ArchitectureProfessor
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That's really more or less standard industry practice.
Yea, sorry. I didn't mean to imply that only Intel does this. I totally agree that it is standard industry practice.
That's really more or less standard industry practice.
I'm aware of the treble damage penalty and its effect on due dilligence.Unlikely. From what I understand, Intel engineers are *forbidden* from even looking at patents. Why? If you're knowingly infringing, then it is 3x damages (part of the patent law statues). To avoid these 3x damages, they just disallow any of their engineers from looking at any patents. Clever, eh?
I'm not sure those who would make the deliberations on this would be obligated to tell you.I've never heard Intel make a technical design decision based around a patent issue.
Leaving Larrabee to freely infringe on Nvidia's patents leads to Nvidia losing anyway.Plus, Intel has such a large patent portfolio, I don't think NVIDIA would want to get in a pissing match with Intel on patents. The counter-suit would likely drag both of them down, and neither of them would be clear winners.
Where do Transmeta and Integraph fit in that scheme?Most of the time, hardware patents are used either (1) by big companies to squash little companies or (2) or little companies without products (only patents) suing a bigger company. A variant of #2 is when a university is suing a big company. You just don't see much hardware patent litigation between big players (few IBM vs Intel vs AMD size battles). In such cases, only the lawyers win (well, and the academics that serve as expert witnesses, but I digress).
The interplay between cost, price, and profit margin make this sort of thing hard to analyze (as you're well aware). Yet, from what you've said, a mid-range GPU chip is cheaper than a mid-range CPU.
So, I wonder what accounts for the difference?
The GPU is a 90nm, whereas the CPU was a 65nm. Generally, 65nm parts are more expensive. The quad-core CPUs I quoted were actually two chips glued together in the same package. One would assume that you could still get a dual-core version of the same chip for cheaper than $280 (which was the cost of the quad-core). Perhaps customers are just used to paying more for CPUs than "add on" GPUs?
A few years ago (before the whole GPGPU thing), Intel say GPUs as a non-threat and a lower-profit margin business. Their opinion was that burning high-end fab capacity on GPUs would make them less money than building more CPUs. With the advent of Larrabee, that thinking is clearly changing inside of Intel...
Where do Transmeta and Integraph fit in that scheme?
Nope, that is NOT correct in the US. Quick Google gives me this document with this quote:
The rest of the document gives some ways to try to minimize the impact of that, but AFAIK the kind of R&D Aaron spoke of is 100% classified as 'Operating Expenses' at both NVIDIA and Intel.
I was merely implying that the price-per-mm2 on the 90nm CPUs were roughly comparable to the current ones for 65nm CPUs afaict, so that this wasn't a very significant factor.I'm note sure I follow. Can you say more?
I've thought a lot about this, and my current personal conclusion is that going programmable is a perfectly viable proposition in *any* business if, and only if, the programmable core's ALUs are similar to what you'd need in your fixed-function unit. This is especially attractive when you can have the advantage of custom or semi-custom logic in the programmable case but not the fixed-function case.ArchitectureProfessor said:This is what I love about this thread. Fundamentally we're debating the role of special-purpose vs general-purpose hardware and which makes sense where. Of course, that is a moving target, but it is really fun to debate.
And the solution is not clever, it's a sign of an insipid patent system...
I'm not sure those who would make the deliberations on this would be obligated to tell you.
Leaving Larrabee to freely infringe on Nvidia's patents leads to Nvidia losing anyway.
Why not sue intstead for damages, a way to force a licensing fee, or a way to slip past the aegis of the x86 patent portfolio that Intel is likely counting on for part of its advantage over Nvidia?
It seems Intel is deliberately pursuing a design philosophy that stays within its own patent spread and avoids the areas of specialized hardware that it knows are rife with competitors' patents.
It's a nice side effect, if nothing else.
Okay then, I guess that makes sense.I've both worked in industry (briefly) and talked with lots of technical leads (chief architects and such) about CPU chip design. Certainly some chip could have been designed to get around patents and such, but from the technical leads I've talked with, they really don't consider patents. They can't even really be aware of what patents are our there because of the 3x damages issue.
Because the counter-claim could damage Nvida more than it helps them. This is why failing companies usually resort to patent litigation as the last resort (and not usually before).
On the other hand, INT8 filtering and blending are obviously wasteful on >=fp32 units.
