Slashdot Mirror
Intel Discloses Its Forthcoming Discrete GPU Strategy and Design Efforts (hothardware.com) (hothardware.com)
MojoKid writes: Intel has been uncharacteristically vocal about its most recent plans to enter the discrete GPU market. Over the last year or so, the company has disclosed a few morsels of information and made some high-profile hires, in its bid to build-up and flesh-out its latest discrete GPU plans. This week, Intel decided to have a sit down with HotHardware, offering the opportunity to chat with Ari Rauch, Vice President of the Core And Visual Computing Group at Intel, to discuss what makes this most recent endeavor different from the company's previous and now discontinued attempts in the discrete GPU space. As a follow up, HotHardware also enlisted readership questions to engage with Intel about its upcoming GPU plans, compiling responses in a Q&A format.
In short, this isn't Larabee 2.0, not by a long shot. Intel is gearing up for a traditional GPU architecture design, coupled with some of the company's own strategic IP that it can bring to the table, to help differentiate its products. Further, Rauch noted Intel "will bring discrete GPUs to both client and data center segments aiming at delivering the best quality and experiences across the board including gaming, content creation, and enterprise. These products will see first availability over a period of time, beginning in 2020."
When questioned on their current silicon fabrication hiccups and delays and how it might affect Intel's ability to execute in this highly competitive space, Rauch noted, "we feel very confident about our product roadmap across software, architecture, and manufacturing." Based on some of the responses to product positioning questions, it also appears Intel is gearing up to address all performance envelopes as well, from entry-level to midrange and high-end graphics cards.
In short, this isn't Larabee 2.0, not by a long shot. Intel is gearing up for a traditional GPU architecture design, coupled with some of the company's own strategic IP that it can bring to the table, to help differentiate its products. Further, Rauch noted Intel "will bring discrete GPUs to both client and data center segments aiming at delivering the best quality and experiences across the board including gaming, content creation, and enterprise. These products will see first availability over a period of time, beginning in 2020."
When questioned on their current silicon fabrication hiccups and delays and how it might affect Intel's ability to execute in this highly competitive space, Rauch noted, "we feel very confident about our product roadmap across software, architecture, and manufacturing." Based on some of the responses to product positioning questions, it also appears Intel is gearing up to address all performance envelopes as well, from entry-level to midrange and high-end graphics cards.
"coupled with some of the company's own strategic IP that it can bring to the table, to help differentiate its products" - From the rest of their general sucking you mean? Yeah good idea.
If you're shorting Intel. I can't wait to see them waste billions of dollars in another failed effort to break into a new market and begin barely selling the worst performing product. Again.
Skimmed the article. The opening data is almost all stuff that's been previously revealed, or is obvious. The Q&A session is painful PR-speak noncommittal vagueness.
I want to know if it's going to support DXR (directx raytracing) or how many generations of architectures they're committing to. If they buy up another promising game and then shut it down like they did when they cancelled Larrabee, I'll be peeved.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Muffingtonpost is left wing propaganda garbage not fit for electrons
At least we know the drivers will be ok from day one. It's not humanly possible to suck more than current GPU makers.
nVidia not only doesn't provide documentation for its cards, but even actively interferes with nouveau on its new cards (encrypting and signing crap). On every card, it's random whether either their proprietary drivers or nouveau will work without crashing. The proprietary drivers are useless if you even dabble in kernel development -- they get ported to current kernels 0-6 months after a .0 release; some of us would want -rc or next. Oh, and support gets dropped within 5 years of a cards's launch. For this reason, Debian keeps forks of a number of discontinued drivers, but perhaps you'd want to run them with current kernels or X, ha ha? And, "drivers exist" doen't mean they actually work. Even basic crap like enabling xfce's compositor causes a crash, while there's that random crash from time to time. Oh, and even physically the cards suck. Out of 3 nVidia cards I went through recently, the middle one went out in flames. Literally. With thick smoke covering the entire room.
Compare Intel. At the family home I visit on weekends, I recently had to bring out an ancient machine (monitor problems -- none of 1864518746 SoCs I own want to talk to either my new monitor nor any (ancient) backups), with an Intel 910GL. Despite the card's age, it worked perfectly, including compositing and stuff. So does the integrated card in a spanking new machine at work. No need to think about drivers, everything is in the current kernel and X.
