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AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency

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Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency

#21

Post by Salgat »

cletus wrote: post #12

Put another way: if AMD (and especially Intel) don't do something about this they're going to get completely eaten alive by ARM. The amount of processing power available in a modern smartphone is truly mind-boggling. I'd love to see a chart showing the chip cost and energy cost of the power on an M1 chip in each previou syear. I would guess that 30+ years ago you'd be in the millions of dollars and watts of power but…

If you take a Zen 3 running at optimal clocks for efficiency (such as the 5800U) the difference between its computing performance per watt is competitive with the M1 if you account for the difference in node size (which TSMC claims gives 30% less power consumption at the same performance). As the article points out, the real efficiency gains will be domain specific changes such as shifting to 8 bit for more calculations.

Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency

#22

Post by CuriousCosmic »

unixhero wrote: post #3
Kon-Peki wrote: post #2

Energy efficiency and improved packaging are things I can readily agree with. The last thing though - “hybrid algorithms leveraging AI efficiency” sounds an awful lot like a buzzword sales pitch. This article reminds of this other one [1] posted about 1 month ago. It’s an interview with some guys that just got done building an exascale supercomputer, in which it was originally estimated to need 1000 megawatts but ult…

What are hybrid algorithms supposed to be anyways? Half algorithm & half dictionary? Half algorithm & half user manual? Half algorithm & half class?

Generally the concept of hybrid algorithms is:

- Half "hard maths" algorithms. i.e. cominbatorics, geometry, etc.

- Half "fuzzy maths" algorithms. i.e. heuristics, approximation, machine learning.

The idea being to solve the parts that can be easily solved by hard maths with those hard maths so that you can reduce the problem space for when you apply the fuzzy maths to solve the rest of the problem.

In other words, it's taking the problem, breaking out discrete pieces to solve with well established hard maths, using heuristics & numerical solutions to tackle the remaining known problems without "easy" analytical solutions, then using ML to fill in all the gaps and glue the whole thing together.

Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency

#23

Post by CalChris »

beebmam wrote: post #16
cletus wrote: post #12

Put another way: if AMD (and especially Intel) don't do something about this they're going to get completely eaten alive by ARM. The amount of processing power available in a modern smartphone is truly mind-boggling. I'd love to see a chart showing the chip cost and energy cost of the power on an M1 chip in each previou syear. I would guess that 30+ years ago you'd be in the millions of dollars and watts of power but…

In my own experience, the supposed ARM chip superiority claims are almost entirely marketing. I get significantly better performance (15-50%) from nearly all of my CPU workloads on modern Intel/AMD hardware vs the ARM Apple devices.

The article is about energy efficiency. Do you get 15-50% better performance per watt from nearly all of your workloads?

Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency

#24

Post by evancox100 »

Kon-Peki wrote: post #2

Energy efficiency and improved packaging are things I can readily agree with. The last thing though - “hybrid algorithms leveraging AI efficiency” sounds an awful lot like a buzzword sales pitch. This article reminds of this other one [1] posted about 1 month ago. It’s an interview with some guys that just got done building an exascale supercomputer, in which it was originally estimated to need 1000 megawatts but ult…

Re. The “hybrid algorithms” bit: I was at this talk. The example she gave was a physics sim like CFD, iterating between a fast/approximate ML-based algorithm and slow/accurate classical physics algorithm, with the output of each feeding in as the starting point of the next round. But this was just an example, clearly there are lots of area you could apply a similar approach.

Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency

#25

Post by cookiengineer »

cletus wrote: post #12

Put another way: if AMD (and especially Intel) don't do something about this they're going to get completely eaten alive by ARM. The amount of processing power available in a modern smartphone is truly mind-boggling. I'd love to see a chart showing the chip cost and energy cost of the power on an M1 chip in each previou syear. I would guess that 30+ years ago you'd be in the millions of dollars and watts of power but…

Honestly I don't understand why there's not something like a 256 core ARM laptop with 4TB RAM.

The benefit of ARM is scale of multitasking due to not requiring the same kind of lock states that Intel's architecture requires, and can additionally scale much better than only one physical+virtual core pair.

I guess the only thing that's holding back ARM is Microsoft, as laptops are expected to run an desktop OS that people are comfortable with. Windows RT wasn't really a serious desktop OS and rather a joke made only for some IoT enterprises instead of end-users.

I wish there was more serious hardware than the standard broadcom or MediaTek chips, I'd definitely want some of that...be it as a mini ATX desktop/server format (e.g. as a competitor to Intel NUC or Mac Mini) or as a laptop.

