The next challenge? You mean the one that started 15 years ago?
AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency
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Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency
#32AMD has done extremely well with multi-chip(let) modules. Zen cores & zen clusters (on Core Chiplet Die, CCD) are wonderfully small, and a huge amount of the regular stuff cores do is relegated to the IO Die (CCX), which is not as cutting edge.
But wow there's a bunch of power burned on interconnect between CCDs and CCX. And now AMD's new southbridge, Promontory 21, made by Asmedia, is another pretty significant power hog, and the flagship X670 tier is powered by two of these.
There's absolutely a challenge to bring power down. I'm incredibly super impressed by AMD's showing, & they've done very well. But they've been making trade-offs that have pretty large net impacts, especially if we measure at idle power.
Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
My company has entire teams and regions that do NOT buy PCs and only Mac laptop for employees. Started with the M-series.
Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency
#34Put 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…
> Put another way: if AMD (and especially Intel) don't do something about this they're going to get completely eaten alive by ARM.
AMD’s latest parts are actually quite close to M1/M2 in computing efficiency when clocked down to more conservative power targets.
They crank the power consumption of their desktop CPUs deep into the diminishing returns region because benchmarks sell desktop chips. You can go into the BIOS and set a considerably lower TDP limit and barely lose much performance.
Where they struggle is in idle power. The chiplet design has been great for yields but it consumes a lot of baseline power at idle. M1/M2 have extremely efficient integration and can idle at negligible power levels, which is great for laptop battery life.
Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency
#35The next challenge? You mean the one that started 15 years ago?
Right? Like, isn't that one of the reasons people have been raving about Apple's MX chips? Because they're very energy efficient and have good performance characteristics?
Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency
#36AMD is having some challenges at the moment.
In particular, the RDNA3 graphics card line launch has been a dud.
The Nvidia 4090 turned out to be far ahead of the AMD 7900XTX.
Then there turned out to be an overheating issue on the AMD cards.
And now it just looks like both Nvidia and AMD are price gouging GPU buyers instead of competing with each other. They are deliberately keeping prices high and creating artificial shortages of GPUs, because that's what kept prices high during covid/crypto mining.
I used to be really cheering for AMD as the underdog, but I guess its true that none of these companies are your friend, they're just there to shake you down.
AMD had a chance to really pull ahead of Nvidia by being "the good guy" and actually offering end users great value for money, but instead they've chosen to emulate Nvidia.
Substantial customer good will has been lost by AMD.
Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency
#37When I was an undergrad, one of my professors was exploring “approximate” computation (forget what it was technically called). The gist was that you build mathematical circuitry that approximates an answer instead of giving you a concrete answer (kinda like floating point but also applied to Boolean algebra, integer math etc). The reasoning was that the approximation could let you reduce the power. I wonder where tha…
It's used inside Google's TPUs[0]. Useless for regular logic programming (You've wouldn't want a nuclear power plant, or your payment processor to approximately work), but has found a use case in scaling ML pipelines where the accuracy of individual values is less important compared to billions of parameters in aggregate.
Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency
#38Put 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 calculati…
How would x86-64 be as efficient with the same transistor & power budget when they have to run an extra decoder and ring within that budget? Seems physically impossible.
Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency
#39We have know this for a long time. This is one of the benefits of ARM64 CPUs as they require much less energy. What's new about his point?
They definitely don't require "much" less energy. Zen 4 is very close to the M series in perf per watt
Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency
#40Put 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 peo…
> Honestly I don't understand why there's not something like a 256 core ARM laptop
The high power ARM cores aren’t that small. If you took the M2 and scaled it up to 256 cores, it would be almost 7 square inches. You can’t just scale a chip like that, though, so the interconnects would consume a huge amount of space as well. It would also consume over 1000W.
The latest ARM chips are great, but some times I think the perception has shifted too far past the reality.