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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

#521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> fastest mobile GPU for Blender rendering cool story, but nobody cares about mobile GPUs for blender. A 4080 eats an M5 Max alive for breakfast. The 5080 in my machine that cost me 1500€ runs circles around an M5 Max that would cost me over 6000€. And when in 5 years the 5080 isn't enough, I can upgrade it to a 7080 or whatever, which will remain compatible. If you're a professional, soldered products like the RTX S…

And nobody cares about 5080.

Exactly. A 5080 is just an enthusiast gamer card. If you're part of a large company that requires you to run Blender/3DSMax/etc (read: disney/pixar sized), you're going to have an A6000 in there, or even just a render farm.

Game dev & asset work is probably happy with a 5080 and that's what most rendering/dev machines would have.

The addressable market of "i have 6000 to blow and i need meh performance on anything related to 3D rendering" is small, and benchmarks make it look bigger than it really is.

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

#522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until LPCAMM2 came along, using low power LPDDR RAM meant soldiering RAM to the motherboard. If you wanted to get sleep right and improve battery life, that was the trade off.

> to get sleep right Thought getting sleep right was something that happened before MS decided they need to be able to wake your PC any time they want and not hardware related much.

Macs were known for far longer standby times while sleeping long before MS completely screwed the pooch with their "modern" standby.

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

#524

Local models becoming thousands of dollars instead of millions to run is a story the public genuinely seems to be unaware of. If the order of magnitude falls again, the markets are cooked. The cheap chips barrier is even artificial and unsustainable. The next big story in local AI adoption will be big players doing chip hoarding-as-a-strategy.

I think this is part of why capex is so high for the big players. Yes data centers are expensive to build but it's also about outbidding for the labor and materials needed to build those. They'd rather build compute they don't need and then lease it then let competitors have their own machines.

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

#525
post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s only if you consider FP32 specifically. On average the M5 Max will pull ahead for tasks like GPU raytracing (it’s currently the fastest mobile GPU for Blender rendering) and token generation and other things that benefit from the higher memory bandwidth. I’d also mention that you’re comparing peaks which the RTX Spark won’t be hitting. The top TDP is less than that of the DGX Spark. I just think anyone calling…

> fastest mobile GPU for Blender rendering cool story, but nobody cares about mobile GPUs for blender. A 4080 eats an M5 Max alive for breakfast. The 5080 in my machine that cost me 1500€ runs circles around an M5 Max that would cost me over 6000€. And when in 5 years the 5080 isn't enough, I can upgrade it to a 7080 or whatever, which will remain compatible. If you're a professional, soldered products like the RTX S…

As a professional in the space, a ton of people DO care about mobile performance. If you’d go to SIGGRAPH in the last few years you’d see how the landscape has really changed.

It’s not going to be the primary place of creation but there’s a lot of usefulness in having a portable workstation or that entire segment of the laptop workspace wouldn’t exist.

In either case, it’s besides the point because the point is talking about the compute levels of a GPU in the same form factor.

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

#526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly the point. Until recently, AI models that could run on home machines were so bad that it was very hard to imagine anyone wanting to. And, like the overly large machines of 1977, models are getting faster, leaner, and better. It's happening a lot quicker, though.

This is why I'm bearish on Anthropic, OpenAI, and friends. I am not confident that we will continue to see the same pace of improvement in frontier model capabilities as we have seen over the past year or two - not using similar mathematics at least. But I think that getting results that are close enough to the same standard to be a realistic substitute but in a model small enough to run locally may well happen quite…

> This is why I'm bearish on Anthropic, OpenAI, and friends.

Just because you can do more and more things at home (thanks Moore and Dennard), doesn't preclude needing things also done remotely. The number of at-home systems seems to have fed a growing number of remote systems (especially once always-on connectivity became ubiquitous).

It's basically the angle Apple is going for: do as much locally (for the sake of privacy), and then offload when it becomes "too much".

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

#527

Local models becoming thousands of dollars instead of millions to run is a story the public genuinely seems to be unaware of. If the order of magnitude falls again, the markets are cooked. The cheap chips barrier is even artificial and unsustainable. The next big story in local AI adoption will be big players doing chip hoarding-as-a-strategy.

I'm fully convinced now that this is the real reason for the OpenAI RAM wafer deals.

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

#528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And nobody cares about 5080.

Exactly. A 5080 is just an enthusiast gamer card. If you're part of a large company that requires you to run Blender/3DSMax/etc (read: disney/pixar sized), you're going to have an A6000 in there, or even just a render farm. Game dev & asset work is probably happy with a 5080 and that's what most rendering/dev machines would have. The addressable market of "i have 6000 to blow and i need meh performance on anything re…

Ironically the two studios you mentioned don’t actively render on GPUs and it’s an area which shows that even these small SoCs can punch way above their weight if you look at their pure compute power.

Disney’s Hyperion is CPU based and RenderMan XPU is just exiting beta after over a decade.

But while they do stack their workstations with higher end GPUs for artist throughput in viewports it’s mostly just for the higher memory to fit unoptimized scenes in. None of the studios or major films I’ve worked on have had their on desk artists be raster rate gated but just memory gated.

But again, besides the point, because it’s still valuable as a metric to compare with when comparing perf between similar chipsets.

There are already more creatives using their consumer grade hardware to make stuff. And even the studios you mentioned do actually use laptops on the go for parts of their creation pipelines for various things like virtual production scouting etc.

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

#529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we really haven't even seen how GenAI can influence new products and games. Have you consumed Dungeon Crawler Carl?

Was it made with AI?

No, but AI is a central theme and also the key way to build such a dynamic experience.

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

#530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not massive, though. Make it 96GB at $2,000 (ok, probably impossible right now, but they could have before the surge in prices) and you’ll see developers work really hard to make AI tooling work for their cards, CUDA be damned. The same goes for AMD. It’s like they both want to rely on market segmentation for VRAM too but fail to realize that it’s their only potential inroad right now.

If you buy three 32GB GPUs, that's 96GB total at a very reasonable price. An AI model splits easily by layers, so running on multiple GPUs is quite feasible.

Doesn't split as easily on an Intel GPU as ona NVIDA GPU though, regarding software support. Sure, it's probably not too difficult if you know what you're doing, but not sure how big that market would be.
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