Personally, I think that will hinder them because everything they want to try won't be "big enough" while NVIDIA doesn't suffer from that problem and AMD just has no idea what it's doing besides professional supply chain management.
Respect where it's due, Nvidia will win the hardware side of deep learning and fast matrix multiplication for the foreseeable future.
Right now the only thing I can see holding AMD back is their lack of vision to drop a bit of cash on a CuDNN equivalent (and the ML framework support for it), especially fast convolution kernels optimised for their hardware. They are waiting for the open source community to do the work for them, but no one is picking it up because it's a lot of work.
A couple of good AMD engineers should be able to knock out fast Winograd kernels pretty quick.
Their best bet it to increase support for OpenCL rather than invent something new. And then improve / create OpenCL support for TensorFlow and other popular toolkits.
Caffe has an OpenCL branch, works on AMD but about quarter of the speed of equivalent NVidia hardware using CuDNN 4/5, mostly due to unoptimised kernels - https://github.com/BVLC/caffe/tree/opencl
If they can achieve a big improvement over Nvidia , they can retain their margins.
As for the market being small - as long they can run a self sustaining , high-margin business org at it ,and there's. A big possibility of future growth , why not ? It's not like they lack those resources for another big growth opportunity they're trying to get.
> If they can achieve a big improvement over Nvidia , they can retain their margins.
That's part of my point--they can't achieve a big improvement over Nvidia. Nvidia hires from the same pool that Intel does. Intel doesn't magically get better engineers. If anything the smarter ones are at Nvidia because it's easier to double the stock price of a $13B company than a $150B company, so more upside potential on stock options, which matters to those seeking long and lucrative careers at bigcos. Salaries are about the same at both companies.
So with Nvidia's headstart and the knowledge that a bigger team does not lead to better engineering performance (as per Mythical Man Month), how does Intel magically achieve a "big improvement" over Nvidia?
> As for the market being small - as long they can run a self sustaining , high-margin business org at it ,and there's. A big possibility of future growth , why not ?
I agree logically, but I don't think Intel is quite there as an organization. Once an organization is being run by committee, it's too easy to throw cold water on an idea to kill it. Why take the risk of backing a new initiative?
Also, let's say they were on-board as an organization... See my first point: they can't run a self-sustaining high margin business because there isn't one. There isn't even an especially high margin business for Nvidia; enterprises aren't nearly as stupid or rich as everyone thinks.
If anything, Intel has made the classic big company mistake of waiting too long in the first place, then realizing they're losing, then overcompensating via acquisition. Historically, it's not a good strategy.
My whole point being: I'm glad to see competition, Nvidia (or quantum computing, etc.) will probably win this.
Their semi-custom segment basically stabilised the company and saved them from bankruptcy, their new graphics cards have been good, and from what we know about Zen it's going to be a winner for them (somewhere around Broadwell levels clock for clock).
If you keep in mind that they only need to capture something like 10% to 20% of the server market to double their revenue you can see why people are willing to bet on them.
Of course if they've been fudging the Zen numbers as they've done in the past then they'll probably be done as a company, but it seems very unlikely this time around.
AMD is losing less money than analysts predicted. They've gone from "hopeless" to "it's a longshot" and the stock has repriced accordingly. Long term prospects depend very much on how this new architectures do in the market.
Huh? AMD is too important to Intel to let them fail, if AMD ever went broke, Intel would give them money just so they didn't have to deal with every country going at them for anti-trust law violations.
China bypassed US export laws by licensing from AMD and creating a partnership which re-capitalized AMD. China wants to have the fastest and best of everything to show up the United States that China is the new world power.
I've personally met with quite a few AMD employees over the past few years (hell, they bought me quite a bit of alcohol at times :P). They are not trying to compete in the high performance desktop or server arena anymore, they view it as an area that they will never win big marketshare in.
That being said, any market they can compete with Intel and cause them to have less than 100% marketshare in while making money is a market they are in or want to be in if they aren't already.
Intel literally has a half decade of chips that they could release right now that perform better and are ready to be released, but won't be until years down the road due to a desire to remain top dog in the event they have another Pentium 4 happen.
Perhaps that Joint Venture will go as well as Intel Israel went (brought the Core series out, replacing the failed Pentium 4) which then replaced Intel Oregon, but that is an iffy bet. The Israelis are particularly good at critical thinking, whereas that is generally not encouraged in China. I might be wrong though, but 2 to 3 years from now when we see first silicon for their modified Zen, we'll know.
However, being a monopolist makes certain things illegal for you to do, and some of those things are things that are easy to suspect you of, but hard to prove you're not doing.
As such, being a monopolist constrains you, as well as invites long, expensive, frustrating probes into your business that creates costs and risk (even if you're not intentionally violating anti-trust law, doesn't mean some business unit isn't inadvertently doing so).
E.g. IBM was under an anti-trust probe from 1969 until 1982 over their mainframe business. The probe ended with the DOJ concluding the case was without merit, but it is widely considered to have had a big effect on IBMs decisionmaking for more than a decade.
I realise it's not the most reliable resource but it shows something interesting regardless. It's a server grade apu, combining a cpu and GPU onto a single socket. With HBM for huge amounts of bandwidth.
They also have HIP for converting CUDA code into performance cross platform code.
I'm curious where AMD falls in this war. While it's true GPU can provide really nice theoritical TFLOPS, the cost of moving data in and out of the GPU's memory is a well known issue. This renders GPU much less attractive for real applications.
The reason I mentioned AMD is that I read some time ago about their Heterogeneous system architecture [1]. One of the HSA's goal is to get rid of the particular issue of moving that data. I wonder if this was adopted in any HPC cluster or anywhere else.
[1] http://developer.amd.com/resources/heterogeneous-computing/w...