Do they need the market leader to take on the market?
In the end, that's also what is at stake, and the reason Intel might not be that interested. They will maybe see the light and see that they would have to steer the collaboration toward a more beneficial direction (for them), but at first, they will probably wait for it to gain momentum before deciding that they have to invest money to push the effort in the right direction (for them).
They have to be a threat for the established company to make a move. What nickpsecurity is saying by telling that they don't need Intel is that they are not yet a sufficient threat and that they are capable of becoming one.
Which they will be if they have a competitive technology that has a migration path for both x86 ISA and about everything else dominating in acceleration space. Intel might respond by supporting it or deploying their own thing. They're sure to loose market share, though, if the coalition's standardization commoditizes accelerators more than Intel's side does. They could loose some profit margin in the niche along with the market share.
Yes, but the commoditization of UNIX-like OSes and processor agnostic runtimes on the data center, means that processor architectures aren't any longer a way to keep developers captive from processor manufacturers.
So any HPC application that makes use of abstraction libraries for SIMD and GPGPU code can be easily moved to non-Intel processors.
The people involved or wanting to use this buy so many chips from intel that if intel doesn't get on board, it's going to likely turn out badly for intel.
I note that Facebook and Intel are missing, which makes me wonder if they are off in a corner somewhere doing their own thing.
"especially when you need to make sure that 30+ year-old code still work like it's the case in HPC"
Most code that works on Intel works on AMD. It's rare that it doesn't. The HPC vendor will have low risk on migration + get a bunch of competing accelerators at various price points for their problem. This is quite an incentive to move even if there would be stragglers.
The question is : are the DOD/DOE (or the chinese/european equivalent) going to risk millions for their next supercomputers on a new architecture or prefer good old intel ?
Especially when we know that the jump to exascale computation will only be possible if we get rid of the buses and have everything on the same chip (which is one direction taken by Intel).
My point is that the conclusion of the article "Intel has to come up with an answer..." is just plain wrong. This new architecture is an answer to intel new developments. We will have to wait to see what stick to the wall.
They're the people that bought all the POWER's (SP2 onward), Alphas, Itaniums (eg SGI), Cell's, and so on. They'll take risks esp if they think the firm will be around to supply the upgrades.
Err, again, the people involved, on their own, buy enough chips to have a completely self supporting ecosystem.
Even if it only ever stayed the current set of participants, it'd be enough money to be worth it
Plus the suppliers are already making enough to justify building these things. It's existing products being extended with a new interface to support new products. Whatever Intel does probably won't kill the existing products. With that in mind, I think the move can be only beneficial for Intel's competitors given they're already in an uphill battle needing differentiators. What you think on that angle?
I would argue that in some respects they would have //less// of a strategic advantage, but that consumers would see the most benefit from everyone getting along and competing on merit on an open playing field. Even in the latter case AMD would still have /an/ advantage as they would at least still be in the primary game, and would also be restricting Intel to targeting that same hardware interface.
