[brindlejim]

Fun fact: More than half of all engineers at NVIDIA are software engineers. Jensen has deliberately and strategically built a powerful software stack on top of his GPUs, and he's spent decades doing it.

Until Intel finds a CEO who is as technical and strategic, as opposed to the bean-counters, I doubt that they will manage to organize a successful counterattack on CUDA.

[tester756]

>finds a CEO who is as technical and strategic, as opposed to the bean-counters

Did you just call Gelsinger a "non-technical"? wow, how out of touch with reality

>Gelsinger first joined Intel at 18 years old in 1979 just after earning an associate degree from Lincoln Tech.[9] He spent much of his career with the company in Oregon,[12] where he maintains a home.[13] In 1987, he co-authored his first book about programming the 80386 microprocessor.[14][1] Gelsinger was the lead architect of the 4th generation 80486 processor[1] introduced in 1989.[9] At age 32, he was named the youngest vice president in Intel's history.[7] Mentored by Intel CEO Andrew Grove, Gelsinger became the company's CTO in 2001, leading key technology developments, including Wi-Fi, USB, Intel Core and Intel Xeon processors, and 14 chip projects.[2][15] He launched the Intel Developer Forum conference as a counterpart to Microsoft's WinHEC.

[jillesvangurp]

Gelsinger is a typical hardware engineer out of his depth competing against what is effctively a software play. This is a recurring theme in the industry where you have successful hardware companies with strong hardware focused leadership fail over time because they don't get software.

I used to work at Nokia Research. The problem was on full display during the period Apple made it's entry into mobile. We had plenty of great software people throughout the company. But the leadership had grown up in a world where Nokia was basically making and selling hardware. Radio engineers and hardware engineers basically. They did not get software all that well. And of course what Apple did was executing really well on software for what was initially a nice but not particularly impressive bit of hardware. It's the software that made the difference. The hardware excellence came later. And the software only got better over time. Nokia never recovered from that. And they tried really hard to fix the software. It failed. They couldn't do it. Symbian was a train wreck and flopped hard in the market.

Intel is facing the same issue here. Their hardware is only useful if there's great software to do something with it. The whole point of hardware is running software. And Intel is not in the software business so they need others to do that for them. Similar to Nokia, Apple came along and showed the world that you don't need Intel hardware to deliver a great software experience. Now their competitor NVidia is basically stealing their thunder in the AI and 3D graphics market. Intel wants in but just like they failed to get into the mobile market (they tried, with Nokia even), their efforts to enter this market are also crippled by their software ineptness.

This is a lesson that many IOT companies struggle with as well. Great hardware but they typically struggle with their software ecosystems and unlocking the value of the hardware. So much so that one Finnish software company in this space (Wirepas), has been running an absolute genius marketing campaign with the beautiful slogan "Most IOT is shit". Check out their website. Some very nice Finnish humor on display there. Their blunt message is that most hardware focused IOT companies are hopelessly clumsy on the software front and they of course provide a solution.

[tester756]

>Gelsinger is a typical hardware engineer out of his depth competing against what is effctively a software play. This is a recurring theme in the industry where you have successful hardware companies with strong hardware focused leadership fail over time because they don't get software.

He spent almost decade on VMware which is... software company that significantly grew during his time

>just like they failed to get into the mobile market (they tried, with Nokia even), their efforts to enter this market are also crippled by their software ineptness.

Microsoft, which is software company failed at it too.

[donor20]

apple did initially want to build on what they saw as the best fab - Intel. unlock the power Intel would bring for their phone. But they had some design objectives focused on user experience (power/cost) and Intel didn't see the value. Intel then scrambled to try and build what apple had asked for but without the software.

Nokia kept doing crazy hardware to show off on hardware side. But these old companies can't stop nickle and dimeing - so you'd get stuff w crazy drm etc. And software wasn't there or invested in fully.

[whomst]

My brother in Christ he was literally the CEO of VMware

[brindlejim]

Intel spent more than a decade under Otellini, Krzanich and Swan. Bean counters. Gelsinger was appointed out of desperation, but the problem runs much deeper. I doubt that culture is gone. It has already cost Intel many opportunities.

[alexey-salmin]

Otellini wasn't an engineer but still he made the historical x86-mac deal, pushed like crazy for x86-android and owned the top500 with xeon phi.

The downfall began with Krzanich who had no goal besides raising the stock price and no strategy other than cutting long-term projects and other costs that got in the way. What a shame.

[selimthegrim]

Krzanich started out as an engineer

[bell-cot]

"Optimize for Wall Street" is a disease to which even the seemingly-best minds can succumb.

[SilverBirch]

>owned the top500 with xeon phi.

This is interesting - because what I heard (within Intel at the time, circa 2015) was Xeon Phi was a disaster. The programming model was bad and they couldn't sell them.

