The meeting of Intel's management with investors a few days ago turned out to be remarkable not only due to the fact that it announced , as well as plans for the introduction of ΠΈ technologies. At the same time, the speeches of some top officials contained very curious and even ambiguous statements on related topics. Among the particularly distinguished speakers was Raja Koduri, Intel senior vice president and lead systems and graphics architect.
Koduri's report at the event was dedicated to the software ecosystem that is being formed around Intel hardware components. However, in the course of the story, he also found time to compare Intel's approach with what competitors are doing in this area. It's funny that at the same time not a single name of any other companies was announced, but it was about some rivals of Intel, marked with colors - green and red. It is hard to imagine that such color masking could really work, so what Koduri said next caused many sincere bewilderment. The fact is that he poured out a lot of bile precisely at the address of the red competitor, that is, in fact, at the address of his former employer.
The fact is that until the end of 2017, Raja Koduri served as head of AMD's graphics division, and therefore he probably has a very good idea of ββ\uXNUMXb\uXNUMXbwhat and how this company does. However, his keynote went like this: β[AMD] has two architectures, no memory or interconnect strategy that I've heard of, and the developer ecosystem is tiny. In fact, without our invaluable input, they wouldn't have any ecosystem at all that would mean anything."
I must say that this statement is somewhat controversial in itself. But it is especially surprising that Raja seems to have forgotten what he himself was doing a few years ago. When he worked in the ranks of the βred competitorβ, he took part in the development of both the Infinity Fabric interconnect bus and the creation of Radeon Instinct accelerators designed specifically for solving artificial intelligence problems.
It's hard to believe, but in mid-2017, the same Raja Koduri on behalf of AMD said something completely different: βInfinity Fabric allows us to connect various engines together on a single chip much easier than before. In addition, it is a truly high-speed interconnect bus with low latency. And this is important in order to tie together all our developments with maximum speed and efficiency. Infinity Fabric will serve as the design foundation for all of our future integrated circuits.β
But in the picture of the world presented by Koduri, NVIDIA represents a much larger and more serious rival for Intel than AMD. This was partly due to the fact that Raja refused on principle to notice many areas of AMD's activities. Along with his denial of the existence of interconnect technology in the red competitor, he also did not put on the slide information about AMD's developments in the field of artificial intelligence, and also turned a blind eye to the fact that AMD is gaining some weight as a provider of data center solutions.
We do not undertake to suggest what such selective amnesia of the leading Intel graphics specialist may be connected with, but we note that what Raja told further about the software ecosystem of the microprocessor giant looks really interesting. The fact is that although Intel operates on four fronts at once - CPU, GPU, artificial intelligence and FPGA - the company wants to prepare a single API for developers that would allow them to create software for Intel equipment using a single approach.
Thus, it is supposed to significantly simplify the work of programmers who now have to deal with different Intel products as if we were talking about solutions from ten different companies, Koduri himself expressed such a metaphor. In the future, Intel intends to implement the oneAPI concept, which will create something similar to a single "store" of libraries and tools for developers. At the same time, the company wants to rely on open source developments, much like AMD is doing now.
βWe're committed to open standards,β says Raja Koduri. βIntel has the best open source experience in the industry. For example, on the Linux kernel development team, we are number one." In other words, Intel is going to pay increased attention to the software ecosystem that accompanies its future products. And this means that such promising solutions as, for example, discrete graphics, will receive serious software support from the very beginning of their existence.
Source: 3dnews.ru