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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

#291

Post by rewgs »

rfoo wrote: post #90
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…

> poor containerization support, an annoying development toolchain Just run an always-on (headless!) Linux VM in the background, and don't use the host macOS for anything besides desktop apps (Slack, VSCode, Browser, mpv, terminal emulator but always ssh into the VM, etc). The same way you deal with a Windows machine. This works good enough unless you work on hypervisors or other bare metal only tech. But hey, that's…

> Just run an always-on (headless!) Linux VM in the background, and don't use the host macOS for anything besides desktop apps (Slack, VSCode, Browser, mpv, terminal emulator but always ssh into the VM, etc).

This is what I do. Specifically, I use Canonical's Multipass, and treat tmux as my "window manager," -- I even mapped my iTerm profile's Command+[key] to the hex code for tmux-prefix+[key], so that Command essentially feels like the Super key in, say, i3. For example, rather than having to type Control+p h, Command+h selects the pane to the left.

The Multipass VM is flawless. Closing the laptop doesn't shut it down, and with the tmux resurrect plugin, sessions persist between Mac restarts (which are rare). If I didn't know better, I'd think it was just a native terminal session.

If I need proper x86_64, I just ssh into my super beefy Linux NAS at home via Tailscale. Both Linux machines are identical in terms of dotfiles/etc, so it feels exactly the same.

I've truly never been happier with Linux. I no longer obsess over my window manager (which used to be a serious time sink for me), and I still get what is IMO the best desktop experience via my Mac. The only tinkering I do is checking out the occasional new neovim plugin, but I really enjoy doing that, as it has a tangible benefit to my dev workflow, and kind of feels like gardening, in a way -- I like the slow but persistent act of improving and culling my environment.

I still have a PC, but I actually recently uninstalled WSL2. It never felt truly finished or "right", and Windows Terminal can be incredibly sluggish -- keystrokes have far more latency than iTerm. I've actually started to embrace just letting "Windows be Windows," even learning Powershell (and enjoying it more than I'd expected).

I've also pretty much moved from gaming on a PC to PS5. So, for me personally, I don't really see a place for Windows anymore. Every single time I boot into my PC, something is wrong -- most recently, it literally won't shutdown unless I execute `shutdown /s`, and no amount of troubleshooting has been able to fix it. I know Windows like the back of my hand, and still it's a constant feeling of death by a thousand cuts.

Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency

#292

Post by ibiza »

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…

> the unrivaled build quality of the MacBook (screen, trackpad, keyboard)

Typing this on a ThinkPad X13, after years of MBPs, I beg to differ. The screen on the ThinkPad is better, even at a slightly lower resolution of 1920 x 1200. It's IPS like the Mac of course, but also Anti-Reflective (matte), which Apple hasn't offered since 2008?

The ThinkPad has Left, Right, and Scroll mouse buttons, as well as a TrackPoint stick. Not so on the Mac.

Finally, the keyboard. You're going to laud Apple for their quality keyboards, really? The ThinkPad has a nicer keyboard feel (subjective, I know), has actual Home, End, PageUp, PageDn, and Delete keys, two Ctrl keys, and praise Jesus, gaps between the function keys, so you can use them confidently w/o looking.

Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency

#293

Post by shaunsingh0207 »

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.

Apple also entirely drops 32-bit from their arm systems

Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency

#294

Post by bob1029 »

sparkie wrote: post #187

To reduce power usage by any significant amount, need to get rid of the clock.

I have never seen a realistic proposal for how this would make a practical consumer PC work better.

Having a clock that every component can agree upon means that components don't have to worry about each other anymore. Physics and information theory would suggest that removal of this centralized clock signal necessarily introduces additional latency in order to safely determine or modify system state.

Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency

#295

Post by shaunsingh0207 »

Dalewyn wrote: post #73
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.

>The future is RISC-V I hope this never comes to pass, because a RISC-V future is a Chinese future. A Chinese future will not be kind to western ideals that most of us hold dear.

I'm loving it. I used cheap risc-v boards for several of my projects, most notably a GD32V in my keyboard. The equivalent stm boards weren't too expensive, mostly in the 10-20$ range, but weren't as easily available (and 10$ is still 3x the price of the chinese risc board)

Though the rp2040 has largely ended my cheap risc-v addiction

Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency

#296

Post by shaunsingh0207 »

Certhas wrote: post #135
evancox100 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

This has been something I've been incredibly pleased with on the apple silicon SOC's. Albeit slowly, being able to load large datasets or blender scenes on a portable, efficient laptop and still being able to use the GPU is a nice touch.

Of course performance wise it doesn't touch the $1k+ graphics cards with crazy amounts of ram, but for students and if I need to do something quick on the go, its a really useful tool.

Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency

#297

Post by jorvi »

ejiblabahaba wrote: post #65
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.

I found this to be a pretty expansive answer to this question: https://chipsandcheese.com/2021/07/13/arm-or-x86-isa-doesnt-...

Thank you for the detailed article!

Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency

#298

Post by monocasa »

klelatti wrote: post #263
monocasa wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You jumped in in support of a comment that said Arm is ‘legacy’ tech. You said they don’t ‘even have a viable server core’. They are ‘haemorrhaging’ staff. Softbank have ‘ruined’ them. Sounds more apocalyptic than exaggerated tbh. I still don’t know why you think this is necessary.

I guess I don't see why you think it's necessary to not criticize them.

Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency

#299

Post by foolfoolz »

esskay wrote: post #245

I dont think Intel or Nvidia got the memo on this. Both are pumping out seemingly more and more desparate products where their solution to more performance is just to throw more power at it, causing obscene levels of heat in the process. Meanwhile down at the mid-end you've got Apple chipping away at them with ultra efficient ARM chips.

what? the 4x series cards are the most energy efficient graphics cards ever made. ignore the 4900, they just scaled the top end to have high power and high performance. look at the low tier. they all have significant power requirement reductions compared to the 3x cards. watts per fps is down

Re: AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency

#300

Post by KingLancelot »

Xixi wrote: post #50
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.

If RISC-V support by Microsoft is as bad as it has been for ARM, then I'm afraid RISC-V will never touch the desktop market, at all. Contrary to ARM, which is being pushed there with great success by Apple. Server-wise of course it's a different story...

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