[alexey-salmin]

It definitely had its downsides, but holding TOP1 for 6 lists (3 years straight) was an achievement. Biggest issues weren't in engineering IMO.

GPUs also have a weird programming model and yet here we are. I think in the end what mattered the most was the strategic failure to address the low-end market with Phi. When the right time came everyone did CUDA because everyone already had a GPU -- basically the same reason why x86 won the server market against SPARC decades ago.

In the meanwhile came the 2015 US export ban, then loss of interest by the management right before matrix multiplication stopped being an HPC problem and came into every segment in the form of ML.

Based on what we know now probably the best strategy was to bet everything on Intel Graphics and leverage the widespread of built-in graphics while it was dominated by Intel. From there it was possible to eat Nvidia's lunch in hi-end and HPC too. However in 2010 it wasn't certain at all. No one was talking about AI, the buzzword of the time was "big data" which relied on conventional computing methods. Deep learning revolution didn't happen yet, even GBDTs weren't a thing, ML was about linear regression. MPP architectures were confined to physics simulation and 3d graphics (which is a physics simulation of a sort).

[baq]

Otellini also made the historical decision to pass on the iPhone chip...

[tester756]

>Intel spent more than a decade under Otellini, Krzanich and Swan. Bean counters.

It still doesn't change mistake in your original message.

>Gelsinger was appointed out of desperation, but the problem runs much deeper.

How much "much deeper"? VPs? middle level managers? engineers?

The example goes from the top, so if he can change the culture at the top, it will eventually get deeper.

[jbm]

> as technical and strategic

It seems that this is an AND not an OR.

[tester756]

Point is valid regardless of "AND" or "OR"

He is both - technical and has a vision

[ksec]

>It still doesn't change mistake in your original message.

Precisely. The problem I found on HN is that It is hard to have any meaningful discussion on anything Hardware. Especially when it is mixed with business or economics models.

I was greedy and was hoping Intel could fall closer to $20 in early 2023 before I load up more of their stock. Otherwise I would put more money where my mouth is.

[ksec]

>Gelsinger was appointed out of desperation,

You will need to observe Intel more closely. It was not out of desperation. And Gelsinger is more technical and strategic than you implies.

[natbennett]

If you read carefully you’ll see the comment is “as technical and strategic.”

That’s very different from “non-technical.”

He was clearly capable of leading a team to develop a new processor but that’s not the issue here.

[tester756]

What makes you think that he is not strategic?

I believe his vision/strategy is really sound

[natbennett]

Again, if you read carefully you’ll see that the phrase is “as strategic.”

I’ll have to take your word for it on his vision/strategy though. I worked for him at VMware and never saw him articulate one.

[hackernewds]

1989 is 34 years ago.

[roenxi]

Gelsinger is saying "the entire industry" and that seems likely to be a simple fact. Every single player, other than Nvidia, has an incentive to minimise the importance of CUDA as a proprietary technology. That is a lot more programmers than Nvidia can afford to employ.

Even if Intel falls over its own feet, the incentives to bring in more chip manufacturers are huge. It'll happen, the only question is whether the timeframe is months, years or a decade. My guess is shorter timeframes, this seems to mostly be matrix multiplication and there is suddenly a lot of money and attention on the matter. And AMD's APU play [0] is starting to reach the high end of the market with the MI300A which is an interesting development.

[0] EDIT: For anyone not following that story, they've been unifying system and GPU memory; so if I've understood this correctly there isn't any need to "copy data to the GPU" any more on those chips. Basically the CPU will now have big extensions for doing matrix math. Seems likely to catch on. Historically they've been adding that tech to low-end CPU so it isn't useful for AI work, now they're adding it to the big ones.

[amadeuspagel]

> That is a lot more programmers than Nvidia can afford to employ.

How many programmers one can employ is determined by profits, and Nvidia has monopoly profits thanks to CUDA, while "the entire industry" can at best hope to create some commiditized alternative to CUDA. Companies with real market power can beat entire industries of commodity manufacturers, Apple is the prime example.

[tiahura]

You're forgetting Microsoft.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/06/meta-and-microsoft-to-buy-am...

[AnthonyMouse]

AMD and Intel together have more revenue than Nvidia, even without considering any other player in the industry or any community contributions they get from being open source.

[julienfr112]

it's not about revenue, it's about investment. It is closely related to future profit. Not so much to current revenue ...

[AnthonyMouse]

Profit is revenue minus costs. Investment is costs. If you're reinvesting everything you take in your current-year profit would be zero because you're making large investments in the future.

[flkenosad]

How many programmers do you really need though to catch up to what CUDA has already? The path has been laid. There's no need for experimentation. Just copy what NVIDIA did. No?

