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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

#221

Post by AshamedCaptain »

senttoschool wrote: post #150
rfoo wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Their results are invalid because they used Cinebench. Cinebench uses Intel Embree engine which is hand optimized for x86, not ARM instructions. In addition, Cinebench is a terrible general purpose CPU benchmark.[0] 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 conclus…

Cinebench/4D does have "hand-optimized" ARM instructions. It would be a disaster for the actual product if it didn't. That's what makes it interesting as a benchmark: that there's a real commercial product behind it and a company interested in making it as efficient as possible for all customer CPUs, not just benchmarking purposes.

Albeit for later releases this is less true since most customers have switched to GPUs...

Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency

#222

Post by thereddaikon »

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…

MacOS has seemingly gotten worse over the years not better. Features removed. Interface has been changed for the worse. The drive to unify the desktop experience with iOS. I could go on.

Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency

#225

Post by madmax96 »

This is not a completely hashed-out thought. But I'll share it and see what others think.

My impression is that the simplest way to improve energy efficiency is to simplify hardware. Silicon is spent isolating software, etc. Time is spent copying data from kernel space to user space. Shift the burden of correctness to compilers, and use proof-carrying code to convince OSes a binary is safe. Let hardware continue managing what it's good at (e.g., out-of-order execution.) But I want a single address space with absolutely no virtualization.

Some may ask "isn't this dangerous? what if there are bugs in the verification process?" But isn't this the same as a bug in the hardware you're relying on for safety? Why is the hardware easier to get right? Isn't it cheaper to patch a software bug than a hardware bug?

Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency

#226

Post by bitL »

greenknight wrote: post #26
georgeburdell wrote: post #10

Su is just talking up AMD’s strengths, many of which come care of TSMC and for which the original R&D was largely funded by Apple. She is not wrong, and AMD has certainly made large gains in HPC recently, but AMD does not monopolize all possible paths to success here.

I agree that a lot of AMDs wins have come from TSMC. That being said, I feel like the biggest win for them over the past 5 years (well 6 now)... was moving to chiplets, which all started at Global Foundaries. Having the same chip, from the lowest end consumer chip all the way to the top end server chip means that they can spend less time and cost developing up processors for every segment, and they just bin the chips…

A move to chiplets would be just prolonging their terminal suffering if they didn't replicate Haswell in the first Ryzen chips, making them somewhat performance-competitive and due to chiplets also economically viable with the ability to wow consumers with the first 8 core desktop chips and later 12/16/24/32-core ones.

Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency

#227

Post by kungito »

makomk wrote: post #177
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…

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 hav…

One big reson why the demand is low is because 1080ti or rx580 can still service 95% of gaming needs so what's the point of upgrading?

Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency

#229

Post by WithinReason »

Kon-Peki wrote: 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…

“hybrid algorithms leveraging AI efficiency”: An example I came across recently:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.11214

A neural network-based solution for weather forecasting: "FourCastNet is about 45,000 times faster than traditional NWP models on a node-hour basis."

Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency

#230

Post by WithinReason »

tankenmate wrote: post #147
Certhas wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main thing AMD has in their accelerators that enables this this is unified memory between CPU and GPU. Thats really interesting.

Don't forget that AMD also bought Xilinx

How do you expect FPGAs to be useful here?
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