[varelse]

That's good news. The requirement to purchase the Intel C compiler and tools like MKL before programming their processors efficiently is IMO one of the chief reasons why NVIDIA is kicking them to the curb here with 6.6 TFLOP $1,000 consumer GPUs that come with an enormous toolkit of free candy, including a DNN kernel library that plugs into all the important frameworks.

Compare and contrast with ~1 TFLOP ~$7,000 Xeon CPUs.

I have brought this up with multiple Intel engineers and for the most part they nod and agree. Then they tell me that there's no way Intel would ever start doing things like NVIDIA does here. And then I nod and tell them why I continue to bet on NVIDIA for the immediate future, sigh...