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by klelatti 1796 days ago
Link says Core Gen 10 or Xeon so you may be out of luck on AMD or at less than $50.

I think this is more likely aimed at AMD than Arm - don't think Arm is yet a threat in this space - and whilst they're entitled to do what they want it does make me less enthused about Intel and frankly more likely to support their competitors.
2 comments
mumblemumble 1796 days ago
AMD has their own equivalent: https://developer.amd.com/amd-aocl/

I'm not sure it's a sin for hardware manufacturers to support their products? In the days of yore, we even expected it of them.

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klelatti 1796 days ago
Not a sin but it's not really just about supporting (or optimising) their products, its about doing so whilst trying to increase the lock-in beyond what is achieved on performance grounds alone.

I may be wrong but my experience is that AMD has been a bit better on this is the past e.g their OpenCL libraries supported both Intel and AMD whereas Intel's were Intel only.

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mumblemumble 1796 days ago
I would assume that's not entirely a fair comparison, though. Intel's 3D acceleration hardware only ever appears in Intel-manufactured chipsets, which only ever contain Intel-manufactured CPUs.

AMD, on the other hand, also supplies Radeon GPUs for use with Intel CPUs. For example, that's the setup in the computer on which I'm typing this.

So I have a hard time seeing anything nefarious there. The one is obviously a business necessity, while the other would obviously be silly. Perhaps that changes with the new Xe GPUs?

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klelatti 1796 days ago
Sorry, should have been clearer - Intel's CPU OpenCL drivers only supported Intel and not AMD whereas the AMD's CPU OpenCL drivers supported both - so GPUs not relevant in this case.

I can see how if you've invested a lot in software you'd like to get a competitive advantage over your nearest rival so maybe a price we have to pay.

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gnufx 1796 days ago
Yes. The difference is that may be "theirs", but I think it's all free software. At least the linear algebra stuff is. They supply changes for BLIS (which seem not to get included for ages). Their changes may well be relevant to Haswell, for instance. I don't remember what the difference in implementation was for Zen and Haswell, but they were roughly the same code at one time.
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vel0city 1796 days ago
I wonder what features are missing from a Comet Lake generation Pentium, those can be had for ~$70 these days. Other than the feature of the box says "Core" on it instead of "Pentium".

EDIT: Ah, I found it, AVX2.

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