Intel Interested in Licensing from AMD?

[cdawall]

They once talked about this at PCPerspective. When Intel has a chip to produce, they sit down with engineers at CPU design and fab factory and they talk things out and adjust stuff to produce best chips possible. In AMD's case, they design the chip based on what they know about the given process, hand the design over to Global Foundries and they make the stuff. It's obvious this can't ever produce same quality. It's a shame AMD doesn't have the capabilities it once had if they really were as good as you say (I was out of loop with Phenoms as I had cheapo E series Intels back then). Having Polaris and Ryzen on good fab would make a massive difference for sure and with potentially higher clocks, they'd be devastating for Intel.

I absolutely agree.

 

[wiyosaya]

^^This is how we should all feel. We see Ryzen launch to be (relatively) competitive, and shortly thereafter we have an announcement that INTC has chosen to bring out an i9 series. This fact alone tells me that Bill's statement hits the nail on the head. INTC had no reason to spend the resources to bring bigger chips out, when they were the king of the hill anyway, with no competition anywhere to be seen.

Competition is key to good, cost efficient products.

JAT

Perhaps this is what you are saying, but IMO, the i9 is a marketing rebrand because of the new competition from AMD. Intel has to realize that their high-priced parts are being outclassed by AMD at much lower price points, and right now, has nothing to compete except to try and make up for their currently poor position with marketing. There is certainly no guarantee, but it will be interesting to see how the Threadripper parts bench against the similar Intel parts. Intel may have more to worry about in the short-term, and as such, this licensing agreement could very well be true.

 

[JATownes]

The entire article was apparently all smoke and mirrors to drive the stock up a little before the analyst conference started. No confirmation of even the graphics licensing deal. If the graphics deal goes through, it could really help AMD's bottom line, and possibly even push them back into a profitable company again, for the first time in ages.

I'm keeping the (little bit) of stock I own, just because I enjoy checking it every now and then, but if I had any big money in it, I might bounce out. I think AMD might be on the right track though, from a profitability perspective. They appear to be targeting the professional and enterprise markets with vigor, and are focusing on a single strategy across the board: Scalability

The Infinity Fabric is very intriguing to me, and I find it a very interesting concept to enable you to take a single design and scale it as large as needed. For gaming, the latency is an issue...but for professional and enterprise applications, it is not. If the evolution of Infinity Fabric leads to the ability to do the same with GPU dies, causing the PC to see them as a "single device" with a large memory pool, using the cache controller to handle distribution, it will be a game-changer. The days of large dies will be over. I personally think that Infinity Fabric is the real "secret sauce" in this generation from AMD. I also think this is the cause of the delay in Vega. Maybe "enthusiast" Vega on the extreme end was supposed to be a dual GPU setup using Infinity Fabric that would be able to easily trade punches with 1080ti/TitanXp...and then the latency was WAY too high to work right, and that is what they are trying to sort out.

But then again, what the hell do I know, I do real estate law for a living. Feel free to tell me how idiotic all this sounds and why I am completely wrong.

JAT

 

[FordGT90Concept]

Remember that GPUs are a small slice of AMD's business. Ryzen is going to have a much bigger impact on AMD's bottom line than Radeon ever will.

Intel changing to AMD GPUs wouldn't help AMD much but it would hurt NVIDIA hugely (very lucrative deal for them).

I could see AMD building GPUs on Intel's fabs as a trade for Intel being able to integrate AMD GPUs. It's relatively small volume for Intel, Intel staves off the FTC, Intel gets GPU licensing for relatively cheap, and Intel fabs help make AMD GPUs competitive against NVIDIA again (whom Intel built up through the licensing).

 

[RejZoR]

If AMD can get Intel fabs to make GPU's for them (it's very unlikely they'll make CPU's as that would directly eat into Intel's market) that would be awesome and a massive potential to kick NVIDIA in the butt. How likely it is, I have no clue, but it would be nice. Or if they step in with Samsung, they have good fabs as well. GloFo has been causing AMD problems ever since they split up and that's hurting their business. I wonder what deals they have running behind the scenes for AMD to keep insisting on GloFo. Must be something going on because no good businessman would keep on doing this with such bad track record.

I mean, AMD makes some good chip designs, it's the fabrication in the end that seems to be screwing them up again and again. Firstly because of being less efficient and secondly the production capacities.

