Then at the end he lists why he thinks that with links: Softbank bought ARM and funded NVIDIA, who announced an ARM & NVIDIA integrated enterprise computing product. IBM is supporting NVIDIA with a POWER and NVIDIA integrated enterprise computing product, and AMD is supporting NVIDIA in Ryzen by providing lots of PCIe bandwidth to the graphics card to support compute tasks.
Probably not but, if so, isn't that what both computer gaming and deep learning need the most?
Around 2011, I got my feet wet in CUDA and tried to calculate quantum waveforms (using a method that is mostly matrix multiplications and FFTs). I eventually went back to doing stuff on the CPU because GPU memory was too small in the systems that I had access to (256 MB), which restricted me to one job at a time, whereas the CPU (a contemporary i7) had enough cores and memory to do 4 jobs in parallel. And I needed double precision, which the GPU could only execute at a tenth the speed of a single-precision job. Also, with the GPU, I was restricted to running jobs during the night since those systems were desktops that were also used for classes. Whenever one of my calculations ran, it would occupy the GPU completely, this rendering the graphical login unusable.
I reckon that the situation would look much more favorably for the GPU today, esp. because of the larger memory sizes and because double-precision speed has caught up. But yeah, the most common uses need only single-precision.
Sure there is a gradual shift and things are getting better, but X86 is not dead, just like windows is still doing fine.
Likewise, I doubt that GPGPU applications will decimate Intel. It will likely hurt Intel's reach. This is particularly true if AMD, ARM, and IBM are facilitating the use of to GPU as a high performance coprocessor.
Don't know how that article you link has any relevance to the facts and analysis he presents here.
"Coding is NOT WORK. People who think it is aren't real software engineers."
That's some highly macho driven bullshit that is untrue and somewhat meaningless to boot. People who think coding is not real work should be able to easily hire a AAA title producing team without paying them anything. Yeah, good luck.
Same slide "High expectations, long hours, new challenges and a customer/market driven mission are motivating for real engineers."
There's no reason that "long hours" needs to be in that sentence, and no evidence that it's true. These sentences on this slide are working to rationalize uncompensated hours of work.
"The Young the Old and the Useless" is downright inflammatory, even if there are elements of truth. It's negative stereotyping to suggest good engineers have no social skills, can't make eye contact, and will marry the first girl they can. The last sentence suggest's their value is high because they will keep a job regardless of the working conditions. If that's true, it's immoral to exploit.
There are some people who aren't good communicators and who won't quit a bad job unless it's really extremely bad. But personally, I don't believe that the best hires are the antisocial engineers that won't stick up for themselves. The best hires are the people that have both good engineering and good communication skills. The best hires are the ones that are hard to keep because they have good options and aren't afraid to take them.
The only reason to prefer people who don't change jobs and don't stick up for themselves is because it's easier than being a good manager. The stuff on these slides is perpetuating the problems that are causing crunch times in the games industry. These ideas aren't forward looking, they aren't setting goals for being better at making games or building healthy companies. These slides are making excuses for taking the cheap way out by exploiting engineers. This isn't just bad in the unethical way, it's also deeply lazy.
So we won't see the kind of organic growth in FPGA computing that we've seen from GPUs over the last 10-15 years. If Intel is counting on that, they (and their stockholders) are in for disappointment.
he never specifies what he means by displace exactly, and follows up with vacuous statements like "x86 party ends in 2017". The entire thing sounds like trying to manufacture a momentous event out of a gradual shift of market profits and priorities over time. Best you could hope for is to state that Intel has failed to take a significant market in high end throughput computing (ie. desktop and HPC GPUs), but its doing quite well with integrated GPUs.
Don't forget this is the same visionary that wrote the game industry playbook on how to hire and exploit developers: https://www.kotaku.com.au/2016/04/alex-st-johns-ideas-about-...