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).
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.
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?
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.
This reads like parody (from llama.cpp, to it being a beacon of where industry is going (!?), to GPUs are overkill for what is effectively a lot of dot products)
The reason CUDA has won is precisily because it isn't horribly stuck in a C dialect, have embraced polyglot workloads since 2010, have a great developer experience where GPUs can be debugged like regular CPUs, and the library ecosystem.
Now while NVidia is making standard C++ run on CUDA, Intel is still having SYSCL and oneAPI extensions.
Similarly with Python and RAPIDS framework.
Intel and AMD have to up their game for the same kind of developer experience.
Err.. Last time I checked, CUDA was the one with the partially compliant C++ implementation, while, on the contrary, SYSCL was being base on pure C++17..
Time to check again, as CUDA is C++20 for a bit now (minus modules), and NVidia is the one driving the senders/receivers work for C++26, based on their CUDA libraries.
SYCL isn't pure C++, meaning writing STL code that goes into the GPU, like CUDA allows for, nor requires the hardware to follow C++ memory model.
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.
> 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.
ML/AI engineers get paid a lot more for the same experience as other software engineers at Intel, so much so that there’s a “soft” Principal Engineer grade where they don’t go through the usual nomination process
You’d think they’d “out-Open Source” Nvidia’s Linux drivers situation. It seems if they shipped “good enough” hardware (not the best) and open sourced their driver stack it would get the attention of more devs.
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.
Intel has been running oneapi for several years, and as a long time user I assure you it's horrible to deal with. It's the only software I've dealt with that breaks other software. Every year or two I'd have to fully reinstall visual studio because it hopped in, messed up a bunch of files, and the uninstaller never works. It will also happily break your system python environment if you let it try. And did I mention it takes over an hour to run through their horrible installer that tends to break itself? Even under linux it would try to hop in and screw up system /bin and /sbin links because why not. They also shut down their old license validation portals so their older, working versions can no longer be installed. Intels dev tooling is absolutely the worst tooling around.
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).