 

[FordGT90Concept]

Intel would definitely prefer not to MCM AMD chips, they'd prefer to integrate it into the architecture like Intel is doing now with Intel HD and AMD has been doing with their APUs. Intel has had to pay NVIDIA an arm and a leg because their were licensing the patents, not the actual chips. My guess is NVIDIA wouldn't give them access to the actual chips and back when that deal was hammered out, AMD was too much of a threat to Intel to be approachable. So Intel was forcibly locked into a bad deal where they'd have to have their own R&D teams to design sub-par chips because no one else would give them access.

Fast forward to today, NVIDIA is greedy and Intel is getting pinched by ARM. They don't want to keep feeding NVIDIA money but they still need GPUs to make their chips competitive. AMD could license the patents to Intel but because NVIDIA has been successfully gouging Intel, AMD would want the same price. That's a nonstarter for Intel. AMD, on the other hand, could develop their Navi architecture for Intel's 10nm fabs, Intel could build them directly into their processors while AMD orders Navi chips from Intel fabs instead of Global Foundries and TSMC. Intel gets much better APUs than they've ever been able to offer before and AMD gains massive leverage against NVIDIA (which Intel no doubt sees the situation evolving is concerned about AMD's shrinking market share).

If you pull back the sheets, you'll discover Microsoft benefits from this arrangement too in terms of leveraging DirectPhysics against PhysX. If Intel HD market share turns into AMD marketshare, suddenly PhysX hardware is a minority of a minority. This could have easily played into Intel's decision to sell Havok to Microsoft.


GloFo was causing problems before the divorce. That's why AMD elected to sell it off to raise capital. Fabs are really high risk to own.

AMD has to buy a minimum of a percentage of their chips from GloFo. It was a condition for the sale to go through. I don't know if it had a sunset provision.

 

[FreedomEclipse]

AMD should be all like "license deez nutz..."

 

[Fluffmeister]

This makes sense for Intel, as AMD are probably paying them.

 

[RejZoR]

This makes sense for Intel, as AMD are probably paying them.

Not really. But AMD has tons of experience from Radeons and Intel has the better fabs. So, licensing a design and building it themselves is the most economic way.

 

[eidairaman1]

Supposedly not true

https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/intel-denies-graphics-ip-licensing-deal-with-amd.233444/

The first article that was brought up by tpu before this one sounded like clickbait/fud if you ask me.

 

[JATownes]

Supposedly not true

https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/intel-denies-graphics-ip-licensing-deal-with-amd.233444/

The first article that was brought up by tpu before this one sounded like clickbait/fud if you ask me.

The entire article was apparently all smoke and mirrors to drive the stock up a little before the analyst conference started. No confirmation of even the graphics licensing deal. If the graphics deal goes through, it could really help AMD's bottom line, and possibly even push them back into a profitable company again, for the first time in ages.

Yeah, it appears to have all been smoke and mirrors to drive the stock price up ahead of the Analyst conference. It worked, but the next day AMD gave up all those gains.

 

[eidairaman1]

I don't like the fact tpu withheld info.

 

[thesmokingman]

Yea, like it's the first time companies have denied rumors.

 

[Frag_Maniac]

I know they aren't technically IN the APU market, but they have the capability to build such a chip. The key words you apparently glossed over were "being able to". Do you guys even know what Xavier is? It's a processor with 512 GPU cores and 8 CPU cores. It also runs on very low wattage.

https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2016/09/28/xavier/

Again, I'm not saying it WILL happen, just that they could if they wanted to. The gaming industry may be the largest grossing of all entertainment industries, but the transpo industry is a $10,000,000,000 one. That kinda makes their decision easy.

 

[thesmokingman]

http://www.tweaktown.com/news/57931/intel-cpu-amd-gpu-spotted-licensing-confirmed/index.html

This is interesting. An Intel 2T cpu showed up on Sandra with AMD gpu codename. What??

 

[TheoneandonlyMrK]

http://www.tweaktown.com/news/57931/intel-cpu-amd-gpu-spotted-licensing-confirmed/index.html

This is interesting. An Intel 2T cpu showed up on Sandra with AMD gpu codename. What??

So Kaby lake G rumours could be right, said to be a part for Apple but may see some hybrid and 3 in 1 Windows action too.

