141–150 of 162 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Next up AI 395+. I love this thing. Sips power!
I got one of these in a laptop. For a laptop, not really, especially in idle (6-7 watts for the whole laptop). It's quite good anyway.
What a time to be a kid then. We had a hand-me-down DEC x86 desktop at home with a Pentium II running at 233 MHz until I want to say 2002? This was around the time I learned how to build a PC since doing that was cheaper than buying one and no-one in my family had the money for that! I saved whatever money I could to buy a 128MB stick of RAM from Staples (maybe it was 256MB?), a few other things from TigerDirect/Newe…
You reminded me that building use to be considerably cheaper than buying. I remember my teen years, doing odd jobs to get some cash, buying a part at a time until the build was complete. Worrying that if you didn't scrap together enough parts soon there may be an architecture change. Finally getting it all together and the feeling of pure bliss installing the OS, troubleshooting drivers, installing this or that. Good…
I think there’s a lot of overlap between that and modern PC builders. It’s not necessarily cheaper, but is likely to be a lot nicer at the same price.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I got one of these in a laptop. For a laptop, not really, especially in idle (6-7 watts for the whole laptop). It's quite good anyway.
6-7W for the whole device seems decent doesn’t it? That’s 14h on a 100Wh battery
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Clock speed increases definitely slowed down, but now that software can use parallelism better, we're seeing big wins again. Current desktop/laptop packages are doing 100 trillion operations per second. The article's processor could do one floating point op per cycle, or 1B ops. So, we've seen a 100,000x speedup in the last 25 years. That's a doubling every ~ 1.5 years since 2000. It's not quite apples-to-apples, of…
Web browsing is still largely single/few-threaded in practice, afaik. (Right?)
It doesn't matter how fast your machine is; you won't be able to read the news, etc, on consumer sites without a bunch of GPU + shader cores, etc to render the ads.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
6-7W for the whole device seems decent doesn’t it? That’s 14h on a 100Wh battery
Very bad by Apple standards and almost twice as much as more (idle) efficient current x86 laptop CPUs. Not terrible overall.
For reference, a M2 16" macbook pro has a 99Wh battery, and Apple advertises 16-17 hours max battery life. That's 5.8-6.25W.
So, their estimate of 6W for the AMD flagship AI laptop is exactly in line with the Apple flagships.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree. There were only 2 game changing upgrades for me. One was hard disk to SSD. The other was x86 laptop to M1.
You really didn't feel Pentium 4 to Core 2 Duo was a 'game changer'?
Back in the MS-DOS days, the amount of data needed to be read off a disk while the OS booted was negligible, so a second or two on a fast 486 felt amazing compared to the incredibly slow grind of watching code execute on an 8086 or slow 80286. Software was still in the space of having to run tolerably on an 8086, so the added resources of a newer faster machine actually did improve the feel of the system.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure what you mean. It lets you do 64 operations with one instruction. Where's the diminishing returns?
Vector or matrix instructions do not improve single-thread speed in the correct meaning of this term, because they cannot improve the speed of a program that executes a sequence of dependent operations. Their purpose is to provide parallel execution at a lower cost in die area and at a better energy efficiency than by multiplying the number of cores. For instance, having 16 cores with 8-wide vector execution units pr…
There is also an argument to be made for re-architecting code to require fewer or zero branching instructions and cramming everything into vector operations.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"The era of exponentially rising clock speeds" was already over in 2003, when the 130-nm Pentium 4 reached 3.2GHz. All the later CMOS fabrication processes, starting with the 90-nm process (in 2004), have provided only very small improvements in the clock frequency, so that now, 23 years later after 2003, the desktop CPUs have not reached a double clock frequency yet. In the history of computers, the decade with the…
Sort of: The Pentium 4 was a strange chip. It had way too many pipeline steps, and was basically just chasing high clock speed marketing numbers instead of performance. In other words, it hit "3.2GHz" by cheating. I'd argue you'd need to use AMD's Athlon XP or 64 bit processors, or either Pentium 3 / Core 2 Duo to figure out when clock speeds stopped increasing.