Intel held its Architecture Day on Tuesday. A trove of disclosures that I am still digesting. Stay tuned for analysis. One easy thing that I can say with certainty is that it will drive discrete GPU revenue and share. That’s not as easy to assess as you may think. $INTC
Gaming, Intel fields a performance desktop GPU "Arc" in Q1 that's up there with NVIDIA & AMD. Not at the top but close. NV & AMD will likely update so at worst case, as I have said for the past 4 years, Intel will have a very competitive mid-range, upper mid-range. TSMC N6. $INTC
Intel's gaming DGPU, Arc, has two features that are more similar to NVIDIA's arch than AMD's:
-Discrete ray tracing blocks
-Super-sampling driven by discrete AI blocks (XMX)
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For HPC & AI, Intel's going straight after NVIDIA's A100 with Ponte Vecchio with XeHPC arch. Claims of 45 TFLOPS FP32 and ResNet train and infer put it on top. Can't assess based on 2 benches, but these two are impressive. 64 RT for visualization interesting. Appears scalable.
Ponte Vecchio is wild:
->100B transistors
-3D Foveros stack PLUS EMIB
-Combo Intel 7 base tile & TSMC N5 compute/link tile
-"will be released in 2022" perf based on A0 silicon
PV is GPU-based, Habana Gaudi is ASIC-based. Intel hedging its bets. $INTC
Now onto Intel Architecture Day CPU cores:
-E core for "efficiency" aka "Gracemont"
-P core for "performance" aka "Golden Cove"
-Hybrid CPU arch mixing E & P in Alder Lake (client) and Sapphire Rapids (DC)
-"Thread Director" to manage uhhh "threads" between P & E
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Intel "E" Core:
-"efficient" core
-Vs Skylake 1T, either 40% better integer perf at same F -or- 40% lower power at same F
-Vs Skylake 4T, 80% better integer perf at same F -or- 80% lower power at same F
-higher perf than I would have expected for an E core
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Intel "P" Core:
-"performance" CPU core
-adds FP16 ML accel to AVX512
-claims 19% advantage over 11th Gen based on SPEC, Sysmark, Crossmark, PCMark, WebXPRT3, Geekbench
-Adds new "AMX" matrix engine for DL inference and training (?) claims 8X improvement on int8 (SR only)
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Thread Director does exactly what you would expect. It manages threads that:
-should go on P-core
-should go on E-core
-should move from P to E-core
If you recall early vers of Arm big.LITTLE had early issues with thread mgmt. Intel claims it's ahead of everyone on this. $INTC
Intel's Alder Lake (client) proc:
-spans ultra-portable (9W) to DT (125W)
-monolithic design, 3 pkg
-Up to 16C (8P/8E), 24T (16P/8E), 30MB cache
-DDR5, PCIe 5, WiFi6, Xe, TB4,
-Neither F or perf disclosed, but at min expect to be comp in notebook & <16T DT
-AI perf ?
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I think @awscloud has the clearest compute product positioning:
-"fastest"
-"largest"
-"most"
-"only"
-"best" #reinvent
Graviton2 growing up a bit today with C6gn. Much higher performance workloads are possible like data analytics, nw appliances, load balancers, some HPC. #reinvent
Qualcomm's @cristianoamon starts off #SnapdragonSummit talking about:
-redefining premium experiences with #5G. As you would expect.
- Video. Gaming. XR. Life-saving.
- Many services "yet to be invented". Yup
Qualcomm a big R&D investor. $66B. While I don't like the comingling of "R" and "D" as its different, it's a huge number.
I wish @Verizon would match its #5G talk with what it actually does. I appreciate the vision and "what we're going to do" but disappointing so far. Speeds on mmWave are amazing, I want, but in so few places, it barely matters. #SnapdragonSummit
Going to doing some testing. What questions do you have about the new #MacBookProM1?
One open USB port on my professional MacBook. Here's the power adapter against a mini 12. I'm told I won't need the adapter as it gets 20 months of battery life. 😀 I'm immediately invited to download the 3GB Big Sur update within the first few minutes. #MacBookProM1
Updated BigSur. Installed my preferred browser, Microsoft Edge. Successful. Edge crashed within 5 minutes. No idea what these error codes mean, do you? Entering my password to reboot. Interesting. Restarting. No fan noise yet. #MacbookProM1