With the ongoing energy crisis something like solar powered servers would be so much more feasible than with x86 hardware.

Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency

#26

Post by greenknight »

georgeburdell wrote: post #10

Su is just talking up AMD’s strengths, many of which come care of TSMC and for which the original R&D was largely funded by Apple. She is not wrong, and AMD has certainly made large gains in HPC recently, but AMD does not monopolize all possible paths to success here.

I agree that a lot of AMDs wins have come from TSMC. That being said, I feel like the biggest win for them over the past 5 years (well 6 now)... was moving to chiplets, which all started at Global Foundaries. Having the same chip, from the lowest end consumer chip all the way to the top end server chip means that they can spend less time and cost developing up processors for every segment, and they just bin the chips in terms of quality.

Intel is starting to make changes towards this structure but they haven't fully committed to it yet.

Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency

#27

Post by BlueTankEngine »

cletus wrote: post #12

Put another way: if AMD (and especially Intel) don't do something about this they're going to get completely eaten alive by ARM. The amount of processing power available in a modern smartphone is truly mind-boggling. I'd love to see a chart showing the chip cost and energy cost of the power on an M1 chip in each previou syear. I would guess that 30+ years ago you'd be in the millions of dollars and watts of power but…

In my experience talking to semiconductors folks, ARM is just not a concern anymore. The future is RISC-V, and ARM is already being seen as legacy tech. ARM's progress in the server space has stalled, the ARM Windows ecosystem is dead, Android has laid the groundwork for a move to RISC-V, and ARM has never and will never touch the desktop market.

Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency

#28

Post by greenknight »

evancox100 wrote: post #24
Kon-Peki wrote: post #2

Energy efficiency and improved packaging are things I can readily agree with. The last thing though - “hybrid algorithms leveraging AI efficiency” sounds an awful lot like a buzzword sales pitch. This article reminds of this other one [1] posted about 1 month ago. It’s an interview with some guys that just got done building an exascale supercomputer, in which it was originally estimated to need 1000 megawatts but ult…

Re. The “hybrid algorithms” bit: I was at this talk. The example she gave was a physics sim like CFD, iterating between a fast/approximate ML-based algorithm and slow/accurate classical physics algorithm, with the output of each feeding in as the starting point of the next round. But this was just an example, clearly there are lots of area you could apply a similar approach.

I think its also leaning into their new product MI300, which has 24 cpu cores with 8 compute dies. Both CPU and GPU (and memory) on a single package.

Conventional processing + AI together. Hybrid approaches.

Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency

#29

Post by neltnerb »

cletus wrote: post #12

Put another way: if AMD (and especially Intel) don't do something about this they're going to get completely eaten alive by ARM. The amount of processing power available in a modern smartphone is truly mind-boggling. I'd love to see a chart showing the chip cost and energy cost of the power on an M1 chip in each previou syear. I would guess that 30+ years ago you'd be in the millions of dollars and watts of power but…

As an experiment quite a few years ago I got a laptop with a special version of the Intel CPU that was not as fast but much more power efficient.

ASUS UL30A-X5

Really an excellent computer, ran linux great (games didn't really exist yet though), and with tuning was coming in under 10W if the display brightness was turned down. First time I was able to get through flights without the system running dead.

I think in this case what's going on is that temperature rises increase resistance in a chip and therefore cause lower efficiency. If you can keep it cool, you can keep it more efficient. The move seems like a necessary one, a computer as powerful as that UL30A is probably inside the phone if you turn off the radio and display, that thing still had a giant battery and only lasted 10-12 hours.

I've seen AMD do some pretty impressive things, I wouldn't count them out. They're at least willing to attempt to compete on price.

Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency

#30

Post by pnpnp »

BlueTankEngine wrote: post #27
cletus wrote: post #12

Put another way: if AMD (and especially Intel) don't do something about this they're going to get completely eaten alive by ARM. The amount of processing power available in a modern smartphone is truly mind-boggling. I'd love to see a chart showing the chip cost and energy cost of the power on an M1 chip in each previou syear. I would guess that 30+ years ago you'd be in the millions of dollars and watts of power but…

In my experience talking to semiconductors folks, ARM is just not a concern anymore. The future is RISC-V, and ARM is already being seen as legacy tech. ARM's progress in the server space has stalled, the ARM Windows ecosystem is dead, Android has laid the groundwork for a move to RISC-V, and ARM has never and will never touch the desktop market.

> ARM has never and will never touch the desktop market

That’s a bold statement as I type all day on an M1 Mac. My FT100 company just made the leap to them as dev machines.

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