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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

#171

Post by Tuna-Fish »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #169

Typical for a company that is stuck to be calling out what they should have been doing for the last decade as the thing to focus on. Basically he's promising more of the same. What he should be doing is announce the next big thing. Which I imagine might include trendy things like tackling AI with some hardware/software stack that is energy and cost efficient and competitive with nvidia. Or a non intel architecture ba…

1. She. AMD's CEO is Lisa Su.

2. This is a keynote at a supercomputing conference. The audience are people who do supercomputing. She's not going talk about consumer stuff.

3. She did announce new, integrated products that are in at least some niches better than what nVidia has.

4. AMD brand is flying very high on the server and supercomputing side right now. They have beat Intel for 3 generations straight now.

In general, you should read the article instead of commenting based on just headlines. Doing this just makes you look really stupid.

Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency

#172

Post by zozbot234 »

snovv_crash wrote: post #168
jorvi wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The decoder has negligible power consumption and die area on a modern CPU.

Not if you have a complex ISA like x86 and want a very wide decode.

Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency

#173

Post by lotsofpulp »

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #136
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…

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...

Why is EBITDA margin better in this context than net margin? Wouldn’t manufacturing facilities have a ton of depreciation and amortization that should be incorporated into the costs?

Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency

#174

Post by naoru »

irusensei wrote: post #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.

Anecdotally, I use a CPU from an aliexpress mystery seller in my desktop machine. It's a i9-9980HK with about 40W TDP...

Which I unlocked to ~300W and installed a water cooling system.

It can idle at around 5W, but a synthetic load (e. g. prime95) quickly makes it draw full 300W and then throttle a bit. Fun stuff, definitely wouldn't do it again due to enormous strain on the PSU and an unreasonably high power draw relative to performance.

Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency

#175

Post by flakeoil »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #34
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…

> 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 BIO…

It's actually this idling power which is what defines battery drain for most people. All these benchmarks about how much it can for a certain compute intensive task is not that important considering that most of the time a laptop is doing almost nothing.

We just stare at an article in a web browser. We look at a text document. We type a bit in the document. An app is doing an HTTP request. The CPU is doing nothing basically.

Once in a while it has to redraw something, do some intense processing of an image or text, but it takes seconds.

It's the 99% in idling that counts and there most laptop CPU's suck.

Even when watching a video the CPU is not (should not be) doing much as there are HW co-processors for MPEG-4 decoding built in.

It's quite embarrassing how AMD and Intel have screwed up honestly.

Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency

#176

Post by monocasa »

klelatti wrote: post #159
monocasa wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I mean, nothing I said is exaggerated here. ARM doesn't even have a viable server core that can compete with x86 even as vaporware. SoftBank ruins everything they touch, and is super focused at the moment on stealing from Peter to pay Paul to get something out of the upcoming ARM IPO since their attempt to sell it off to Nvidia fell through. The rumor is they've been cutting R&D funding hard to get temporarily boost profitability. If anything this is more a dig at how vulture capitalism ruins productive companies.

As an aside, ARM has always been a hybrid CISC/RISC core. It has nothing to do with the number of instructions, but the fact that not having an I$ on the ARM1 forced it to have microcoded instructions to mainly to support LDM/STM. That's not a dig at ARM. It's a valid design; particularly at that gate count.

Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency

#177

Post by makomk »

m00x wrote: post #48
andrewstuart wrote: post #36

AMD 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 artificia…

Their graphics division has certainly been lacking vs Nvidia's cards, but are still far ahead of Intel's. Their desktop and server CPUs are crushing the market. > They are deliberately keeping prices high and creating artificial shortages of GPUs That's simply not true. Check out TechTechPotato's youtube channel for the explanation on this, but under-shipping isn't price fixing. They're just shipping less to distribu…

One big reason that demand is low is that the current generation of GPUs are way too expensive, with top-end GPUs about twice what they used to cost a few years ago, very poor improvements in performance-per-$, and anythign below the top end offering even more dubious value for money especially on the AMD side. Originally those high prices were a result of high demand compared to supply, but the companies seem to have gotten greedy and decided they can permanently keep prices high and just throttle back supply to keep them there.

Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency

#178

Post by Tuna-Fish »

borissk wrote: post #167
xattt wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Single word: PCIe This explains Intel’s squandering of PCIe lanes for consumer desktops versus AMD’s generosity.

There's very little difference in the number of PCIe and M2 slots between Intel and AMD on their consumer platforms. The only difference really between AM5 and LGA 1700 motherboards is a lot more AMD boards have one M2 PCIe 5.0 slot, while only the very top Intel boards have this feature.

AMD has 24 PCIe 5.0 lanes directly from the CPU available for user, while Intel has 16 5.0 + 4 4.0. Cheaper motherboards might not expose all of those, or downgrade some to 4.0 to save on on-board components. In addition, both have more on the chipset, which is connected to (additional, reserved) PCIe 4.0 lanes. The best AMD chipsets have 12 4.0 and 8 3.0 lanes, while the best Intel ones have 20 4.0 and 8 3.0 lanes. An important point is that the connection between the chipset and CPU is twice as wide on intel (8x vs 4x).

So overall, AMD has more and faster IO available directly from the CPU, but less lanes from the chipset, and with a weaker connection to the chipset. If PCIe 5.0 drives become available and the transfer speed to storage is important, I'd say AMD is better, otherwise I'd say Intel has more IO.

Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency

#179

Post by addandsubtract »

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…

My biggest complaint is that I have a "16-core Neural Engine" in my MacBook, but nothing that can be run on it. Sure, internal macOS tools such as the fingerprint reader or even webcam might use it, but not a single ML project on github makes use of it. I can be lucky if ML projects don't depend on CUDA to run.

Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency

#180

Post by transpute »

moondev wrote: post #158
datadeft wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Asahi said it's present in M2 hardware, will likely be supported in future MacOS.

https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/109838053800961073

  Asahi Linux is introducing support for some brand new Apple Silicon features faster than macOS.. M1 has a virtual GIC interrupt controller for enhanced virtualization performance. Linux supports it, macOS does not.. M2 introduced Nested Virtualization support. The patches for supporting that on Linux are in review; macOS still doesn't support it.
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