I haven't tried ATI/AMD in a decade. Their drivers used to suck -- I'm told AMD very recently (as in, a year ago) rewrote their driver stack so it's actually usable. I seriously hope so as I urgently need to rebuild my rig, and I'm not waiting till 2020. So it'll be AMD for me.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
And yet the video speaks for itself. Unless you idiots are going to say that's not really him but some obese diaper wearing manchild body double? Pathetic. You're a coward, you ARE the muffington lol. Feckless Republicans.
Mueller will handle you soon.
Intel isn't going to magically overnight create a real GPU for the high end graphics market. It may add more horsepower to what it already has but more inline with what we used to call mainstream dedicated graphics which Nvidia and AMD have sort of abandoned because of lack of profit in that area. Most people are fine with Intel graphics for day to day work. But as Intel looks to VR support at least in basic support I think that's more their goal.
From the interview:
Q: Will Intel’s new GPU architecture eventually migrate down onto the CPU or will the discrete and integrated solutions remain separate architectures?
A: Leveraging Intel’s broad portfolio of products is critical to building winning platforms: lots of performance, in compelling form factors, in compelling power envelopes. We’re excited by the opportunity to build technologies that will allow us to take experiences, features, and innovation to new and unique form factors, and to an install base of a billion screens around the world.
Are they going to improve the integrated graphics in their CPUs? (which currently is the weakest link in their offering, AMD Ryzen APUs have Vega GPU cores). According to the interview....... I don't know!
I think there is WAY more progress in the AMD and ARM front
Intel has been uncharacteristically vocal about its most recent plans to enter the discrete GPU market.
What? Like any prior time was secret? Each time has been accompanied by plenty of press releases, and each time so far has been an abject failure. But this time for sure!
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
These days I consider Wall Street Journal center left, New Yorker Times left, and New Yorker far left.
Muffingtonpost? Tis a bad joke.
That's stupid. You are the only person who thinks that. You are so far wrong, you are off the chart.
The catastrophe they offered as Windows drivers for their Silicon Image GMA950 based graphics "solutions" back then, makes nVidia drivers look almost elegant.
And POSIX too. :)
Also, Vulcan FTW!
obese diaper wearing manchild
How dare you refer to President Bonespur in such demeaning manor. Even if it is true, you have to at least treat the position he holds with a certain amount of respect.
and with a host of critical HW bugs, just like their CPU lineup! No thanks.
The original Larabee cost more to develop than the combined R+D spend of both ATI and Nvidia (at the time) across the entire history of both GPU companies- and Larabee didn't even come close to challenging the WORST GPU's from either industry winner available when Larabee went live.
Pro-tip: Larabee was designed, at the high level, by Abrash- the REAL talent behind iD's original Quake game. Not beinf one of iD's three owners, Abrash wasn't rewarded well and left iD shortly afterwards. Years later he took he (by then completely obsolete) understanding of a game rendering loop to Intel= which became the Larabee design. Yes, Larabee was rendering like the software rendering of Quake, before Quake was ported to 3DFX's Voodoo.
Intel's history of engineering is the WORST in the sem-conductor biz, only disguised by the insane amounts of funds Intel is able to throw at new projects. Even then most of them crash and burn. Intel's processor 'success' (only with the x86 branch- other Intel attempts were bombs) has mostly been down to Intel 'borrowing' other company's leading tech (sometime legally, sometimes- as with the Pentium Pro- by stealing every RISC tech possible, then paying tiny fines down the road).
AMD is great at GPU work (as the consoles from Microsoft and Sony prove) but struggles today in the PC space. Nvidia is the clear leader, but now has to charge the Earth for good discrete GPUs to simply stay in biz. And Nvidia's latest- Turing- has proven to be a tech bomb with each of the Turing chips (3) failing after a short period of time.
Intel has employed an ex-AMD 'lead' engineer who single handedly SUNK AMD's discrete GPU ambitions, and set AMD behind Nvidia for more than five years. He is guarnteed to make poor Intel engineering even worse.
Why didn't Intel buy Nvida- well they tried but wouldn't allow the Nvidia boss to take over the merged company. AMD has 'protections' from take-overs few know about (hint- AMD has 'strategic' value. Intel could have bought UK PowerVR, the company behind all of Apple's mobile GPU success until very recently. But Intel's prior partnership with PowerVR proved hopeless when Intel could not write drivers for PowerVR GPUs to save its life.
