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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

#81

Post by silisili »

BlueTankEngine wrote: post #60
pnpnp wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

[flagged]

> It proves my point beautifully when the only response to my comment

Your comment was beyond ignorant, and wrong. Most folks here are too smart, or busy, to reply to such nonsense. I am neither.

ARM is by far the most shipped and used arch every year. AMZ is even going in heavier on it. It's not legacy tech at all. So a person decided to show you how wrong you were, by listing what's probably the most impressive chip in all of our lifetimes, and it's guess what, ARM.

> Obviously I was referring to Linux/Windows workstations

The creator of Linux is using an ARM machine as a workstation today, AFAIK.

> if everyone was smart enough to pick up on that I wouldn't be paid as much as I am

If you're making more than a burger flipper at Wendy's, the world just isn't fair.

Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency

#82

Post by unnah »

cookiengineer wrote: post #25
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 peo…

The largest number of high-performance ARM cores you can get in a single socket is the Ampere Altra Max with 128 ARM Neoverse-N1 cores. At 2.6 GHz the processor consumes 190 W, and at 3.0 GHz up to 250 W. This is a server chip, not something you can put in a laptop.

Source: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16979/the-ampere-altra-max-re...

Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency

#83

Post by aidenn0 »

rektide wrote: post #32

AMD 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 powe…

I'm not up-to-speed on modern chipsets, but WTF is the Southbridge doing that it needs that much power? Is Thunderbolt going through it or something? I think of the Southbridge as a mostly ignorable part of the chipset (up until something goes horribly wrong).

Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency

#84

Post by Dylan16807 »

ororroro wrote: post #41
unixhero wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The article gives a concrete example in the same paragraph: "For example, AI algorithms could get close to a solution quickly and efficiently, and then the gap between the AI answer and the true solution can be filled by high-precision computing." Interestingly the example is backwards (statistical reasoning first, hard reasoning second) compared to traditional usage of "hybrid" in AI and control contexts.

That's not concrete at all.

Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency

#85

Post by bayindirh »

aidenn0 wrote: post #83
rektide wrote: post #32

AMD 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 powe…

I'm not up-to-speed on modern chipsets, but WTF is the Southbridge doing that it needs that much power? Is Thunderbolt going through it or something? I think of the Southbridge as a mostly ignorable part of the chipset (up until something goes horribly wrong).

Single word: PCIe.

Lots of fast PCIe lanes eat a lot of energy. A server motherboard contains tons of more PCI devices when compared to a consumer desktop systems, and they are not the cards, but the small units enabling the advanced features in servers, which are embedded on the motherboards themselves.

Thunderbolt is just a PCIe encapsulator of some sort, which can also do plethora of other things.

Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency

#86

Post by apatheticonion »

From the perspective of a consumer, my MacBook Pro is basically the perfect laptop, at least in theory.

I love the battery life and performance of the hardware, not to mention the unrivaled build quality of the MacBook (screen, trackpad, keyboard).

In practice, however, MacOS limits the capabilities of the hardware such that I cannot daily drive my MacBook Pro as a work or personal computer (poor containerization support, an annoying development toolchain, and no _real_ support for video games).

When Asahi Linux is mainlined, stable and features full hardware acceleration - the MacBook running Linux will likely be the best laptop money could buy. Until then, please AMD, Intel, release some mobile hardware that's at least as good. It sucks so bad seeing what is possible with today's technology but that being exclusive to a company unsuccessfully determined to ring fence you into their API ecosystem.

Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency

#87

Post by kanbara »

apatheticonion wrote: post #86

From the perspective of a consumer, my MacBook Pro is basically the perfect laptop, at least in theory. I love the battery life and performance of the hardware, not to mention the unrivaled build quality of the MacBook (screen, trackpad, keyboard). In practice, however, MacOS limits the capabilities of the hardware such that I cannot daily drive my MacBook Pro as a work or personal computer (poor containerization sup…

i've used a mac for development for various projects which have been globally impactful for over a decade. it's literally unix, man.

docker on mac can be improved, but if i'm developing for other architectures it's much easier to just test natively. toolchain for all the languages i use is exactly the same as any other *nix.

gaming i'll give you a point, but that's why i have windows dual boot at home. /shrug

Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency

#88

Post by mort96 »

BlueTankEngine wrote: post #60
pnpnp wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

[flagged]

The M1/M2 Macs run Linux pretty well. It's not perfect yet, but perfectly usable (especially as a desktop machine!) and support is improving every day.

I believe you're trying to move goalposts to avoid admitting you're wrong.

Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency

#89

Post by jabl »

jorvi wrote: post #38
Salgat wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

All else being equal, they can't. But the difference isn't as big as some people like to think. For a current high end core, probably low single digit %. And x86-64 has had a lot more effort going into software optimization.

Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency

#90

Post by rfoo »

apatheticonion wrote: post #86

From the perspective of a consumer, my MacBook Pro is basically the perfect laptop, at least in theory. I love the battery life and performance of the hardware, not to mention the unrivaled build quality of the MacBook (screen, trackpad, keyboard). In practice, however, MacOS limits the capabilities of the hardware such that I cannot daily drive my MacBook Pro as a work or personal computer (poor containerization sup…

> poor containerization support, an annoying development toolchain

Just run an always-on (headless!) Linux VM in the background, and don't use the host macOS for anything besides desktop apps (Slack, VSCode, Browser, mpv, terminal emulator but always ssh into the VM, etc). The same way you deal with a Windows machine.

This works good enough unless you work on hypervisors or other bare metal only tech. But hey, that's currently non-existing on M1 Macbooks (or undocumented and locked to Apple ecosystem) anyways.

> and no _real_ support for video games

That's the real deal breaker if you are into gaming.

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