Why wouldn't they do this? Intel is a fab company, architecture second. The main reason they bought Altera was EMIB. EMIB frees them from spending huge amounts of resources on cutting edge Architecture and Microarch, freeing them to focus on pushing the boundaries on their foundries (which are falling behind). Using EMIB enables Intel to incorporate whatever IP will sell in the market, theirs or somebody else's. The alternative for Intel is to drop their foundries and use GF or TSMC (don't see that happening). I can see Intel using Arm, AMD, Nvidia (if they'll let them, Nvidia seems to be pushing the discrete path hard...that'll fail given high latency of PCIe). Arm has already arrived in the HPC market, SC in Denver's unofficial theme was Arm (both Cavium and Qualcomm). There are even awesome desktop machines now (https://www.avantek.co.uk/store/avantek-32-core-cavium-thund...). HPC is the vanguard for server, already Arm compatible chips are providing perf greater than Skylake Intel server parts at a cheaper price point...why pay for Intel when you can have a Qualcomm Centriq or Cavium Thunder X2? IBM Power is yet another option, but hugely expensive. Definitely useful for GPGPU accelerated applications, but like Intel, IBM is going to be given a run for its money by AMD in sheer number of PCIe lanes.
I don't agree. SC's unofficial theme was AI/ML. Every single vendor and HPC center were talking AI, not all were talking ARM. The student cluster was dominated by GPUs, not a single one ran ARM.
We don’t really care about ML. If just so happens ML and AI are easy compared to what HPC normally deals with. ML is just statistics and learning functions which is in turn really dominated by the linear algebra. It’s hard to hear that when you like buzzwords, but it’s just algebra and pretty simple at that. That’s why things like grad student built systolic array processors (popular in he 60’s) dominate here. It’s also why SC is showing lots of ML...because the community knows how to do that better than anybody.
