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Does Intel Need GPUs For HPCs

June 15, 2016 by  
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Nvidia might have scored a few wins by touting its GPU’s in the HPC market, but it is starting to lose ground to the co-processor, according to Intel’s Diane Bryant.

In an IDC interview Intel’s data center boss said that Nvidia gained an early lead in the market for accelerated HPC workloads when it positioned its GPUs for that task several years ago. However there is a perception that processors used for machine learning today are GPUs like those from Nvidia and AMD.

Bryant was a bit miffed when she was asked how Intel can compete in this market without a GPU. She said that the general purpose GPU, or GPGPU was just another type of accelerator and not one that’s uniquely suited to machine learning.
It is better to look at Knights Landing which is a coprocessor, but it’s an accelerator for floating point operations, and that’s what a GPGPU too.

She said that since the release of the first Xeon Phi in 2014, Intel now clawed back 33 percent of the market for HPC workloads that use a floating point accelerator.

“So we’ve won share against Nvidia, and we’ll continue to win share,” she said.

She said that Intel’s share of the machine learning business may be much smaller, but the market is still young.

“Less than one percent of all the servers that shipped last year were applied to machine learning, so to hear Nvidia is beating us in a market that barely exists yet makes me a little crazy,” she says.

Intel will continue to evolve Xeon Phi to make it better at machine learning tasks. She said that there are two aspects to machine learning – training the algorithmic models, and applying those models to the real world in front-end applications. Intel’s FPGAs and its Xeon processors mean Intel has both sides of the equation covered.

But Nvidia’s GPUs are harder for programmers to work with which could give Intel an edge as ordinary businesses need to adopt machine learning. Knights Landing is “self-booting,” which means customers don’t need to pair it with a regular Xeon to boot an OS.
However Intel’s newest Xeon Phi has a floating point performance of about 3 teraflops, which is a little slow compared to the five teraflops for Nvidia’s new GP100.

Courtesy-Fud

Intel’s PC Group Hit The Hardest

June 8, 2016 by  
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Intel’s restructuring axe seems to be falling on its PC client division and software areas with more than 12000 jobs to go.

Our well-placed sources are confident that the PC group will be the hardest hit. This is all because the PC market has stopped growing and Intel has to find its way to new markets to supplement loss of this business.

Latest research data from IDC indicates that in 2016 PC market will decline from 275.8 million units in 2015 to 260.8 million units in 2016 and the current projections for 2017 show the PC market slightly decreasing to 257.9 million units. At its peak PC market was at 364.0 million units, but this was in 2011 when things were rosier, kids were polite to their parents, and rock stars played decent music. These times are clearly behind us and Intel knows it.

The PC group downsize is being supervised by Dr. Venkata “Murthy” Renduchintala who is Intel’s number two. He is the bloke who was paid $25 million dollars to defect from Qualcomm. Murthy has already done a high level clean up at PC client group and is believed to be thinking about dusting the top of the corporate bookshelf next.

Another team which will be pummeled is Rene James’s old software outfit. People from software services and the security division formerly known as McAfee are expected to mostly go the same way as the artist formerly known as Prince.

Murthy’s also wants to get Intel to the right course with IoT market. Marketing for that area is expected to grow from $655.8 billion in 2014 to $1.7 trillion in 2020. Intel wants the piece of that cake, and perhaps a few tea and biscuits to go with it and it will be interesting to look the fight in this promising land market.

There is still no killer app to help the IoT market which defines it. IoT right now is nothing and everything.

Courtesy-Fud

Can Samsung Beat Intel?

April 25, 2016 by  
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Samsung is closing in on Intel in the semiconductor sector as its market share increased by 0.9 percent when compared to a year earlier.

According to beancounters at IBS, the news comes on the heels of an announcement that the three-month average of the global market for semiconductors ending in February fell 6.2 percent compared with the same figure in 2015, down from a 5.8 percent decline in January.

IBS chief executive Handel Jones said:

“Based on talking to customers about buying patterns, we see softness,” said. “Smartphone sales are slowing, and the composition of the market is changing with about half all chips bought by companies in China who want low-end devices In addition, over the past year memory prices have fallen by nearly half both for DRAMs and NAND-based solid-state drives as vendors try to buy market share, said Jones. “It’s more of a price issue because volumes are up.”

Jones expects softness in the PC market will continue through this year. Demand for chips is rising in automotive and for the emerging Internet of Things, but so far both sectors are relatively small, he added.

Data shows that the gap between the market share of these Intel and Samsung firms is narrowing. In 2012, the gap between Intel and Samsung was 5.3 percent. This narrowed to 4.2 percent in 2013, and is now 3.2 percent in 2015. SK Hynix, which now stands as the third largest semiconductor brand in the world, beat Qualcomm with a market share of 4.8 percent.

Courtesy-Fud

Will Intel’s Xeon Broadwell-EP Hit The Market Soon?