[droopyEyelids]

I'm not an expert here, but with:

> That is a lot more programmers than Nvidia can afford to employ

How do you account for the increased complexity those developers have to deal with in an environment where there are multiple companies with conflicting incentives working on the standard?

My gut reaction is to worry if this is one of those problems like "9 people working together can't have a baby in one month".

[roenxi]

I actually find that a really interesting question with a really interesting answer - the scaling properties of large groups of people are unintuitive. In this case, my guess would be high market complexity, and the entire userbase to ignore that complexity in favour of 1-2 vendors with simple and cheap options. So the market overall will just settle on de-facto standards.

Of course, based on what we see right now that standard would be Nvidia's CUDA; but while CUDA is impressive I don't think running neural nets requires that level of complexity. We're not talking about GUIs which are one of the stickiest and most complicated blocks of software we know about, or complex platform-specific operations. I'd expect that the need for specialist libraries to do inference to go away in time and CUDA to be mainly useful for researching GPU applications to new problems. Training will likely just come down to raw ops/second in hardware rather than software.

It isn't like this stuff can't already run on other cards. AMD cards can run stable diffusion or LLMs. The issue is just that AMD drivers tend to crash. That is simultaneously a huge and a tiny problem - if they focus on it it won't be around for long. CUDA is an advantage, but not a moat.

[raincole]

> Gelsinger is saying "the entire industry" and that seems likely to be a simple fact. Every single player, other than Nvidia, has an incentive to minimise the importance of CUDA as a proprietary technology. That is a lot more programmers than Nvidia can afford to employ.

I mean, this statement is technically true, but it's true for any proprietary technology. If things work like this then we won't have any industry where proprietary techs/formats are prevalent.

[roenxi]

I suppose, but it is a practical matter here. CUDA is a library for memory management and matrix math targeted at researchers, hyper-productive devs and enthusiasts. It looks like it'll be highly capital intensive, requiring hardware that runs in some of the biggest, nastiest, OSS-friendliest data-centres in the world who all design their own silicon. The generations of AMD GPU that matter - the ones out and on people's machines - aren't supported for high quality GPGPU compute right now. Alright, that means CUDA is a massive edge right now. But that doesn't look like a defensible moat.

I was interested in being part of this AI thing, what stopped me wasn't lack of CUDA, it was that my AMD card reliably crashes under load doing compute workloads. Then when I see George Hotz having a go, the problem isn't lack of CUDA; it was that his AMD card crashed under compute workloads (technically I think it was running the demo suite). That is only anecdata, but 2 for 2 is almost a significant number of people with the small number of players and lack of big money in AI historically.

Lacking CUDA specifically might be a problem here, but I've never seen AMD fall down at that point. I've only ever see them fall down at basic driver bugs. And I don't see how CUDA would matter all that much because I can implement most of what I need math-wise in code. If I see a specific list of common complaints maybe I'll change my mind, but I'm just not detecting where the huge complexity is. I can see CUDA maintaining an edge for years because it is convenient, but I really don't see how it can stay essential. The card can already do the workload in theory and in practice assuming the code path doesn't bug out. I really don't need CUDA, all I want rocBLAS to not crash. I suspect that'd go a long way in practice.

[flamedoge]

AMD could use testers(cough clients i mean) like you. Jokes aside, please report bugs to rocm github..

[slavik81]

Unless their hardware is on the official support list, I wouldn't be too hopeful for a quick resolution. Still, it's even less likely to get fixed if it's not reported.

If nothing else, I would be curious to know more about the issue. Personally, I want to know how well ROCm functions on every AMD GPU.

[natbennett]

I find the hero-worship of Pat Gelsinger — examples in sibling comments — really weird. My impression of him at VMware was very beancounter-y, not especially technical, and too caught up in personal vendettas and status games to make good technical leadership decisions.

Granted, I may have just gotten off on the wrong foot. The first thing he said to Pivotal during the acquisition announcement was, “You were our cousins, but you’re now more like children.” So the whole tone was just weird.

[baq]

This was true for Intel for at least 10 years and I’m pretty sure for much longer than that. It was probably true for nvidia for about as long as they exist.

Hardware without software is just expensive sand. Every semiconductor company knows this. Intel was the one to perfect the whole package with x86 in the first place…

In the GPU compute space CUDA is x86. It’s ubiquitous, de facto standard and will be disrupted. Question is if it takes a year or a decade.

[JonChesterfield]

The stereotype is hardware engineers all think software is easy. So while semiconductor firms know software is important, they're often optimistic about the ease of creating it.

Cuda is enormous, very complicated and fits together relatively well. All the semiconductor startups have a business plan about being transparent drop in replacements for cuda systems, built by some tens of software engineers in a year or two. That only really makes sense if you've totally misjudged the problem difficulty.

[mi_lk]

You don't know Pat Gelsinger do you?

