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.
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.
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...
A 233Mhz StrongARM coprocessor plugged into an Acorn RISC PC around 1994 was astonishing to behold. 233Mhz! RiscOS flew! That could have been the future.
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.
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.
> This is typical of Intel’s weak leadership and focus on short term profits instead of long term success.
They're probably just doing what their shareholders want. Unfortunately, shareholders are shortsighted and risk-averse, contrary to the common rhetoric of being risk takers to justify eliteness.
Surely leadership could be embroiled in lawsuits were they to actually care more about the company than their weak, whimsical, and often incompetent shareholders. Kind of a sad irony actually.
Not really. Phi never had a very large market in reality, and at the time it existed there were very few non-niche workloads it was actually cost effective at. Intel was also on top at the time so they could afford to experiment there; now they're actually chasing an existing market that is growing. Phi looked really cool but existing software (a major selling point!) couldn't meaningfully be run without very poor performance and it was difficult to program. To the extent its design decisions made sense or were useful, they were absorbed into other product lines (e.g. Xeon MAX now has an HBM on die as an option, most Xeons just began scaling up their core count while keeping a better core uarch, etc...)
But Intel has been doing GPUs for a very long time however and it doesn't realistically seem like they are going to stop anytime soon. Discrete-class and Datacenter class GPUs are new for them, but hyperscaler space is a place that's staying hot and one they're familiar with. Nvidia literally can't sell H100s fast enough. So, I suspect they'll probably remain in the "GPU accelerator" race for quite a while yet, actually.
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.
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.
If you look at this through an organizational lens -- how incentives line up for individuals -- rater than as what makes sense for Intel holistically, it might make more sense.
You see similar behavior in many failing companies, as well as third world countries. You can't admit faults to iterate, and you need grand new initiatives.
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.