April 12, 2016 by  
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An Intel press slide has been leaked on the web which means we should be seeing a workstation-grade Xeon “Broadwell-EP” processor in the shops soon.

The slide appeared on the anandtech forums and shows the chip will be branded under the Xeon E5-2600 V4 series and will have at least “20 per cent more cores and last-level cache” than Haswell-EP.  It should be shipping on March 31st.

This CPU is started for an HP workstation, called the HP Z640, which succeeds the Z620.

The Xeon Broadwell-E uses Intel’ s14nm process which means 10-core chips will be available at the price of an 8-core chip from the previous generation.

The slide said that the Broadwell-E will deliver 18 per cent average performance increase over Haswell-EP, as well as support up to 2400MHz DDR4 memory for greater I/O throughput.

This slide follows the news that an 18-core Xeon Broadwell-EP CPU was spotted on eBay, carrying a price tag of $999 US. Dubbed Xeon E5-2600 v4, the chip was listed to feature a base clock speed of 2.2GHz and Turbo frequency of 3GHz, as well as a TDP of 145W, 2.5MB of L3 cache per core, with 45MB LLC cache in total.

Courtesy-Fud

Intel Processors Will Support Vulcan API

March 31, 2016 by  
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Intel is releasing graphics drivers that support the Vulkan 1.0 API for chips running Windows 7, 8 and 10 PCs.

According to Intel the drivers provide beta support for the Vulkan 1.0 API for 6th Generation Intel Core and related processors.

Vulkan 1.0 was introduced last month by industry consortium Khronos Group and is supposed to replace the OpenGL, which was first introduced in 1991 by Silicon Graphics. Vulkan is supposed to exploit powerful GPUs and multicore CPUs, but it is still a long way behind Direct X 12 – at least in its beta condition.

With Intel’s drivers developers will be able to exploit features on Intel GPUs, like the Iris Pro, that are integrated in chips alongside CPUs. Intel’s rival AMD has already released Vulkan drivers for Radeon graphics processors.

Vulkan 1.0 APIs will also work with Linux-based PCs like Steam Machines. Intel has made available open-source Vulkan drivers for Linux PCs running on chips code-named Broadwell and Skylake.

Courtesy-Fud

Will Intel Release It’s 10nm Processors By 2017?

March 2, 2016 by  
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Intel has said that a job advert which implied that it would not be using the 10nm process for two years was inaccurate and confirmed that it is on track for a 2017 release.

The advert, which was spotted by the Motley Fool has since been taken down, said the company’s 10-nanometer chip manufacturing technology would begin mass production “approximately two years” from the posting date.

Intel has said that the advert was wrong and confirmed that its “first 10-nanometer product is planned for the second half of 2017.”

It is not expected that Intel will roll out server chips in 2017. At the moment the plan appears to be introducing its second-generation 14-nanometer server chip family in early to mid-2017. But instead Intel will be trying to get its process ramped at high yields experimenting on the PC market so that 10-nanometer server processors will be ready for the first half of 2018.

This follows Intel’s traditional pattern of a having a few parts released as it experiments with the new tech. This is what happened in the first year of Intel’s 14-nanometer availability.

Courtesy-Fud

Is Intel Going 10nm Next Year?

February 3, 2016 by  
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Intel is reportedly going to release its first 10nm processor family in 2017, expected to be the first of three generations of processors that will be fabbed on the 10nm process.

Guru 3D found a slide which suggest that Chipzilla will not be sticking to its traditional “tick-tock model.” To be fair Intel has been using the 14nm node for two generations so far – Broadwell and Skylake. Kaby Lake processor architecture that is due later this year, will also use 14nm .

The slide tells us pretty much what we expected. The first processor family to be manufactured on a 10nm node will be Cannonlake, expected to launch in the year 2017. The following year, Intel will reportedly launch Icelake processors, again using the same 10nm node. Icelake will be succeeded by Tigerlake in 2019, the third generation of Intel processors using a 10nm silicon fab process. The codename for Tigerlake’s successor is unknown.  When it comes out in 2020 it will use 5nm.

 

architecture CPU series Tick or Tock Fab node Year Released
Presler/Cedar Mill Pentium 4 / D Tick 65 nm 2006
Conroe/Merom Core 2 Duo/Quad Tock 65 nm 2006
Penryn Core 2 Duo/Quad Tick 45 nm 2007
Nehalem Core i Tock 45 nm 2008
Westmere Core i Tick 32 nm 2010
Sandy Bridge Core i 2xxx Tock 32 nm 2011
Ivy Bridge Core i 3xxx Tick 22 nm 2012
Haswell Core i 4xxx Tock 22 nm 2013
Broadwell Core i 5xxx Tick 14 nm 2014 & 2015 for desktops
Skylake Core i 6xxx Tock 14 nm 2015
Kaby lake Core i 7xxx Tock 14 nm 2016
Cannonlake Core i 8xxx? Tick 10 nm 2017
Ice Lake Core i 8xxx? Tock 10 nm 2018
Tigerlake Core i 9xxx? Tock 10 nm 2019
N/A N/A Tick 5 nm 2020

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Intel Says PCs Will Make A Comeback

November 18, 2015 by  
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The PC will make a comeback, but the so-called Tablet revolution is history, according to the Chipmaker who missed out on it.

