Intel's Big Board Meeting: The Tech Poutine #6

This week we're discussing Intel's Big Board Meeting - what's the future for the company, and what that means for the rest of us. AMD has announced its next event, and updates to its processors to fix the CCD to CCD latency bug we spoke about last episode.


Potato: Ian Cutress, More Than Moore
Cheese: George Cozma, Chips and Cheese

#techtechpotato

00:00:00 - pre-show
00:14:42 - Intro
00:16:08 - Intel Board meeting
01:15:20 - AMD Advancing AI 2024
01:18:15 - AMD combining RDNA and CDNA into UDNA
01:31:55 - AMD CCD-CCD latency fix
01:35:00 - Ampere looking for a buyer.
01:39:00 - Summit being sold by ORNL
01:44:50 - Qualcomm looking to buy parts of Intel?
01:56:30 - ANTON3 to be installed at PSC
02:03:45 - you can now remap the CoPilot key!
02:06:00 - Lattice gets a new CEO
02:10:15 - Q&A
02:24:45 - Outro

-----

More Than Moore, as with other research and analyst firms, provides or has provided paid research, analysis, advising, or consulting to many high-tech companies in the industry, which may include advertising on the More Than Moore newsletter or TechTechPotato YouTube channel and related social media. The companies that fall under this banner include AMD, Applied Materials, Armari, ASM, Ayar Labs, Baidu, Dialectica, Facebook, GLG, Guidepoint, IBM, Impala, Infineon, Intel, Kuehne+Nagel, Lattice Semi, Linode, MediaTek, NordPass, NVIDIA, ProteanTecs, Qualcomm, SiFive, SIG, SiTime, Supermicro, Synopsys, Tenstorrent, Third Bridge, TSMC, Untether AI, Ventana Micro.

[wiedehopf]

There was phoronix benchmark on the CCD latency AGESA update, seems to suggest a real world difference, faster for some workloads, slower for others.

[Wild_Cat]

Hey TTP, it would be cool if you could interview Intel's Grenoble GraphiX (GGX) Research team

[abb]

Ian said the US government wrt the CHIPS act was telling intel "don't build EU fabs", I'd say it's more "Don't build $10Bn EU fabs with US taxpayer dollars". Don't cash a US gov't check and then invest it directly into EU fabs.

[MrMartinSchou]

Sure, renting office space instead of owning it allows you to cut down on the number of staff you have. But that doesn't make it cheaper in the long run. The number of people and the equipment and supplies needed to keep that office space running is the same, regardless of the owner. As such, all else being equal, the costs are identical - they're just paid by someone else.

If YOU own it, you don't have to make a profit off of those expenses. If someone else owns it, they WILL want to make a profit off of it. So now, instead of paying the original costs, you're paying those costs plus a profit.

Alternatively, if you end up paying the same amount as before, you're going to be faced with lower quality of service. It might not be cleaned as often, things might be fixed more slowly etc.

[Veptis]

I have noticed two people I have previously talked to have recently left intel. So it might be the 10% that is already vanishing... But i have also witnessed two people joining intel.

As for conferences next week, not just innovation - also rhe pytorch conference. Which does include some keynote speakers by Intel for example. As they are now doing their GPU (XPU) natively in the upcoming PyTorch 2.5. And might announce Melville Sound soonish.

[ChrisJackson-jsrd]

remember also aws nitro uses some custom serial protocol for networking
so nothing passes over the fabric that wasnt specifically designed to be able to by aws.

[Kurukx]

Intel stop raggin on glue and started using glue ... intel sniffin

[thegamingone-thegamingone]

can anybody link the wafer calulator archive shown in the stream?

[henrikoldcorn]

Sounds like Pat no longer has quite the same “lust for fabs” he did a year or two ago then.

[newtonchutney]

Would Qualcomm be interested in Intel's wifi business? Apple bought Intel's 5g modem team too..

[jeffrydemeyer]

Germany already built 3 billion in needed infrastructure for intel to build their fabs on, there is no simply oh we're not going to take the government grant and cancel the project.
There will be serious consequences if intel doesn't build that fab

[abb]

Intel: "Let's build empty warehouses that could be fabs" EU: "We want fabs" Intel "Let's build fabs!" EU: "Here's lots of money for those fabs intel!" Intel: "Thanks for the money for the idea of building fabs in EU, now let's build empty warehouses in EU and spend all that EU money in the existing fabs we have in tax free Ireland!"

[shieldtablet]

Think about this: even on a lowly Intel N3350, you can do OpenCL and other kinds of stuff, on Linux even.

You go to AMD and APUs are completely broken for OpenCL, despite years of people clamoring for ROCm support and being dismissed. So the heteregenous compute company didnt want any of that for 5+ years.
Of course people dont adopt the software, most of the ones interested are research students with few funds. Also not like AMD had an academic program that sends you $10k in workstation hardware iff you have an interesting proposal for them.

If you go back to 2016 AMD that had RX 480s, they were in a much better place. That is what Jack means. They went from that to doing high end Vegas that did nothing for them. All that Raja to the moon architectures that failed to gain any traction.

[ChrisJackson-jsrd]

and in response to something in the chat... selling ur r&d and design businesses is a staple of mature us tech companies
basically cash out and operate as an investment bank without all the regulations financial companies have to abide by

i think jack welch at ge in the early 1980s originated it as a strategy?

and what qualcomm wants from intel isnt technology, it's intel's employees. as they make a push into consumer pcs/laptops - something they know nothing about, that intel's employees have decades of experience with

[ChrisJackson-jsrd]

all of goya's most significant paintings were so disturbing and violent that he never showed them to any other human while he still lived

im suure the accelerator card will be a smashing success tho lol

and kudos on the holiday. keeps the mnd sane. pat g should take one. a very very long one. the man is completely insane, and as long as he is head of intel the company will continue to bleed senior managers

[iothomas]

Can you guys please invest in better audio set up on both your ends, the sound is atrocious, makes it difficult to listen.

[tappy]

rocm sucks. Always has, possibly always will