Intel is like a recently dead dinosaur- where the message of its death has yet to reach the tail. Intel is out of the CPU biz now in all sectors and was never a runner in the GPU biz. Intel is left trying to TALK a good game to keep its rapidly panicing investors onboard.
PS Intel has tried to build its own GPU on at least SEVEN different times, and has bought more graphics companies than you can count. Intel's last 'grand idea' was buying the horrific McFee trojan company- and look how that worked out.
Oh, man. Should be "Will push ahead of.." They have lost already. The feminized Intel is on a downward spiral. You have to lead your target, not aim directly at it. The new product sounds like it will be merely current GPU technology made proprietary with some Intel IP added to lock clients into Intel's also- ran GPU technology. And if they started doing that three years ago they are already behind in technology. Not a great job Intel.
E Proelio Veritas.
Nvidia's 1200 dollar Turing 2080TI has, like all Truring chips, little ASIC hacks that allow more efficient paths between the triangle rasterising system and the shader system. NONE of these chips has 'ray tracing' units.
Anyway this ASIC allows the software machine that drives Turing to be reconfigured to do NON-real time ray-tracing back end work for programs like Maya at maybe 10 times the efficieny of Pascal.
In games though, the ASIC allows around ONE ray per pixel with ONE ray collison at 1080P. Real ray tracing is tens of thousands to millions of rays per pixel, with multiple world space collisions per ray.
AND to use the ASIC, there is a massive state conversion period to reconfigure the Turing chip when running OpenGL, Vulkan, DX12 or DX11.
Nvidia's turing had two new techs vs Pascal- this NON-realtime back-end ray tracing accelerator for pro-work that I mentioned. And the so-called tensor cores that Nvidia actually placed into the chip for CRYPTO-CURRENCY mining. You see Nvidia had been working with dodgy new crypto-currency outlets to base new mining algorithms on the low precision 3d matrix multiplier that is a tensor core. Turing was designed up and down to be a MINING card. The mining went bust before Turing released, and Nvidia's boss sold the two unique features FALSELY as 'gaming' features to get PC gamering's most stupid to buy them.
Ray tracing has existed forever- and has always been understood to be the WORST way to do any form of real-time work. The best CGI cartoons ONLY use ray rendering for special sequences - never for the ordinary pipelines. But it sounds cool to know-nothing dribblers like the OP.
Just wait until some javascript graphics library running on your GPU can read anything. Why can't intel just tell the NSA to fuck off, and try actually making products that arent shit?
Intel was trying to move from GPUs towards ray-tracing on multi-core CPUs, now that Nvidia is moving to ray-tracing Intel wants to move towards GPUs? Why the role reversal?
The American people didn't treat the office of the President of the United States of America with respect when they elected a reality TV clown.
What a lousy "interview" - I failed to see a single reply for the first six questions and stopped reading at that point.
I hope they're really successful with high performance video chipsets. Right now, I'd welcome additional competition in that space, no matter who is doing it.
The current situation is pretty ridiculous -- where every single person on the planet interested in 3D gaming or design/CAD/CAM or animation/rendering work is stuck with what one of only two vendors have to offer them.
Every time people come up with a new reason to buy fast video cards (like crypto-mining the latest e-coin), there's a massive shortage of available cards across the entire industry.
And it's not terribly difficult to pinpoint the downsides of going the nVidia route, or conversely, going with AMD. A third vendor could figure out how to address those negatives so their offering covers all of the bases.
As many have pointed out Intel has a history of almost impossibly bad performing gpus. Their discrete GPUs are so bad, that writing your own code in cpu userspace is usually an order of magnitude faster than using their "accelerated" discrete gpus, and that's just for 2d graphics, let alone 3d. I have never seen such pathetic performance in a chip as intel GPUs.
Oh, wait.
I must admit that I've never read the Huffington Post, but the rest of your comment tells me more about you than about them. WHY do you consider them whatever you think of as "left".
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
AMD really seems committed to provide an open source driver, but while the amdgpu driver provides good performance and includes even the most exotic features and newest hardware, it is still full of bugs, and system crashes are all but infrequent.
... and so on. The list of open bug reports is ever increasing, with tragically, no end in sight.
When you read the commit messages of Intel drivers, you get the feeling that those who write those drivers know what they are doing, and just need to follow a proper, written down hardware specification.