 

[thesmokingman]

So Kaby lake G rumours could be right, said to be a part for Apple but may see some hybrid and 3 in 1 Windows action too.

It's unpossible!

 

[TheoneandonlyMrK]

It's unpossible!

Because ???? And what's unpossible anyway apple use Amd a lot for gpus and intel a lot for cpus , they now compete with surface books etc that will eclipse an apple product in power and efficiency due to requireing a discrete gpu since intels are shit, they need an SOC with good gfx and good enough cpu performance ,not chips CHIP. , So where they going to get it from......?

Arm , nvidia , intel ish , imagination tech ,Amd thats pretty much it for gpu tech matrox licence amd and vias s# is shitter.

@FordGT90Concept intel licenced nvidia because they had to due to a patent infringement case nvidia raised against intel, i think intel paid over 1.5 billion but i could have that figure wrong and that licence though possibly still valid wasn't renewed when it ran out

 

[Frick]

I know they aren't technically IN the APU market, but they have the capability to build such a chip. The key words you apparently glossed over were "being able to". Do you guys even know what Xavier is? It's a processor with 512 GPU cores and 8 CPU cores. It also runs on very low wattage.

https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2016/09/28/xavier/

Again, I'm not saying it WILL happen, just that they could if they wanted to. The gaming industry may be the largest grossing of all entertainment industries, but the transpo industry is a $10,000,000,000 one. That kinda makes their decision easy.

8 ARM cores. Xavier is really cool (as is so much in transportation, as you say, and heck industry at large is really thick with cool tech right now), but x86 is at this point kind of important. They could make a killer console chip though, or a killer gaming tablet chip, but as you say they hunt for bigger game. Having a foot in the door of AI and self driving cars is soooooo big.

 

[JATownes]

http://www.tweaktown.com/news/57931/intel-cpu-amd-gpu-spotted-licensing-confirmed/index.html

This is interesting. An Intel 2T cpu showed up on Sandra with AMD gpu codename. What??

This is inaccurate. The way Sandra reflects what is being used creates this issue. This is a Intel HD630 with 184SP/23C w/6.4GB Vram running at 1Ghz, being used with a GCN GPU using 1536SP/24CU with 4GB Vram running at 800Mhz.

IDK what dGPU is being used, but I am assuming it is some custom stuff developed for Apple, but this is NOT confirmation of the licensing deal (as much as I wish it were).

JAT

 

[TheoneandonlyMrK]

This is inaccurate. The way Sandra reflects what is being used creates this issue. This is a Intel HD630 with 184SP/23C w/6.4GB Vram running at 1Ghz, being used with a GCN GPU using 1536SP/24CU with 4GB Vram running at 800Mhz.

IDK what dGPU is being used, but I am assuming it is some custom stuff developed for Apple, but this is NOT confirmation of the licensing deal (as much as I wish it were).

JAT

You start like you Know and finish off assuming, so i take it you don't know and this is your opinion.

 

[dorsetknob]

This is inaccurate.

Tweektown

 

[R-T-B]

You start like you Know and finish off assuming, so i take it you don't know and this is your opinion.

It's really not his opinion that that's not proof. It isn't.

 

[TheoneandonlyMrK]

It's really not his opinion that that's not proof. It isn't.

I agre but his empty assertions are just that possibly, ie it also could be true.

 

[JATownes]

I agre but his empty assertions are just that possibly, ie it also could be true.

The Math:

AMD GCN GPU has 16KB L2, and Intel iGPU has 512KB L2, which adds up to 528KB L2.

Intel HD 630 Graphic has 184SP/23C, shows 6.4GB VRAM, running at 1GHz

Just pair it with a GCN GPU with 1536SP/24CU and 4GB VRAM, running at 800MHz

Then we got 1536+184=1720SP, 23+24=47C, this is just how GPGPU Benchmark from Sisoft works, if you combine an iGPU with AMD GCN Graphic, you can get very similiar result.

Source material:

https://translate.google.com/translate?u=http://www.mykancolle.com/?post=2154&sl=zh&tl=en

Edit for clarity: I can agree it is somewhat of a guess (as to what the AMD dGPU is), but from the data provided, it is pretty evident that it is an Intel HD630 iGPU with an unknown AMD dGPU and NOT an Intel CPU with a GCN iGPU. I should have been more clear in my original post.

Thank you for your time.

JAT