141–150 of 328 posts
My Thinkpad X1 Nano Gen 2 with Alder Lake has only 50% battery runtime of what X1 Nano with 1160G7 accomplished. For pretty much the same performance. Power constrained to say 5 or 7W, the 1160G7 feels faster.
I hope that Lenovo can offer something so light as a X1 Nano with AMD inside. Technically it should be both possible and feasible, given that the AMD CPUs are much more efficient/performant at low power levels.
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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.
Some don't, but a phone does.
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…
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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…
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?
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…
Manufacturing costs force them to go down the chiplet path. Its actually impressive they can remain competitive at all given TSMCs margin of 67%. [0] If Intel Foundry manages to keep up with TSMC, thats a lot of pricing power advantage over AMD. Or they could make lower-power CPUs that would be uneconomical for AMD. [0] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TSM/taiwan-semicon...
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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.
The main thing AMD has in their accelerators that enables this this is unified memory between CPU and GPU. Thats really interesting.
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Graviton, M1/M2, Ampere etc but I’m sure you’ll be able to explain why Arm is seen as ‘legacy’ tech when billions of smartphones are being shipped every year with Arm CPUs.
Oh look, you named 4 areas where ARM development has already peaked. Hyperscalers are already looking to evolve from ARM in the near future, just look at how much attention Ventana got at RISC-V Summit. M1/M2 are Apple ecosystem specific phenomenon that haven't inspired any copycat products. Ampere has been a massive disappointment to everyone in the industry, see the fact that Nuvia had their entire business dead-to…
citation needed
https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/08/5_percent_cloud_arm/
"5% of the cloud now runs on Arm as chip designer plans 2023 IPO"
5% does not seems to me as a position that you want to change to something else.
ARM in every day computing outside of mobile phones and SBCs is just getting started as I see it.
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Manufacturing costs force them to go down the chiplet path. Its actually impressive they can remain competitive at all given TSMCs margin of 67%. [0] If Intel Foundry manages to keep up with TSMC, thats a lot of pricing power advantage over AMD. Or they could make lower-power CPUs that would be uneconomical for AMD. [0] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TSM/taiwan-semicon...
But don't forget that TSMC's margins for massive bulk purchasers like AMD will be lower than the average.
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People keep repeating that Zen4 and M1 are close in efficiency but what is the source with actual benchmarks and power measurements? At any rate, using single points to compare energy efficiency isn't a good comparison, unless either the performance or power consumption of the data points comparable. Like, the M1's little cores are 3-5x even more efficient when operating in an incomparable power class, and Apple's ow…
> but what is the source with actual benchmarks and power measurements? Every notebookcheck.net review. For example https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Ryzen-7-6800U-Efficiency-R... They also do the same to a lot more laptops they test. Look at the multi-core results, Zen3+ comes pretty close. Also the single thread result shows what GP said: AMD CPU drains too much power at idle.
Imagine if you're testing how energy efficient an EV and a gas car is. But you only run the test in the North pole, where the cold will make the EV at least 40% less efficient. And then you make a conclusion based solely on that data for all regions in the world. That's what using Cinebench to compare Apple Silicon and x86 chips is like.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/pitid6/eli5_why_d...