In contrast, if you read the commit messages of the "amdgpu" driver, they read almost like random attempts into improving something based on trial and error. Not seldom, the descriptions of consecutive patches to the same file read like: "Implemented X" - "Replaced X with Y" - "Y turned out not to work for some users, replaced with Z" - "Reverted Z because Z broke A for some"
Intel just needs "Good enough" 3d graphics on chip. Imagination tech has good engineers, and drivers, for lower power 3D graphics. In fact, intel has used Imagination IP before.
Some competent colleagues of mine left Intel right at the time when they were asked to work on software for Larrabee, because they knew right from the start that this project was bound to fail. The very concept of the Larrabee hardware was ridiculously flawed, as anyone with eyes could see. They of course told their supervisors so, but as usual, were not heard.
Bad for Intel, good for us, as we were back then just hiring.
In TFA Intel states they "plan to use telemetry and machine learning, on a per-system and per-user basis" - wow, that sounds like a solid threat to turn users into their product, like Facebook does.
...because everyone patented the already better ways of doing traditional GPUs, and your stuff, will be cumbersome and generally shit (like *every* *time* *before*).
Best thing would be to start stripping some of that dead weight in your company and start bringing in new talent. You need to churn a little in employees to start getting the good ideas out.
You don't currently have any. Entering the GPU space with a commitment to 'traditional' GPU'ing when everyone is about to jump to raytracing as the next big thing? Plain stupid. (and I'm really glad I don't have shares in you)
"HuffPost (formerly The Huffington Post and sometimes abbreviated HuffPo)[2] is a politically left-leaning, American news and opinion website and blog"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The problem with that is simple; American's views of politics are hyper-skewed. Anything that is "left of Ronald Reagan" is somehow left-learning, extreme left or any of those qualifiers.
People have gotten so used to saying that in this country over decades that it is accepted as the norm and as fact. All you have to do is look at overall voting records and how people approach things.
For example our past president; as much as you hear all over that he is so "left-learning" or a "leftist extremist" ... all you have to do is see policy and action in nature (drone strikes, etc). He's right-wing (and correctly identified as such by anyone who knows basic Civics 101.
Left-wing in the USA? You can call something left-wing, someone can claim they are left-wing, etc. but all that matters is performance, we have very little left-wing in this country (especially anyone prominent).
If its sole purpose is added realism in gaming then I think ray tracing will be almost like VR -- cool and few people will really care about it. Current games have much larger gaps in realism elsewhere than in graphics, for example changing state of objects, sound generation, not to mention AI. That's assuming realism is the most important thing for a game to sell well.
If the purpose is something else, I'd be curious what that is.
If and when they appear, I'll let the benchmarks do the talking. Not that I'll probably buy and Intel product anyway given their track record of trying to fool the consumer.
Trust Intel to screw things up and make GPUs an even more dangerous attack vector (if at all) in to the systems and data channels of the servers/PCs using their offering. This is a fact, based on what they are saying about their offering and history.
FWIW, here is how your expectations line up with mediabiasfactcheck.com:
Wall Street Journal: Highly Factual, Center-Right
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com...
New York Times: Highly Factual, Center-Left
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com...
New Yorker: High Factual, Left
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com...
Whether or not it's their bias or your bias, you seem to view all of those sites one rank to the left relative to how they rate them.
It's me or in the video that appears in the link looks as if instead of a computer fan they are milling a car turbocharger admission fan? Sure they will make history as long as no spectre gets sucked in.
Intel has a track record, literally going back 20-25 years now. It goes like this: Announce a new GPU, hype the hell out of it. Integrated or discrete, it makes no difference. "Trust us! We are gonna blow your socks off! You won't believe our innovative new graphics technology!"
Then, a year or two later, said product arrives and proceeds to impress... No One. It sucks, other vendors got there first and did a much better job. All the marketing flacks who pushed their garbage are either gone or 'unavailable to comment'.
Now my attitude is, 'you are right. I'm not gonna believe it. You folks keep pushing turds out on to the market and you expect me to keep falling for it?' Either ante up with some good stuff or GTFO. And you get no, zero, nada credibility for marketing vapourware. Prior to establishing your bona fides, I consider you to be a hired huckster, willing to say anything for money.
Intel burned up it's GPU goodwill a long time ago. The sad part is that there are an endless stream of suckers out there, still buying tickets to this particular show.
There's probably a secret messages encoded in Slashdot's delightful crop of fresh misspellings.