Intel has no chance in servers and they know it(semiaccurate.com) |
Intel has no chance in servers and they know it(semiaccurate.com) |
Despite the current scaling issues they can simply reduce margins to be price competitive and keep up their market share. AMD entering the market is a great way for Microsoft/Google/etc to negotiate hard for the CPU's needed for the next datacentre/upgrade cycle.
Reading semiaccurate.com feels a bit like reading InfoWars, everything is a conspiracy.
That may be but Intel is certainly not beyond ... ahem ... interesting tactics. Demoing a CPU holding 5GHz by cooling it via an industrial chiller just to steal some of AMD's thunder?
It's not really believable that Intel thinks it has no chance in servers. What I think is believable is that Intel will not be able to limit AMD's advance into their market share. This should start to show in next quarter's results, as AMD server product qualifications are finalised by large data centres (as AMD has pointed out in their briefings).
What I had believed until now is that Intel was essentially pivoting to a different strategy, moving away from traditional CPUs. But this article makes me believe they have just miscalculated and could be in for a rough few years (where rough, for Intel, is still making billions of dollars).
Intel is addicted to $100 - $3,000/CPU for its "traditional CPUs." Where do you think they would move to exactly?
This'll sound a bit strange at this point, but I have the feeling CPU's will become little more than an I/O controller in the long term. Much consumer computing will be done in the data centre. Data centres will be dominated with devices that look more like GPUs and TPUs than CPUs.
Naturally, GPUs will inherit more CPU like features before this happens.
Major hardware companies have to have fairly long roadmaps, because they have so much inertia. And they have to reveal what they are up to, to their investors. I certainly don't believe these roadmaps reveal another couple of decades of die shrinks and IPC gains. They reveal a real shift of strategy, across the board. Consumers simply won't be able to afford the "CPUs" of the future.
For a scalable application, better performance basically means reducing expenses. If your cloud computing bills aren't high to begin with, it may not be worth the rewrite. Of course there might be new companies or new projects that can use TPU's for machine learning, etc.
But Moore's law is not the only way to scale better. Today's machine learning algorithms are ridiculously inefficient and that seems unlikely to remain true forever, given the amount of research being done. A series of algorithmic improvements might result in a 10-100x reduction in cost, or maybe even not needing TPU's anymore?
Who knows what the future will bring, but making straight-line predictions in a fast-moving field like machine learning seems unlikely to work out.