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AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency

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151–160 of 328 posts

Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency

#151

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

I use UTM and Docker on a daily basis and it is extremely smooth. What exactly is missing?

> an annoying development toolchain

What are you talking about exactly? For example most Python and Rust builds just work out of the box.

> no _real_ support for video games

https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/Metal.html

These claims look like a bit of an exaggeration.

Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency

#152
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? China has licenses for both the x86_64 and ARM ISAs. WhT about RISC-V makes it an advantage for Chinese companies?

RISC-V is free and open as in libre, by contrast to x86 and ARM which must be licensed from Intel/AMD and ARM and are thus subject to potential western economic sanctions. Now, yes, China will just espionage and kangaroo court their way through and around such legalities anyway, but nonetheless RISC-V is less effort for more reward for China if it becomes at least on par with x86 and ARM. Put more basically, it's a m…

Can Zhaoxin's x86 license, or the various Chinese companies's ARM licenses, just be revoked?

Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency

#153
post #21
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 calculati…

It really isn't competitive.

First of all, when you downclock anything, you're going to gain efficiency. If Apple downclocks M1, it can get even more efficient.

Second, most of these tests use Cinebench, which is highly optimized for x86, not ARM instructions. Geekbench should be used instead.

Third, the M1 is a SoC. Everything is on it. Everything is efficiently connected directly inside the chip.

Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency

#154
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 imagine something like AlphaZero would also benefit: It's basically a hybrid of tree search and neural network.

Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency

#155
post #125
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? China has licenses for both the x86_64 and ARM ISAs. WhT about RISC-V makes it an advantage for Chinese companies?

China has licenses for x86-64 “designs” and ARM’s design. Not the ISA. Although “ARM China” is probably enough for them.

Really? No Chinese company has the ARM architecture license? That's honestly a bit surprising if true

Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency

#156

It's amazing on how you can power limit the newest Ryzen to only 105 and get high energy safes for much less performance reductions. But the review-game (same reviewers who complain about power usage) drives AMD/Intel to get the last 5% of performance increase for 20% of power increase.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33231081

Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You sure? 7900 is probably better value but the 4090 outperforms it by at least 20% in games.

It really depends on the games. Modern Warefare 2 for example, 7900xtx outperforms 4090 in every resolution. While in fortnite the 4090 outperforms the 7900xtx even more. @ 4k gaming then 4090 on average is /much/ better than the 7900xtx, but looking at 1080/1440p that lead deminishes alot. edit: At the end of the day tho its all too damn expensive now.

The lead diminishes at 1080p/1440p because games become more CPU bottlenecked than GPU.

Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency

#158

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 I use UTM and Docker on a daily basis and it is extremely smooth. What exactly is missing? > an annoying development toolchain What are you talking about exactly? For example most Python and Rust builds just work out of the box. > no _real_ support for video games https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/Metal.html These claims look like a bit of an exaggeration.

nested virtualization is missing on m1/m2 on both MacOS and Asahi - it's unclear if this is a hardware or software limitation.

Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 chi…

The one viable server ARM CPU core is now tied up in a Qualcomm-ARM legal spat and probably won't see the light of day and made it pretty clear to anyone not grandfathered in like Apple that it's not worth designing your own ARM core. ARM itself has been hemorrhaging employees both because of better offers from Apple and the RISC-V stealths, and because since the SoftBank push to get their money back has simply been…

I get it that you want RISC-V to succeed - so do I - and to advocate for it but I really don’t understand why it needs this sort of comment about Arm. I see exaggerated criticism of the Arm ISA elsewhere from people who ought to know better too - it’s really CISC, it’s 5000 pages vs 2 for RISC-V etc. It’s just not necessary.

Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency

#160
Looking forward to this. It seems lately you can only get I’m pretty sure people will suggest x86 options that fit into that description but again it looks like you have to scrape the internet for stuff like intel 1[2,3][1-9]00t or wathever the AMD alternative is.
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