Wow, nervana, and now movidius. Intel are eating a lot of non nvidia machine learning hardware. Theyre also really into opencl, half the talks at this years international workshop on opencl were from intel http://www.iwocl.org/attend/sessions/ Interesting times :)
That's definitely one way of saying Intel is all over the place lately because it has no idea what's "the future."
Many-core CPUs (Phi), FPGA's (Altera), ASICs (Nervana), and now the GPU-like Movidius for machine learning.
You could argue that "they're just experimenting" to see what will take off. But I don't know if paying $17 billion for something (Altera) still fits in the "experiment" category. Was acquiring McAfee antivirus for $8 billion an experiment, too? What if FPGAs aren't the future of machine learning, and they fade out? Does Intel write-off the $17 billion, like it did the $10+ billion it spent on the mobile market.
And it's now trying to make x86 chips, while at the same time making ARM chips better for the competition. I don't think Intel (its current CEO) has any clue about what the company should focus on. Sooner or later, its PC market profits will be squeezed/wasted on these acquisitions, and Intel will need to show something for it.
No, it would not need to write off the $17 billion, it would simply spin Altera back out again. It was a successful stand-alone company and FPGAs have plenty of applications that have nothing to do with machine learning to make it a viable segment of the market for a long long time to come.
McAfee is a different matter and the mobile market could have been won but not in the way that Intel hoped.
They could have won the mobile market, at the cost of severely hurting their desktop market. In a way, Intel was scared of their atom being "too good". They had to suck, because the major premium they earn is selling i3/i5/i7/xeon, a low end x86 chip that performs well would have earned them good parts of the mobile market at low margin, and lost sales in the desktop market at high margin.
Already the cheap end x86 notebooks were ditching i3 for atom, and being "good enough".
The instruction set is irrelevant. In modern CPU, decoding the X86_64 instruction set takes about 80K transistors. Compare this with 1,175 millions transistor packed into a Skylake - it does not even factor.
What is relevant is the ability to compute within a power envelope. Intel didn't try to scale down its new designs for mobile. It tried to scale up old cores with new technology - something that they got good at during the tick-tock development flow. And guess what, new core designs beat process improvement. Intel eventually reached same power envelopes as ARM with more computing power, and better overall performance due to better memory bus access. But it reaches them after 8-12 months after Qualcomm does, so it's a full generation behind in terms of mobile development.
Specific to this acquisition, Movidius packs 150 Gflops under 4W of power. Skylake packs 100Gflops under 120W of power. The difference here is more than 2 degrees of magnitude. Moving the designs to the new Intel processes should cover another significant improvement. So that's what's going on.
> Specific to this acquisition, Movidius packs 150 Gflops under 4W of power. Skylake packs 100Gflops under 120W of power. The difference here is more than 2 degrees of magnitude. Moving the designs to the new Intel processes should cover another significant improvement. So that's what's going on.
Where did you get the measurements? Link please.
M2 to Skylake is like apples to oranges. The RISC cores are based on Leon, and then you have 12 SHAVEs/VLIW cores, which are very good at number crunching and GPU/DSP-like tasks, but they are not really general purpose CPUs as such. I think you should exclude them from your comparison.
Anyway, good for Movidius, I wish 'em all the best.
Added: Intel created a huge moat and wall around their x86 architecture. It worked very well for them in keeping out the rest of the world. The problem is, they inadvertently bricked up their gate and burned their drawbridge and now they are imprisoned in their own castle.
Intel has the luxury to bet on multiple things. And I think thats a smart strategy becasue Intel is fighting Nvidia, IBM, Mellanox, ARM & many other competitors on multiple fronts. Betting on "the future" is not a single thing, its exploring multiple technologies that have the potential to become their own version of "the future".
> That's definitely one way of saying Intel is all over the place lately because it has no idea what's "the future."
As has no one else. Everyone who said that he knows the future has been proven wrong so far, at most people can hope to try to see a possible future, nothing more.
My first reaction was to ask: 'Why would not these technologies (acquired from Intel-Phi, Altera, Nervana, Movidius) not be successful in their own niches?'
Now I understand that it is easier to coalesce around a champion technology and too hard to navigate around optimising multiple methods. But I'd expect that the differences between them are so large that they would have their own niche implementations.
Trying to project the future is hard. That is why we have index funds. Invest in a bunch of different assets to reduce risk. The main issue is there is some correlation between the companies which screws up the math.
They know they won't beat nvidia on CUDA and playing on their turf won't work, so they make sure to win on opencl. They might not know which solution will win on that field but if they have all of them they're sure to hold a "winner".
For those like me, who don't have the slightest idea what is Movidius: based on http://www.movidius.com/technology and my lay-programmer reading of it, it seems they've designed some kind of CPU/chip specialized for "vision" processing (and/or neural networks).
Bit disappointing to see another Irish tech company sell out early instead of pushing for a flotation. Can anyone more familiar with the industry comment as to whether there was a realistic chance for them to succeed on their own?
It's an Irish thing - I'm constantly looking at the Irish tech scene and what we're missing that we can't really compensate for is size. Theres a trend among such Irish tech companies to sell very early.
In Silicon Valley a company will never experience any problems scaling. The entire ecosystem is developed there is a full stack available to cater to whatever the growing firms need - be it talent, investment or other resources.
Ireland is more limited - we cater to startups and large tech companies quite well so the strategy is grow, move to US while medium sized grow again and then return to Ireland when you're Apple or Google and you want an EMEA HQ. We don't cater that well to the medium sized firms in Ireland so it encourages early selling.
You're probably right. I wonder if there are lessons to be learned though from similar sized countries (e.g. Israel, Denmark, Netherlands)? My feeling is that a lot of the issues you raise are valid, but they could be addressed or at least mitigated somewhat.
The dead giveaway that you're looking at Irish and not Scottish Gaelic is the accent direction: Irish uses acute accents exclusively, whereas Scottish Gaelic uses grave accents exclusively in its standard orthography (though older variants, and some holdouts still use both acute and grave accents).
There are complicated reasons why that's unlikely to happen, which go back to why some people still use both grave and acute accents Scottish Gaelic (vowel quality, essentially) and why standardising on the grave accent was a more natural choice for SG.
It's not a huge deal so long as you use an appropriate keyboard map.
This might lead to duopoly in the market for hardware machine learning chips with Intel and Nvidia competing-with/acquiring new players. This could ultimately stifle innovation like it happened with EDA companies - Synopsys and Cadence.
Hard to do. The funding landscape doesn't really support very long term AI applications without an associated consumer application as proof. Commercializing AI is quite hard actually and most of the AI projects you see are cost centers for the bigs (Alphabet, Apple etc...)
Novel ML implementations have a lot of R&D overhead and need a (comparatively) lot of incubation before they are effective. Tying that to a commercial success adds magnitudes of complexity that 99% of Venture doesn't like.
inference only. This is an IoT/robotics play for Intel, combined with RealSense.
The only feasible product at the moment for training large models is NVidia GPUs. Maybe AMD in 1-2 years time, if they decide to wake up and invest in software optimisation for deep learning
The Telegraph says "Intel...has made a conditional offer for Movidius, which will result in an estimated total cash return of approximately £27 million for Draper Esprit." Unclear what their % ownership is though.
