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needusername | 3 years ago

It’s my general impression that software is not one of Intel´s strengths.

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spicymaki|3 years ago

That's really ignorant given that Intel has thousands of software engineers supporting hundreds of opensource projects you use daily. Including Linux where Intel has consistently a top ten contributor for years.

gumby|3 years ago

A little concerning given how much software there is inside their CPUs (not just microcode but the management processor et al).

drfuchs|3 years ago

And how much software is used to generate what’s inside them; search for “Pentium FDIV bug”.

dathinab|3 years ago

I'm not sure about this.

This mistake could easily have been in other vendors Linux GPU drivers, they in the end don't have nearly the same priority (and in turn resources) as the Windows GPU drivers. And it's a very easy mistake to find. And I don't know if anyone even cared about ray tracing with Intel integrated graphics on Linux desktops (and in turn no one profiled it deeply). I mean ray tracing is generally something you will do much less likely on a integrated GPU. And it's a really easy mistake to make.

And sure I'm pretty sure their software department(s?) have a lot of potential for improvement, I mean they probably have been hampered by the same internal structures which lead to Intel faceplanting somewhat hard recently.

actually_a_dog|3 years ago

Even so, the very first thing anybody learns about GPU programming is to use the VRAM on the card whenever possible, and to minimize transfers back and forth between VRAM and main memory. This is a super basic mistake that should have been caught by some kind of test suite, at least.