Kirk Skaugen, GM of Intel’s client computing group told the Intel Global Capital Summit that there are more than a billion PCs that are more than three years old and a third of a billion that are over five years old. People are coming back to the PC and refreshing their systems.

It used to be that people upgraded every two years or so, but in the last five years silicon has got so powerful that no one saw the need. The problem is that they still don’t and Skaugen hopes that two-in-one detachable-screen systems, will be a major growth driver.

Sales of two-in-one systems are up 150 per cent, he claimed, and are leading to people wanting to refresh their PCs up to 18 months earlier than they would have. Mini computers are another growth market.

Without the growth in two-in-ones, the laptop market in the US would have shown 4 per cent negative growth, Skaugen said. However the new forms created a one per cent growth. He thinks the new hardware that such systems are starting to carry, particularly 3D cameras are going to have people rushing back to laptops.

The big loser in all of this is going to be the tablet market. Intel had got the growth in tablets wrong, he said, and is now revising its forecasts.

“18 months ago many people thought that tablet sales were going to cross over PCs in 2014. Now we’re sure they won’t ever. Intel has taken a billion units out of our forecasts in the last year,” he said.

That is just as well because Intel never made a sustainable dent into the tablet market, but it also fulfilled our predictions that the technology never solved any problems. It was still the same toy that Microsoft had been attempting to sell without success for years and they never had a use.

Courtesy- http://www.thegurureview.net/computing-category/intel-says-pcs-will-make-a-comeback.html

Did Intel Deliberately Slow PC Sales?

October 7, 2015 by  
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Intel might have caused slow PC sales at the beginning of the year to boost the price of its Skylake chips later.

A recent study shows that the slump in PC sales in the first half was deliberately made to help Skylake sell better since August. Initially analysts believed that sales of the Skylake are hindered by existing stocks of previous Haswells, but it turns out this was untrue.

Tech Trader Daily has found that Intel significantly reduced shipments of its central processing units in the first half of the year, to leave PC maker inventories drained and empty.

This is normal practice since Intel needed to have all its PC makers and retailers with empty enough stocks in order to fill them up quickly with new Skylake models in August. But this year the plan worked too well. The Skylake stocks quickly evaporated and the first supply aps appeared between the months of August and September, with Intel quickly assuring its customers that new Skylake batches will return in stores as fast as possible.

Normally Chipzilla has a cycle of unit buildups in the first half of a financial year and then a controlled drain of units in the second half. This helps PC makers and retailers build systems in the first half and then sell them bundled without being compromised by stand-alone units selling alongside them at a higher pace in the second.

This time Intel launched the Skylake in the second half of the year, August onwards, so the cycle was stuffed up. Now it seems that this will mean a low supply of Skylakes in the first half of 2016. If you can find them, you might need to stock up now.

Intel is making piles from this. PC makers mainly build their systems on Skylakes and since the supply is low the price is high. Intel does not have to discount to shift the technology, the suppliers have to buy it at any price. Particularly as Intel’s only real x86 market, AMD, is having a bit of a snooze.

A full transition to Skylake will probably happen in winter, but the ongoing process at the moment gives Intel the much-needed money to financially buffer a slowdown in sales next spring.  All this gives a warning about what will happen if AMD goes under and Intel takes total control.

Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/computing-category/did-intel-deliberately-slow-pc-sales.html

Is Intel Supporting Open-Source?

June 19, 2015 by  
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Intel has suddenly made some interesting hardware less interesting to open sourcers by insisting that its i915 DRM kernel graphics driver for upcoming Skylake and Broxton hardware demands some binary-only firmware blobs.

According to Phoronix these first i915 DRM firmware blobs are for Skylake and Broxton for the GuC and DMC.
DMC is the Display Microcontroller used by Skylake (Gen9) within the display engine to save and restore its state when entering into low-power states and then resuming. It saves and restores display registers across low-power states separate of the kernel.

Intel said that the firmware blobs are required by the DRM driver rather than being an optional add-on.

The license of these firmware blobs also indicate that redistribution is only allowed in binary form without modification. Beyond that, “no reverse engineering, decompilation, or dis-assembly of this software is permitted.”

Basically this will kill off any desire for Open Source enthusiasts to touch Skylake, although we doubt Intel will be too worried – they are a very nice couple. In any event AMD apparently uses something similar to protect bits of its operation.

Still Intel is shipping these firmware files early so everyone knows they are there.

Source

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