If malicious program has access to GPU directly or via some buggy interface, the whole system is at risk. There is no "safe" GPU virtualization like there is with CPUs.
> why the milestone isn't something classically hard but easily verified
They're far from being able to do any such thing, so posing such milestone would make the field look stagnant and thus be a bad marketing and hurt the money stream. The "milestones" are chosen so that they are plausibly reachable in short time relevant to patrons/investors, because people working on this need to constantly demonstrate progress.
Economy doesn't perform, but ideology has collapsed only in minds of ordinary people. Politicians, stakeholders and various media outlets are very much invested, and still push that the current course is the only correct way and the bright green future as designed is unstoppable. Reminds me of the arrogance of the ruling party slogans from before 90s.
Intel tried to get into GPU-like products 14 years ago. They promote their consumer Arc GPUs since 2022, and still almost nobody wants them. Is there a datacenter Intel GPU that some business wants?
The big money is flowing NVIDIA's way, and even if Intel can make a GPU, it won't be able to divert a big part of the flow, similarly to AMD.
Yeah, but they can saturate fabs and provide income, which they need. Intel can't produce better CPU/GPU products than their competition now. Their design and manufacturing of CPUs has serious problems for years now. The big money in GPUs is already captured by NVIDIA, and it's hard to see how Intel can challenge that - people want NVIDIA and CUDA. So Intel should cut down and focus the remaining bloat and R&D spending on the areas where it's plausible they can get competitive in a reasonable time. That is CPUs, and maybe memory and SSDs - they have X-Point which was great, just marketed and priced wrong.
The idea of another competitive GPU manufacturer is nice. But it is hard to bring into existence. Intel is not in a position to invest lots of money and sustained effort into products for which the market is captured and controlled by a much bigger and more competent company on top of its game. Not even AMD can get more market share, and they are much more competent in the GPU technology. Unless NVIDIA and AMD make serious mistakes, Intel GPUs will remain a 3rd rate product.
> "They need to start somewhere in order to break ground"
Intel has big problems and it's not clear they should occupy themselves with this. They should stabilize, and the most plausible way to do that is to cut the weak parts, and get back to what they were good at - performant secure x86_64 CPUs, maybe some new innovative CPUs with low consumption, maybe memory/solid state drives.
Too late, and it has a bad rep. This effort from Intel to sell discrete GPUs is just inertia from old aspirations, won't really help noticeably to save it, as there is not much money in it. Most probably the whole Intel ARC effort will be mothballed, and probably many more will.
If Ryan McBeth defines MIC as just the defense companies, or its existence being conditioned on these companies having greater official revenues than Procter & Gamble, then he either misunderstands the concept, or he is (why?) trying to spread some weak argument for an idea that U.S. does not have an MIC, which is quite comical.
MIC is not just the defense companies, read the name again - it' the complex made of industry and the military. And Eisenhower's point in warning against it is not about revenue of the industry part, but about influence of the whole complex on major decisions.
In 1990's there was a short dip in funding, but since 2000's, its growth caught back on, and it's getting close to a trillion dollars a year. That much money chases a lot of constituency and a lot of power. Millions of people are dependent on it.
> There's a certain personality type that is drawn to engineering that believes the whole world can be explained by their simple pet model and that they are smarter than everyone else.
Lots of failed theorists with that personality type/flaw as well.
It's a flop for people who expect that after 20months, they'll get 13%-18% more. Perhaps Steve did not know this "already well known fact" and thus wrote about flop and Intel 11-th gen vibes.
How did you know before benchmarks were out? Did AMD say gaming performance will stagnate? (that would be very stupid thing for them to say).
In which applications is AVX-512 performance decisive? Video editing / 3D modelling?
Yeah, Moore's law seems to culminate and the rising tide with it. We seem to be entering an era where new tech improvements are mostly about integrated coprocessors and specialized workloads, and sometimes lower power.
Yep, after Zen 3-4/Alder Lake, we're now in another stagnation cycle like Intel Sandy Bridge brought in 2010-2015.
For casual users, a good test if it's time to upgrade is - has the CPU speed, the memory speed doubled? If not, for most people, it's better to keep your old device.
For competitive gamers, smaller gains make sense, but it gets expensive fast.
Steve's reviews are focused on gaming and he probably isn't wrong there. 9700X seems to bring very little for gaming, compared to 7700X. 7700X is almost the same performance, sometimes even better, and cheaper to buy. Most gamers do not care about 10% lower power consumption, especially when they have to pay more upfront for it.
Yes, the better energy efficiency allows 9700X to boost higher to get somewhat higher performance in multi-thread, but for some reason, gaming does not benefit noticeably. Zen 5 seems interesting for laptops and low-power client devices, but so does the new Intel Lunar Lake (for now, at least), so we have to wait for reviews and comparisons there.
> has not tested... floating-point computations, cryptography or ML/AI.
That is true, but small fraction of people care about these specialized workloads, it's overhyped in marketing. But if you care about those, I think you may be right that Zen 5 may be more interesting there.
9700X system has materially the same performance and only a little lower consumption than similar 7700X system, which was released 21 months ago. It's stagnation like Intel 2010-2015.