Re:Looking Ahead at Intel's Xe3 GPU Architecture
by tylerchurch on Wednesday March 19, 2025 @10:09PM
(#43419303)
I’ve been tracking it for weeks and it comes back in stock only to sell out minutes later. I’ve had 2 or 3 times where I thought I got one, only to get the order cancelled email.
I can’t tell if there’s just no stock, or huge demand, but either way it seems like a great product. If only you could buy it.
Re:Looking Ahead at Intel's Xe3 GPU Architecture
by timewizard on Thursday March 20, 2025 @04:02AM
(#43420692)
Knowledge is significantly different from a training set. In particular we can hold incomplete knowledge that is eventually resolved through further practice and observation. Also knowledge access is analog and inaccurate to a degree that often introduces emergent behavior into outputs.
Re:Looking Ahead at Intel's Xe3 GPU Architecture
by immibis on Wednesday March 19, 2025 @08:46PM
(#43418839)
This is, like, the entirety of computing. Did x86 spring fully-formed from Zeus's forehead or did people bake in their knowledge of what programmers wanted their programs to do?
When you write programs do you not use heuristics? And tests?
Re:Looking Ahead at Intel's Xe3 GPU Architecture
by ok_computer on Wednesday March 19, 2025 @08:47PM
(#43418845)
Yep, the crowning achievement of machine complexity in recent human history is easily generalized in computational efficacy by effectively markov chain chatbots that were trained on project Gutenberg, reddit comments, and github python and javascript repos.
Re:Looking Ahead at Intel's Xe3 GPU Architecture
by ok_computer on Wednesday March 19, 2025 @09:54PM
(#43419224)
Ok fair point.
One such method was an improvement in matrix matrix multiplication in 2022. So I’m sure there is a potential discovery of many efficient numerical algorithms that will be uncovered with machine learning.
My parent comment was a knee jerk response to the over confidence and wishful thinking of computer work people to a magic AI box solving all the hard physical problems like its some simple conversation prompt away.
Re:Looking Ahead at Intel's Xe3 GPU Architecture
by shermantanktop on Wednesday March 19, 2025 @10:10PM
(#43419305)
Unfortunately I think the fetishization of prompting is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Over time these models will be able to understand enough of the physical problems to have a dumb prompt yield a reasonable if not optimal solution. But of course that house of cards collapses when fundamental advances appear.
Re:Looking Ahead at Intel's Xe3 GPU Architecture
by nl on Thursday March 20, 2025 @07:58PM
(#43430433)
If evolution has worked out that having specifically optimized pathways for specific actions it doesn't seem terrible that human designed machines are similar.
Re:Looking Ahead at Intel's Xe3 GPU Architecture
by barotalomey on Friday March 21, 2025 @04:39AM
(#43433195)
I feel that's assuming a whole lot of unrelated things, such as machines and humans having anything at all in common.
I get that your take qualifies as stoner philosophy, so I won't push too far, but really. Do give some concrete examples to support your ideas rather than GPT fluff.
Re:Looking Ahead at Intel's Xe3 GPU Architecture
by ForTheKidz on Thursday March 20, 2025 @02:01AM
(#43420212)
Does "open source drivers" imply documentation of the underlying ISA or just the tooling to shepherd it? How much code would I need to go from bootloader to quake 2 assuming I only needed to play that one piece of software on my one card?
It's all there. For the driver/runtime everything is also open and upstreamed into the Linux kernel (register map and pcie bar and etc). The packet protocol isn't well-documented but documented enough that tinygrad managed to build their own driver from scratch.
Re:Looking Ahead at Intel's Xe3 GPU Architecture
by adrian_b on Friday March 21, 2025 @11:02AM
(#43436531)
While the AMD ISA documentation has been slightly improving during the last years, so the document about RDNA 3.5 is noticeably better than older documents, Intel has failed to publish the documentation for the latest Xe versions, even if in the past its GPU documentation was much better than that of AMD.
Intel still has to publish several additional manuals, to cover Xe in Meteor Lake, Xe in Arrow Lake H, Xe 2 in Lunar Lake and Xe 2 in discrete GPUs, and then Xe 3 in Panther Lake, to bring their documentation up to date.
You can extract most of the GPU information from the open-source Linux drivers and LLVM compiling back-end, but this is a poor substitute for actual GPU ISA documentation.
Re:Looking Ahead at Intel's Xe3 GPU Architecture
by mandevil on Wednesday March 19, 2025 @09:46PM
(#43419181)
That's a privilege that the dominant players in the market can get away with. If you are the #1, everyone will do what they need to to run on your stuff. But the players trying desperately to get programmers (and customers) to pay attention to them need to make things as easy as possible to use.
Re:Looking Ahead at Intel's Xe3 GPU Architecture
by Tsiklon on Wednesday March 19, 2025 @09:38PM
(#43419145)
From some of the interviews i saw at B580’s launch, it seems like Intel know the shortcomings of the Alchemist and Battlemage architectures, but weren’t able to change them before launch.
Of course these are parts that have been in the works for several years now. They’ve had time to see what Nvidia and AMD are doing with their competitive products
I can’t tell if there’s just no stock, or huge demand, but either way it seems like a great product. If only you could buy it.
Why can't AI come up with some kind of fast universal computation machine that doesnt have the need for the siliconized version of ifdefs?
Because fixed silicon inevitably has fixed "baked in" choices.
When you write programs do you not use heuristics? And tests?
One such method was an improvement in matrix matrix multiplication in 2022. So I’m sure there is a potential discovery of many efficient numerical algorithms that will be uncovered with machine learning.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05172-4
My parent comment was a knee jerk response to the over confidence and wishful thinking of computer work people to a magic AI box solving all the hard physical problems like its some simple conversation prompt away.
Is it surprising that silicon does too?
Given that human brains and silicon has nothing in common, then yes, it is surprising. What makes you think otherwise?
I get that your take qualifies as stoner philosophy, so I won't push too far, but really. Do give some concrete examples to support your ideas rather than GPT fluff.
The compiler is LLVM
https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/tree/main/llvm/lib/Targ...
It's all there. For the driver/runtime everything is also open and upstreamed into the Linux kernel (register map and pcie bar and etc). The packet protocol isn't well-documented but documented enough that tinygrad managed to build their own driver from scratch.
Intel still has to publish several additional manuals, to cover Xe in Meteor Lake, Xe in Arrow Lake H, Xe 2 in Lunar Lake and Xe 2 in discrete GPUs, and then Xe 3 in Panther Lake, to bring their documentation up to date.
You can extract most of the GPU information from the open-source Linux drivers and LLVM compiling back-end, but this is a poor substitute for actual GPU ISA documentation.
edit: they are scary huge.
If a C770 or C970 card can prove to be a contender like B580 is at the respective price point then people will buy them.
Of course these are parts that have been in the works for several years now. They’ve had time to see what Nvidia and AMD are doing with their competitive products