Stefan Mileschin

Without it, their life has no meaning

Raja Koduri, Intel’s systems and graphics architect and senior VP told the assembled throngs at Chipzilla’s 2019 Investor Meeting claimed that his former employer AMD and rival Nvidia need Intel to give their life meaning.

For those who came in late, Koduri was a big noise at AMD so he knows what happened over there, who has the keys to the drinks cabinet and where the bodies are buried.

He said that AMD has two architectures, but “no memory or interconnect strategy that I know of, and the size of the developer ecosystem is tiny. In fact, without Intel’s invaluable software contributions they have no software ecosystem that’s meaningful.”

It seems that Koduri has forgotten all about Infinity Fabric interconnect, and the AI-centric Radeon Instinct line of GPUs that he helped start. It sometimes happens when you get older but this is the same bloke who once said Infinity Fabric “allows us to join different engines together on a die much easier than before. It enables some really low latency and high-bandwidth interconnects. This is important to tie together our different IPs together efficiently and quickly. If forms the basis of all of our future ASIC designs.”

He seemed also to have forgotten about AMD’s burgeoning data centre work where AMD is growing and Intel is barely even registering its existence on that front.

For all his selective memory Koduri did come up with something rather interesting about Intel’s software ecosystem. Despite almost fighting a war on four fronts, creating different architectures for its CPU, GPU, AI, and FPGA strategies, Intel is looking to create a unified API for developers to use when creating software for Intel products.

“We’ve got to have one developer experience. Today we sometimes make working with Intel like working with ten different companies,” Koduri said.

“We’re committed to open standards. Open for all, and Intel has the best open source practices in the industry. We are the number one contributor to the Linux kernel stack.”

https://fudzilla.com/news/48684-raja...dia-need-intel