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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

#181

Post by peoplefromibiza »

jeffparsons wrote: post #164
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I care a lot about idle power, even on my desktop PC. It seems crazy to me that in 2023 I still need to consider whether maybe I should shut down my computer when I'm not using it. What should I be buying to not have to ask myself that question?

deep sleep is enough.

idle means the computer is turned on, a Mac on idle consumes less power than an x86 on idle, they both consume ~zero in deep sleep.

Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency

#182

Post by peoplefromibiza »

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.

> when they have to run an extra decoder

it's not that expensive

it's a tradeoff, you lose something there, you gain somewhere else.

x86 has a more complex decoder exactly because it was less powerful and had to save on computing power and energy consumption, not being a mainframe.

Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency

#184

Post by Tepix »

addandsubtract wrote: post #179
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.

Here's one project

https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/stable-diffusion-...

https://huggingface.co/blog/diffusers-coreml

Not surprisingly, they are quite a bit slower than those power-hungry nVidia GPUs.

Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency

#185

Post by baq »

vasco wrote: post #92
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…

Millions of people use macs for work successfully.

Windows too. That isn’t the point.

Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency

#186

Post by baq »

formerly_proven wrote: post #109
m00x wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Their desktop and server CPUs are crushing the market. Seeing plenty of people choose 13th gen over Zen 4, the platform pricing for Zen 4 just wasn't very attractive. AMD [had to] significantly cut prices across the lineup by 20-30 %.

Let’s not forget that 12th and 13th gen are actually good chips

Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency

#188

Post by peoplefromibiza »

zozbot234 wrote: post #172
snovv_crash wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

yes if you want to keep the transistor count low

M1 has 16 billion of them

AMD is below 10 billion

Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency

#189

Post by YourDadVPN »

qball wrote: post #103
cookiengineer wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>I guess the only thing that's holding back ARM is Microsoft It's not Microsoft holding it back. It's Qualcomm. Apart from their very latest SOC (designed by a bunch of ex-Apple employees, no less) their CPUs have are significantly worse than x86 in terms of general performance and have persistently lagged 4 years behind Apple in terms of performance (3 years behind x86). They sell for the same price per unit as x86…

> that acquisition will still take some time to bear fruit.

It might be a very long time considering Arm is suing to get Qualcomm to destroy Nuvia's work.

Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency

#190

Post by bayindirh »

Tepix wrote: post #183

They could score a quick win for power efficiency by making the Ryzen 9 5900 and Ryzen 9 3900 12-core 65W CPUs generally available instead of only selling them to OEMs.

If your production process and binning doesn't create enough supply for these parts, you only sell them to OEMs, because they can silently discontinue, or limit availability of these models when parts can not be found.

However it'll be a PR disaster if the parts have spotty availability in retailers, and will cause wild rumors to spread, from "AMD doesn't want you to have this CPU" to "AMD is going bankrupt".

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