[ActionHank]

We're in 2023, he's been in the CEO seat for 2 years already. He's had plenty of time to show the world his intent and where they are going. All that has happened is they launched a very mid GPU and have yielded more ground to AMD. Meanwhile AMD continue to eat away at Intel's talent pool, market share, and still managed to push into the AI space.

He should be sweating.

[pgeorgi]

> for 2 years already ... All that has happened is they launched a very mid GPU

Hardware development cycles are closer to 5 years. So while he might have gotten some adjustments done on the designs so far, if he turned the ship around it'll take a while longer to materialize.

The software side is more agile, so any tea leave reading to discern what Gelsinger's strategy looks like is best done over there.

[jorvi]

Not only that, for a “first” (not sure how much of Larrabee was salvaged) discrete GPU attempt, Intel Arc is fantastic. Look at the first GPUs Nvidia and ATI launched.

It’s only when you put them up against Nvidia and AMDs comes-with-decades-of-experience offerings that Intel’s GPUs seem less than stellar.

[CuriousCosmic]

Yeah Arc is incredible in how much it accomplished as a first attempt and as long as they keep at it without chopping it up into a bunch of artificially limited market segments then it'll probably be incredibly competitive in a few generations.

[signatoremo]

His intent is “5 nodes in 4 years” - [0]. The goal is to reclaim the node leadership from TSMC by 2025.

They announced the first chips based on Intel 4 today, which is more or less equivalent to TSMC’s 5nm.

They may fail, but the goal is clear and ambitious.

[0] - https://www.xda-developers.com/intel-roadmap-2025-explainer/

[ksec]

>All that has happened is they launched a very mid GPU and have yielded more ground to AMD.

And you dont blame that to Raja Koduri but to Gelsinger?

[drexlspivey]

or Lisa Su

[logicchains]

Ultimately it comes down to Intel and AMD being penny wise, pound foolish. They're unwilling to hire a lot of quality software engineers, because they're expensive, so they just continue to fall behind NVidia.

[specialist]

Yes and, for different reasons:

> ...as opposed to the bean-counters

Intel whining about the CHIPS Act, while doing huge layoffs, while continuing massive stock buybacks, while continuing to pay dividends...

I'm not impressed.

I'd expect a corporation facing an existential crisis would make some tough decisions and accept the consequences. I know that Wall St (investors) is the tail wagging the dog. But I expect a leader to hold off the vultures (ghouls) long enough to do the necessary pivots.

At least Intel's doom spiral isn't as grimm as the condundrum facing the automobile manufacturers. They need to prop up their declining business units, pay off their loan sharks (investors), somehow resolve their death embrace with the unions, transform culture (bust up their organizational siloes), transform relationships with their suppliers, AND somehow get capital (cheap enough) to fund their pivots.

I'm sure Intel has the technical chops to do great things. But financially their half-measures strategy doesn't instill confidence.

Source: Just a noob reading the headlines. Am probably totally off base.

[seanalltogether]

Nvidia GPU moat has always been their software. Game ready drivers are a big deal for each AAA game launch and they always help to push their fps numbers on reviewers charts. I feel like for 20 years I've been reading people online complain about ATI/AMD drivers and how they want to go back to an Nvidia card the next chance they get.

[epolanski]

This hasn't been true for more than a decade at this point, and in fact AMD tends to have the better driver support, especially long term.

[overdrive23]

Well, you said a decade so I'll take an easy one from 4 years ago.

"Yes, you know all those r/amd and r/nvidia posts about people ditching their RX 5700 XT and switching over to an Nvidia RTX 2070 Super… AMD is reading them and has obviously been jamming them down the throats of its software engineers until they could release a driver patch which addresses the issues Navi users have been experiencing."

https://www.pcgamesn.com/amd/radeon-rx-5700-drivers-black-sc...

[ac29]

Intel has over 15,000 software engineers, per their website. I couldn't find a number for NVIDIA, but it looks like they have a bit above 26k total employees.

So, its very likely Intel has more software engineers than NVIDIA. Intel has far more products than NVIDIA though, so NVIDIA almost certainly has more software engineers working on GPU.

[rightbyte]

I would say that over a certain number of devs the output decreases.

I think it was 500 people working on Windows XP? A hundred for Windows 95. Etc.

[baq]

Intel's/NVidia's/AMD's GPU drivers alone are probably more LOC at this point than the whole of XP...

[muxr]

People used the same argument when saying AMD would never beat Intel in CPUs. Intel has a lot of software engineers. Also these days AMD has a good number of software folks, thanks to the Xilinx acquisition and the organic investments in this area.

[papichulo2023]

Are you saying they able to develop without a PM every 5 engineers? Insane.

[sulam]

Yeah, they should get someone who actually architected a successful chip, like the 486. Maybe a boomerang who used to be CTO. Get rid of this beancounter and hire someone like that!!

/S