1. Intel still has better Silicon process. NVidia depends on TSMC on
manufacturing.
2. Intel missed and behind Nvidia AI several years. Right now is doing catch
up.
* buy Nervana @about 400m.
* buy Movidius.
* change Xeon Phi roadmap to include deep learning specific instruction.
* buy Altera @16.7B, trying co-processing concept.
* All the other AI investment through intel capital.
3. Nvidia is way ahead of Intel on AI eco-system. Cuda, cudnn lib on lower
level. All exiting AI software library, theano, torch, tensorflow, caffe,
mxnet..., application layer like language translation, image reorganization
and tagging, self driving car/truck, automatic drone (Jetson), robot ....
Very good relationship with internet company like Baidu, Alibaba, AWS,
Google...
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My personal think on critical point for Intel/Nvidia.
* Whether Intel can release Xeon Phi on 2017 as Intel promised. And in
hardware raw performance level, and in price level can compete with Nvidia
GPU offering.
* Whether Intel can and has the deep pocket to move the huge software
community to port existing AI software to Intel platform.
* Whether Nvidia can release its Volta platform on 2017 to widen its gap
with Intel.
* Nvidia needs to solve the PCIE bottom neck to scale up its GPU offering.
There is a hugh conflict of interests here. NVLINK vs new CPU co-processing
interface. Intel is not supporting NVLINK, IBM power 9 will be released in
2017, and support both.... Nvidia cannot count on Power 9, since more than
90% data center market is still Intel.
* Whether the whole AI is a hype bubble, or it is something real this time.
* 2017 will be a critical year.