Overall, my expectation is that DX11 NV/AMD GPUs (or even earlier) will likely get rid of the follwing stages:
...
- Texture filtering for fp32+ textures.
- In addition to sometimes being a bottleneck, it might also still take power even when it is bottlenecked by other elements (which is likely much of the time).
If we rule out Nvidia, there are a number of minor GPU players besides AMD and Nvidia that could possibly try something. Given their increasingly marginal roles, they may have less to lose.
If they can somehow manage an injunction, they could retard Larrabee's uptake and buy time for the GPUs to narrow the process gap...
The current unit in R6xx can in select instances amplify geometry to the point that it is likely that the rest of the chip can't keep up.
(The unit or future tesselation hardware may never catch on, but just for argument's sake...) On the other hand, is the unit really all that large? ... So what if one sliver of the GPU idles when it saturates the rest of the core?
Corporate legal fears certainly make being a spectator far more boring these days.They received a single letter from some small firm that said something like: "you may or may not infringe on our patent". That was enough for IBM management to put a moratorium on any public disclosure of how part of the chip work. This, of course, really annoyed the engineers, because they wanted to be able to talk about what they did. They were eventually able to talk more about it, but it delayed when they could disclose things by a year or two. Sort of sad, in my opinion.
Interestingly, as was pointed out earlier, the less fixed-function logic that Larrabee has, the less likely it is to infringe on NVIDIA patents. It would be hard for NVIDIA to claim that a many-core x86 chip with cache coherence somehow infringes on their patents. I guess some of the vector instructions might have arithmetic operations that could be patented, but those might be easier to work around.
Depends on whether a hardware patent is also interpreted as a software patent, doesn't it?Interestingly, as was pointed out earlier, the less fixed-function logic that Larrabee has, the less likely it is to infringe on NVIDIA patents. It would be hard for NVIDIA to claim that a many-core x86 chip with cache coherence somehow infringes on their patents.
Corporate legal fears certainly make being a spectator far more boring these days.
Look at how scant the POWER6 data was/is.
Depends on whether a hardware patent is also interpreted as a software patent, doesn't it?
They can't afford to have Larrabee 32nm going online much after the 32nm shrink of Nehalem though, because my current expectation is we'll see 32nm GPUs in 4Q10 or 1Q11. And TSMC's 45nm process has an obvious density advantage against Intel's (which probably doesn't do more than compensate Intel's speed advantage though). Of course, that's all based on preliminary TSMC roadmaps and things could change.
Yes.I have no idea what you're talking about. Are you implying the following chips are all-new architectures and have major differences in their RTL: NV15, G71, G92, etc.? RV370, RV610, etc.?
I beg to differ. According to rumors, Larrabee's in-order cores are based on the age-old P5 architecture. Of course it takes some effort to extend it with x86-64, the SIMD units and the four-way SMT, but once that's done (and it has been done before) it's just mainly a matter of scaling the number of cores and tweaking some parameters. The really big differences will be in the software, as Larrabee will be capable of doing rasterization, raytracing, physics, etc. all with relatively high efficiency.Larrabee's advantage here is exactly zero.
What does make a P5 core + SIMD efficient at rasterization?he really big differences will be in the software, as Larrabee will be capable of doing rasterization, raytracing, physics, etc. all with relatively high efficiency.
Larrabee II????But feel free to disagree. I'm just exploring another reason why Larrabee (II) might survive against G100/R700...
Going from Pentium M to Core 2 the only 'major' changes are doubling the L1 cache bus width to 128 bit, doubling the width of the SSE execution units, and issuing four operations per clock. From a high level point of view doubling the number of cores when the transistor budget doubles isn't exactly revolutionsary. It still has caches, decoders, register renaming, reorder buffers, retirement buffers, TLBs, branch predictors, you name it. But if we look at G70 versus G80 we hardly find the same building blocks. Texture samplers are separate from shader pipelines, vertex and pixel shader units are unified, SIMD units are scalar, interpolators and transcendental function evaluation share the same logic, granularity is way lower, etc.The work of implementing a design has increased to the point that Intel's CPUs are going through major architectural changes every 2 years, which doesn't leave much room for GPUs to seem all that excessive.
True, but my point is that Larrabee might evolve even more rapidly.Not keeping the same ISA hasn't stopped GPUs from rapidly evolving.