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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

#211

Post by PedroBatista »

eric__cartman wrote: post #203
PedroBatista wrote: post #201

The last time a chip company talked about "Efficiency" in this way, we got +10 years of 5% increments in performance and 50% in price increases for 2 and 4 core CPUs.. I know it's my PTSD, the words make sense but I really hope this is not code for "we can't get much more performance out of our architectures, so we'll focus in selling "efficiency".. " I really hope I'm wrong, since the power consumed by this chips ha…

ARM CPU manufacturers have been doing that for more than a decade :)

Yes, but real world performance ( aka compute speed ) has been like desktop Linux, "it's here, but not really" ( we are talking about general desktop, laptop, server here, not mobile ).

Having said that, Apple's M1 was the real one that changed things, also ARM on the server is starting to actually be a mainstream thing, so I get why AMD and Intel are sweating, I just hope they can pull it off because a World where you need to buy a +$1000 aluminum box attached to the CPU you want to get is not a better World.. or worse: Doing business with Qualcomm.

Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency

#213

Post by appointment »

chasil wrote: post #142
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.

How can AArch64 be as efficient when it implements all of the old 32-bit extensions? Some don't, but a phone does.

The latest ARM Cortex CPUs (models X2, A715 and A510) drop 32-bit support. Qualcomm actually includes two older Cortex-A710 cores in the Snapdragon 8 gen 2 for 32-bit support. Don't know much about Apple Silicon but didn't they drop 32-bit a couple of years back?

Google has purged 32-bit apps from the official Android app store, but as I understand it the Chinese OEMs that ship un-Googled AOSP ROMs with their own app stores haven't been as aggressive about moving to 64-bit.

Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency

#214

Post by pb82 »

Tepix wrote: post #191
bayindirh wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Sure. But since AMD has been producing these CPUs for a while, their yield should be good by now, shouldn't it? Anyway, I hear some people saying you can just buy the 105W "X" variant and limit the power usage to 65W in the BIOS. Does it really give the same result, also in idle power consumption?

I'm running my 5800x in 45w Eco mode. It does not improve idle power from what I can see. It only limits the max it can draw.

Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency

#215

Post by washadjeffmad »

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.

> very top Intel boards

Where "top" means "most expensive". The Z790 board I recently purchased for around $300 was pretty barebones and lackluster (no TB, meager IO from ports and headers, wattage constrained VRM relative to 13th gen TDP, etc), but it was the least costly way to work with an Intel proprietary technology.

It'll last another four or five years, but it was my first Intel build since the slocket days, and likely my last.

Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency

#216

Post by weberer »

PedroBatista wrote: post #211
eric__cartman wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ARM CPU manufacturers have been doing that for more than a decade :)

Yes, but real world performance ( aka compute speed ) has been like desktop Linux, "it's here, but not really" ( we are talking about general desktop, laptop, server here, not mobile ). Having said that, Apple's M1 was the real one that changed things, also ARM on the server is starting to actually be a mainstream thing, so I get why AMD and Intel are sweating, I just hope they can pull it off because a World where y…

Desktop Linux has been better than Windows out of the box for more than a decade now. Unless you're talking about market share, which will never increase without a hundred million dollar marketing blitz behind it.

Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency

#217

Post by Dalewyn »

mort96 wrote: post #152
Dalewyn wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If the US and/or UK place sanctions on exporting microprocessor technologies to China then that's that. Intel/AMD and ARM are subject to US and UK laws and regulations respectively.

RISC-V by contrast is much, much harder for any given country to regulate because of its free and open nature. At most the US and UK can embargo individual developments made within their jurisdictions, but they can't regulate the entire architecture. RISC-V doesn't have a kill switch named Intel/AMD or ARM.

Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency

#218

Post by koiueo »

favaq wrote: post #166
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…

Really looking forward to buying a 256-core laptop and seeing almost all tasks using 1 single core. Let's get real here, most things can't be parallelised at all. We must strive for better single core performance.

Let's get real. Most times you're not doing a single task on your laptop.

These days I only see a single core loaded up to 100% when I grep through a big directory or when I encounter a bug in some software.

Most of the time, it's either all cores are equally idling or equally doing something heavy (like building a big project).

Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency

#219

Post by Dalewyn »

baq wrote: post #186
formerly_proven wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Also worth remembering that for the vast majority of people, any performance differences between Intel and AMD are utterly and absolutely insignificant as to be completely meaningless.

Nobody needs two-digit CPU core counts and 5~6GHz clock speeds to do their emails, communicate on Skype/Discord/Teams/Slack/Zoom/whatever, browse Facebook and Twitter, watch Youtube, and even play some vidja gaemz. An i3 or even a god damn Celeron is perfectly fine.

So at that point, Intel's superior stability (read: less jank) wins out by a hair and otherwise nobody really cares because there's no practical difference. The vast majority of people will just buy whatever's cheaper or just happens to be on the display table that day.

Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency

#220

Post by adql »

ksec wrote: post #122
BlueTankEngine wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience talking to semiconductors folks, ARM is just not a concern anymore. The future is RISC-V, and ARM is already being seen as legacy tech. ARM's progress in the server space has stalled, the ARM Windows ecosystem is dead, Android has laid the groundwork for a move to RISC-V, and ARM has never and will never touch the desktop market.

>In my experience talking to semiconductors folks, Most, if not all SemiCoductor “folks” I know are very pragmatic. As in how a Real Engineer should be, unlike software engineers. And in my experience, only HN and the Internet are suggesting ARM is dead. Everything will be RISC-V.

Yup, difference to the engineer is minuscule.

It's getting traction coz chip companies don't want to pay ARM for licensing, not because it is particularly better at something.

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