[News/Rumor] Intel Could License AMD Radeon iGPU Tech for Future Processors

[drmrlordx]

AMD and IBM have had licensing agreements in the past.

Well not only that, but early on in the Zen rumour mill, at least a few people were suggesting that Zen would be taking cues from the UltraSPARC playbook. At least one rumour-monger suggested it would be hybrid CMT/SMT, but that hasn't come to pass (thank goodness).

GlobalFoundries already controls all the fabs that produce POWER chips, and if you look at the SMT scaling on POWER8 and POWER9, they get a lot done that way.

Intel is not the only SMT game in town.

Based on what has been revealed about Summit Ridge, we can see that it's a pretty wide core, so there's fertile ground here to permit a lot of computational resources to go to the second thread per core, depending on the circumstances.

That's an interesting theory. True, Intel did definitely enjoy in some profit taking these past few years. But I'm not sure I'm quite ready to say Nvidia is in a position to take away the CPU market from them just yet.

Deep learning is definitely an interesting market segment - one that is arguably more efficient on a GPU than a CPU. Having said that, I don't see any route where Nvidia can survive without a CPU helping to run the OS.

I'm not sure how much the ARM-based Win10 is really going to lead to market displacement. The continued maturation of Linux on ARM is probably going to mean more in the server room.

And it's going to take more than a consumer build of Win10 for ARM to cause any major change in that space (not to speak of the drivers that would have to be ported over).

That being said, Nvidia has already paired their products - and their NVLink - with IBM's POWER platform. POWER + OpenPOWER is expected to be NVidia's platform of choice.