11–20 of 323 posts
The picture you're painting is far too simple. There are many metrics that play a role for different applications. A modern Nvidia card is magnitudes faster than any CPU and the M1 GPUs. A Nvidia A100 card has HBM memory with ~2TB/s bandwidth. On the other hand, there are areas where a ~5GHz intel CPU is competitive, or even older server chips with AVX can compete. So let's see what happens when Intel and AMD step to…
> magnitudes faster No...
For many years, AMD GPUs were cheaper and equally or more performant than NVIDIA GPUs. Did that stop NVIDIAs lead in AI training? No, software support is the key component. It's the same with Apple's M1. I don't know anyone who is using it. People need obscure x64 instructions and CUDA. And that means you buy AMD CPU + NVIDIA GPU as the cheapest high-performance combination. Also, I expect that the 5nm process is res…
"For many years, AMD GPUs were cheaper and equally or more performant than NVIDIA GPUs. Did that stop NVIDIAs lead in AI training? No, software support is the key component. It's the same with Apple's M1. I don't know anyone who is using it. People need obscure x64 instructions and CUDA. And that means you buy AMD CPU + NVIDIA GPU as the cheapest high-performance combination." Riiight, but, OP isn't necessarily talki…
Even if the comparisons to the RTX3090 were legit, all that power is still 'trapped' inside a Mac.
As the main reasons to have that level of power are gaming and VR, you'd be probably be better off having a bit less performance but on a Windows machine.
The picture you're painting is far too simple. There are many metrics that play a role for different applications. A modern Nvidia card is magnitudes faster than any CPU and the M1 GPUs. A Nvidia A100 card has HBM memory with ~2TB/s bandwidth. On the other hand, there are areas where a ~5GHz intel CPU is competitive, or even older server chips with AVX can compete. So let's see what happens when Intel and AMD step to…
> magnitudes faster No...
Intel Rocket Lake FP64: 32 Flops per core per cycle at 8 cores and 5GHz
Nvidia Ampere: 1/32 Flops per core per cycle at 2048 cores and ~2 GHz
Even though there are more architectural differences, there IS a difference in orders of magnitude ... for the things that you can do on a GPU (SIMD).
The picture you're painting is far too simple. There are many metrics that play a role for different applications. A modern Nvidia card is magnitudes faster than any CPU and the M1 GPUs. A Nvidia A100 card has HBM memory with ~2TB/s bandwidth. On the other hand, there are areas where a ~5GHz intel CPU is competitive, or even older server chips with AVX can compete. So let's see what happens when Intel and AMD step to…
> So let's see what happens when Intel and AMD step to smaller processes and switch to much faster memory (ddr5 as apple has done). Maybe the gap is large in energy consumption, but not in total performance. There are 18 months worth of benchmarks from the Apple M1 that show that the gap really is large in total performance, and the "standard" M1 doesn't use DDR5, it uses the same DDR4 memory everything else uses. Th…
For obvious reasons, desktop CPUs cannot use LPDDR RAM, because you can't put it in DIMM form.
The picture you're painting is far too simple. There are many metrics that play a role for different applications. A modern Nvidia card is magnitudes faster than any CPU and the M1 GPUs. A Nvidia A100 card has HBM memory with ~2TB/s bandwidth. On the other hand, there are areas where a ~5GHz intel CPU is competitive, or even older server chips with AVX can compete. So let's see what happens when Intel and AMD step to…
> So let's see what happens when Intel and AMD step to smaller processes and switch to much faster memory (ddr5 as apple has done). Maybe the gap is large in energy consumption, but not in total performance. There are 18 months worth of benchmarks from the Apple M1 that show that the gap really is large in total performance, and the "standard" M1 doesn't use DDR5, it uses the same DDR4 memory everything else uses. Th…
The gap between M1/M2 is pronounced in laptops but you can get faster (and hotter) multicore CPUs. Single-core is also not the same gap that it was because Rocket Lake has caught up and Zen3 had less of a gap to begin with.
Apple utterly dominates the mobile phone CPU landscape, and it’s hard to see that changing. The reason is that they capture a huge slice of the profits in mobile phones. Something like 90%. For a while they capture over 100% of profits, because so many of their competitors were operating at a loss. This enables them to make investments their competitors can’t. Also because their competitors use commodity chips developed by Cisco and Samsung none of the Android vendors can use those chips to differentiate their products, which means even for flagship phones the CPU isn’t a unique selling points, so they can’t justify buying super premium chips. Without the guaranteed sales, the chip vendors can’t justify investing in making super premium chips. They’ve been stuck in this rut for almost a decade now, and still not found a way out. Success breeds investment, but without investment they can’t achieve success. It’s a negative feedback loop, compounded by a prisoner’s dilemma.
With desktop and server chips these factors don’t apply. Apple will never dominate the desktop and server CPU market because they’ve positioned themselves as a niche premium brand. They don’t even make servers, and the desktops they do make are ridiculously high end. They can’t go down market without eviscerating their margins. There’s still huge amounts of money to be made in those sectors, so vendors like Intel and AMD can afford to put in massive investment in new designs. They may be behind now, in some ways, but I don’t see any barriers to them competing in the near to long term.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"For many years, AMD GPUs were cheaper and equally or more performant than NVIDIA GPUs. Did that stop NVIDIAs lead in AI training? No, software support is the key component. It's the same with Apple's M1. I don't know anyone who is using it. People need obscure x64 instructions and CUDA. And that means you buy AMD CPU + NVIDIA GPU as the cheapest high-performance combination." Riiight, but, OP isn't necessarily talki…
Well if you don't need the high performance, then I'd expect people will go for a cheap CPU, meaning no M1 Ultra.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So let's see what happens when Intel and AMD step to smaller processes and switch to much faster memory (ddr5 as apple has done). Maybe the gap is large in energy consumption, but not in total performance. There are 18 months worth of benchmarks from the Apple M1 that show that the gap really is large in total performance, and the "standard" M1 doesn't use DDR5, it uses the same DDR4 memory everything else uses. Th…
Yeah I was imprecise there, the M2 is using LPDDR5. So I'm expecting Apple to stick with that for future macs of this generation. The gap between M1/M2 is pronounced in laptops but you can get faster (and hotter) multicore CPUs. Single-core is also not the same gap that it was because Rocket Lake has caught up and Zen3 had less of a gap to begin with.