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Nvidia Vera CPU Benchmarks: Olympus Cores Delivering Great Performance

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Re: Nvidia Vera CPU Benchmarks: Olympus Cores Delivering Great Performance

#21

Post by cduzz »

elorant wrote: post #12
justincormack wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly what Apple has done, but it does mean soldered memory, as socketed memory at these speeds still hasn't happened. In the server market that is pretty unpopular (even the hyperscalars are apparently reusing DDR4 with CXL in newer machines). DDR6 apparently has twice the memory bandwidth of DDR5 so that will bring it back in line, to around 1TB/s for 12 channels, so comparable but still with standard mem…

Mac ultras would be great if they offered pcie slots to put nvme drives on and ideally an infiniband network card.

They've got thunderbolt 5 which is pretty good and every port has a dedicated controller. You can even network macs together just over thunderbolt.

Not as fast as raw PCIe slots inside the chassis, but I don't think the ghost of steve jobs cares much. He'd tell you that if you've got no taste at all you can put his beautiful machine into ugly junk like from sonnettech and you can go do ugly things elsewhere.

I think apple's happy taking the market they've got and they'll leave the big guns HPC market to nvidia. The margins look great for nvidia right now, but I suspect nvidia's path will be similar to dram's boom/bust cycle more than apple's continuous "premium tool" brand's market positioning.

Re: Nvidia Vera CPU Benchmarks: Olympus Cores Delivering Great Performance

#22

Post by cduzz »

15155 wrote: post #9
justincormack wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly what Apple has done, but it does mean soldered memory, as socketed memory at these speeds still hasn't happened. In the server market that is pretty unpopular (even the hyperscalars are apparently reusing DDR4 with CXL in newer machines). DDR6 apparently has twice the memory bandwidth of DDR5 so that will bring it back in line, to around 1TB/s for 12 channels, so comparable but still with standard mem…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAMM_(memory_module)

High Bandwidth Memory uses thousands of interconnects for the data bus. DDR style memory typically uses in the neighborhood of 64 bit transfers at a time.

HBM tends to be integrated onto the package (board, multi chip module, die) because there are really tight signaling and wire routing constraints that make "modularity" impossible.

I remember back in the day you could get motherboards for your 286, 386, and sometimes even 486 with external L1 / L2 / L3 cache -- you'd buy a bunch of static ram dips that you'd populate sockets next to the CPU, and set a bios or DIP switch to enable it. These days that's just not practical because there are too many wires interconnecting the cache to the dies and cache coherence logic, and the speed of light is just too slow and electricity is too messy to put "external" to the die/chip/package, even if the packaging issues could be addressed.

HBM memory is similar -- it's not practical to make a generic interconnect that'd actually work reliably enough to provide field replaceable memory modules as you can with DDR style dimms.

EDIT:

Apparently I'm totally wrong in that these "SOCAMM2" modules have thousands of pads (like a CPU socket) and can in fact run with the same data bus width (1024 bits wide!) as "local" HBM. Very cool. And please ignore my out of date blatherings above. It's still not quite as fast as if you put the HBM in the package, but it's way faster than the DDR style setup.

Re: Nvidia Vera CPU Benchmarks: Olympus Cores Delivering Great Performance

#23

Post by re-thc »

joe_mamba wrote: post #2

The design and symmetry of that PCB is oddly satisfying. Also, does that mean that once the AI bubble pops, Nvidia come come to the consumer market with a powerful ARM gaming SoC?

> Also, does that mean that once the AI bubble pops, Nvidia come come to the consumer market with a powerful ARM gaming SoC?

Are we rewriting history? Nvidia had consumer ARM SoCs long ago before Qualcomm pushed them out with patents, modems, etc. See: Tegra.

Early day Tegra had quite a bit of Android market share (and they're also currently in the Nintendo Switch).

Re: Nvidia Vera CPU Benchmarks: Olympus Cores Delivering Great Performance

#24

Post by hank808 »

re-thc wrote: post #23
joe_mamba wrote: post #2

The design and symmetry of that PCB is oddly satisfying. Also, does that mean that once the AI bubble pops, Nvidia come come to the consumer market with a powerful ARM gaming SoC?

> Also, does that mean that once the AI bubble pops, Nvidia come come to the consumer market with a powerful ARM gaming SoC? Are we rewriting history? Nvidia had consumer ARM SoCs long ago before Qualcomm pushed them out with patents, modems, etc. See: Tegra. Early day Tegra had quite a bit of Android market share (and they're also currently in the Nintendo Switch).

...and the Nvidia Shield.

Re: Nvidia Vera CPU Benchmarks: Olympus Cores Delivering Great Performance

#25

Post by rasz »

cduzz wrote: post #22
15155 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAMM_(memory_module)

High Bandwidth Memory uses thousands of interconnects for the data bus. DDR style memory typically uses in the neighborhood of 64 bit transfers at a time. HBM tends to be integrated onto the package (board, multi chip module, die) because there are really tight signaling and wire routing constraints that make "modularity" impossible. I remember back in the day you could get motherboards for your 286, 386, and sometim…

Apple doesnt use HMB, but its marketing successfully convinced people it does ant thats why ram has to be soldered.
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