Just look at this list: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisit...
Given what you see from Google now is dominated by the "everything else" (I doubt even losing search would be fatal), Google is a poster boy for growing a technology company by acquiring new products. Given the rumours about their ongoing cultural shift (I'm sure Intel was like Google at one stage), this may not continue. But for new Google is the exemplar for now to do this right.
Facebook acquiring Instagram and Whatsapp.
Mellanox
Sure, Intel have quite a history of failures, especially for the last decade or so. But I would like to think that even Intel can be smart enough not to mess with things that work, so maybe things didn't work and Intel management (unsuccessfully) tried to save it. It is actually a very common scenario: branch doesn't perform as well as expected, upper management tries to do something, it doesn't work, people blame management but don't mention that without intervention it would have also failed. Of course management is to blame, but it is not just because of them.
Another point of view would be interesting.
(If the article has a failing, it's that it's somehow trying to hang the failure of Habana inside of Intel on Avigdor, which is absurd.)
If you have to do more work to port for no benefit, it doesn’t make sense except to commoditize it
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Bandwidth_Memory#HBM2E
"N5, PCIe 4.0, and HBM2e. This chip was probably delayed two years." -wmf
With this context, the articles clain that
>Intel correctly identified AI as the future
seems tenuous at best.
It also claims that Nvidia was just a graphics company in 2019-20. This was clearly not the case for anyone training cv models at the time.
IDK what Gaudi is or what Habana Labs was developing. Does anyone know what the status of pytorch/tensorflow on Intel GPU hardware is? Because add far as research is concerned one of the framework has to be supported.
I'd say this is true - they just failed to execute meaningfully on it. They were adding stuff like VNNI back in 2018, buying Nervana and Habana, but then just...didn't do much with it. At the same time, they made Ponte Vecchio.
Software support for all of these is not great, in my personal opinion.
For the Ponte Vecchio and Xe GPUs, pytorch 2.5 allegedly supports it now: https://pytorch.org/blog/intel-gpu-support-pytorch-2-5/
For habana, I think they have a custom interface that hooks into Pytorch: https://docs.habana.ai/en/latest/PyTorch/Reference/Python_Pa...
There's a random Intel 1100 Max with 48gb HBM on eBay, if anyone is inclined to try it...https://www.ebay.com/itm/387631533950
The article is saying that Intel failed to lead the startup to developing a successful product by taking steps, not detailed, that the founder may have taken if he had still owned it.
edit. startup was chromatis. but it was lucent who did buying and not nortel.
I’ve more often seen it’s something seen as easy and very visual thing that looks like you’re solving a problem instead of looking internally and making tough choices. Or having to take a critical look at leadership.
In 2020? Uhm... No.
This was also the height of the global GPU shortage... I suppose anything can fit your narrative, just as long as your spin has enough RPMs.
1) systolic arrays without SIMT or general purpose multicore are not flexible enough, creating a flawed foundation
2) everyone targeting tsmc is building the same circuits, leading to no differentiation and no motivation to move off an incumbent
3) the CUDA software stack is so big it creates porting friction
So you have a flawed foundation that makes everything else harder together with no advantage and a huge porting effort
No wonder why no one switches
I’d like to see hardware startups take more risk and get off the beaten path in ways that enable fundamentally new algorithms
When you put all of this against the backdrop of Intel management, what other outcome could there have been?
One of those decisions was to put an Intel factory on the land of a Palestinian village that had been ethnically cleansed by Israel during the 1948 Nakba.
Another was to announce in Dec 2023, at a time when Israel was losing international support due to what was becoming internationally recognized as a genocide, that it was about to invest $25B in a new factory in Israel [2]. Intel investors were not happy and Intel was made to reverse this decision.
[1] https://en.globes.co.il/en/article-staunch-israel-supporter-... [2] https://bdsmovement.net/news/Intel-Halts-25b-Investment-Isra...
This isnt strongest argument
Copying and improving things takes less time.
For example how many years Nvidia needed to develop 4060 4080 and how many years Intel needed to reach similar capabilities
