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Nvidia is proposing a beast of a CPU system for Windows PCs

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Re: Nvidia is proposing a beast of a CPU system for Windows PCs

#341

Post by to11mtm »

Onavo wrote: post #317
cm2187 wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And conveniently, by making your machine non upgradeable, it allows the manufacturer to enforce market segmentation / charge a huge premium for small RAM upgrade ( a la Apple)

Are there no PCIe standards that are sufficient to support both use cases? What happened to PCIe 8 and CXL?

AFAIK PCIe6 just started getting implemented in hardware last year... PCIe7 Spec was just released last year too...

PCIe6 is a much larger change than 'just bump up the transfer rate', the encoding changed too (on top of the new code length, it's no longer NRZ,) so everyone needed to design and validate both the new encoding block, negotiation, etc etc.

That said, I'm guessing PCIe7 will be a 'smoother' transition from PCIE6, i.e. we might see 7.0 products in 2027. That will theoretically get you ~240GB/sec, on an x16 link, or hypothetically a little less than the hypothetical max of a current Strix Halo. (I'm guessing however, that PCIe protocol overhead will make the difference larger.)

Re: Nvidia is proposing a beast of a CPU system for Windows PCs

#342

Post by [deleted] »

pbalau wrote: post #271
stego-tech wrote: post #197

The Unified Memory pool is what will continue to be the “game changer” in systems architecture, especially outside of data centers. The reality is even cutting edge games and consumer workloads don’t actually take full use of the PCIe bandwidth of the GPU or the bandwidth of its GDDR memory. Even local AI use cases don’t substantially or meaningfully benefit from faster memory, at least to average consumers. A unifie…

What is the difference between unified memory and shared memory? Shared memory existed since the first CPU with an embedded GPU came to market and you could set in BIOS how much memory goes to what component. I do have an opinion about how unified memory could be different, but I want a proper explanation.

[deleted]

Re: Nvidia is proposing a beast of a CPU system for Windows PCs

#343

Post by ForOldHack »

QQ00 wrote: post #332
MBCook wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that required or just a choice Apple made?

both. soldered ram is faster. also Apple don't want to offer upgradblity after purchase.

Don't I/you wish. The mechanical junction adds no delay, only manufacturing expense, and the delay of purchasing new systems to keep up with OS bloat.

Actually the opposite is true. Socketed RAM can be made to overclock and adjust timings, while soldered ram, no. Two Lenovo's one soldered ( Carbon X1 ), one T590, one slot: Crucial 16GB, 260-pin SODIMM, DDR4 PC4-19200. Exact same processor, the X1 is DDR3 soldered on 532.0 MHz PC3-1066. The T590, has DDR4, PC4-19200, 1200Mhz.

Both have a Core i7 8665U... and the T590 is much faster, with socketed ram.

Re: Nvidia is proposing a beast of a CPU system for Windows PCs

#344

Post by Retr0id »

bobmcnamara wrote: post #321
Retr0id wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Memory safety is orthogonal to side-channels, and hardware-enforced isolation (e.g. IOMMU) is more powerful than compiler-enforced isolation (but both are good!)

Oh no now I have to worry about shaders row hammering my OS ram /s

You really do have to worry about that!

Re: Nvidia is proposing a beast of a CPU system for Windows PCs

#345

Post by MBCook »

cm2187 wrote: post #318
MBCook wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that required or just a choice Apple made?

What do you mean by required? Apple's prices are notoriously disconnected from the cost of manufacturing.

I mean is it possible to make unified memory systems with good performance or is it not really feasible due to memory timing/trace length issues?

It’s possible if you’re willing to go with much slower RAM than GPUs like but CPUs often use. Thats what integrated graphics laptops have done for a long time right?

But can you get high end CPU and GPU performance with unified memory and maintain user upgradable memory in a reasonable way? Thats what I don’t know.

Re: Nvidia is proposing a beast of a CPU system for Windows PCs

#346

Post by ForOldHack »

cm2187 wrote: post #318
MBCook wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that required or just a choice Apple made?

What do you mean by required? Apple's prices are notoriously disconnected from the cost of manufacturing.

You mean Apple prices are notoriously over priced, over hyped, under powered, and

"Abdul Jabar, couldn't have made these prices, with a sky hook."

Re: Nvidia is proposing a beast of a CPU system for Windows PCs

#347

Post by tjoff »

stego-tech wrote: post #197

The Unified Memory pool is what will continue to be the “game changer” in systems architecture, especially outside of data centers. The reality is even cutting edge games and consumer workloads don’t actually take full use of the PCIe bandwidth of the GPU or the bandwidth of its GDDR memory. Even local AI use cases don’t substantially or meaningfully benefit from faster memory, at least to average consumers. A unifie…

Don't really buy the economic argument. For 99% pf all workloads you need at least an order of magnitude more system memory than gpu memory.

Most systems barely need more gpu memory than what is required for video, browsing etc.

Just because we found a new usecase doesn't flip that on its head.

Besides, I want to keep doing what I'm doing today. So if I need 128GB today and my local AI needs 128 GB then I'd need 256 GB to keep doing the same work.

The argument rather seems to be that we shouldn't use such expensive memory on the GPU. Which might be true if you only want to do inference on it.

Re: Nvidia is proposing a beast of a CPU system for Windows PCs

#349

Post by to11mtm »

zozbot234 wrote: post #299
Salgat wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To this day I do not get why Intel doesn't just offer massive memory options for their cards. Just charge what it costs to add the extra memory, no upcharge, and they will never be able to keep up with demand. Cheap VRAM is enough to justify a lot of open source investment into challenging CUDA.

> To this day I do not get why Intel doesn't just offer massive memory options for their cards. They seem to? Intel Arc is the cheapest option by far for a discrete card with 32GB VRAM.

They took longer than everyone expected and then shortly after release they made announcements that made people worry that Intel might kill the project the way they tend to kill GPU projects.

(I still kinda want to get one tho.)

Re: Nvidia is proposing a beast of a CPU system for Windows PCs

#350

Post by sedatk »

Danox wrote: post #131
modeless wrote: post #119

The Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme trounces Nvidia's chip in single core CPU performance. It beats Intel and AMD's best, too. It has unified memory. It's the only CPU in the same league as Apple's M-series in both CPU performance and power efficiency. And it's available in laptops today, not later this year. People are sleeping on Qualcomm.

Microsoft is sleeping on Qualcomm with their lousy port of Windows to Arm processors…

> with their lousy port of Windows to Arm processors…

What's lousy about it? I use it daily and have zero problems.

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