281–290 of 297 posts
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Thanks, missed it. Is the steamdeck rdna2? That's also decently capable.
Sort of. The generation is RDNA2, but it's unlike all other RDNA2 chips because the focus is so much on energy efficiency (and the APU has its own codename, van gogh)
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I would prefer that we figure out how to make the massive vector blobs called AI work more efficiently, versus throwing tons of hardware at what we can barely understand in perpetuity. It doesn't sit right with me that putting lots of floating point ability in edge devices for running these approximate-at-best models is considered the way forward for computing.
Yeah, bitnets already shift those matmuls to integer math.
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Apple's M3 Max CPU cores peak out at 55w for 16 cores (12p+4e). AMD's 8-core U-series chips peak out at 65-70w on CPU-only workloads and still loses out massively in pretty much every category. If you downclock that AMD chip, it does get more efficient, but also loses by even larger margins.
Because you're comparing a 16-core CPU to an 8-core CPU on threaded workloads, which as mentioned is where the multi-threaded workloads will favor the one with more cores on both performance and performance per watt. But why not compare it to the Ryzen that also has 16 cores, like the 7945HX3D? Because then the Ryzen is generally faster on threaded workloads, even though the TDP is still 55W -- and even though it's o…
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AMD has been making SoCs forever. Why does it take a kick in the teeth from Apple for both Intel and AMD suddenly to wake up and give us performance SoCs, 5 years later? They've been coasting on the stone-age motherboard+cards arch because essentially Nvidia gave you a big, fat, modern coprocessor in the form of an [g/r]tx card that hid the underlying problems. They could have done what AAPL did ages ago but they hav…
> AMD has been making SoCs forever. Why does it take a kick in the teeth from Apple for both Intel and AMD suddenly to wake up and give us performance SoCs, 5 years later What do you mean? AMD has been the market leader in performance SoCs for specialised use cases (like consoles) for many years.
Nvidia or Intel could certainly make a console focused SoC at least as performant as AMD.
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>Intel still fabs their own CPUs Isn't Lunar Lake made by TSMC? Supposedly they have comparable efficiency to AMD/Apple/Qualcomm at the cost of making their fab business even less profitable
AFAIK there are some components that are made by TSMC while some others are still made at Intels own fabs
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I see the discussion of instruction fusion for AVX512 in Intel chips. Can someone explain the clock speed drop?
A clock speed drop must always occur whenever a CPU does more work per clock cycle, e.g. when more CPU cores are active or when wider SIMD instructions are used. However the early generations of Intel CPUs that have implemented AVX-512 had bad clock management, which was not agile enough to lower quickly the clock frequency, i.e. the power consumption, when the temperature was too high due to higher power consumption…
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AVX512 was never over 2 cycles. In Zen4 it used the 256 wide execution units of avx2 (except for shuffle), but there are more then one 256-bit wide execution units, so you still got your one cycle throughput.
More importantly for the "2 cycles" question, Zen 4 can get one cycle latency for double-pumped 512-bit ops (for the ops where that's reasonable, i.e. basic integer/bitwise arith). Having all 512-bit pipes would still be a massive throughput improvement over Zen 4 (as long as pipe count is less than halved), if that is what Zen 5 actually does; things don't stop at 1 op/cycle. Though a rather important question with…
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Yeah, bitnets already shift those matmuls to integer math.
Thanks for turning me on to this subject. It's interesting. I took a look at this paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.11453
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Because you're comparing a 16-core CPU to an 8-core CPU on threaded workloads, which as mentioned is where the multi-threaded workloads will favor the one with more cores on both performance and performance per watt. But why not compare it to the Ryzen that also has 16 cores, like the 7945HX3D? Because then the Ryzen is generally faster on threaded workloads, even though the TDP is still 55W -- and even though it's o…
Who said I was comparing multithreaded loads? AMD will hit that on just one core with those boost clocks.
But you can't really expect an older CPU on a previous generation process node with lower power consumption to be faster.
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> raw peak performance hasn't moved much in a decade. In general, CPU clock speeds stagnated about 20 years ago because we hit a power wall. In 1985, the state of the art was maybe 15-20MHz; in 1995, that was 300-500MHz; in 2005, we hit about 3GHz and we've made incremental progress from there. It turns out that you can only switch voltages across transistors so many times a second before you melt down the physical c…
> That's an unfair comparison. When I visit retailers' websites, the 8GB product category seems to be the one with the most products on offer. Dell, Asus, Acer, HP and Lenovo are also more than happy to sell you a laptop with 8GB of RAM, today. Although I would agree don't charge $1600 and call them "Pro" So 8GB machines are still around, and not just in the throwaway $200 laptop segment. I would agree with you that…
You're not wrong here! I entirely agree that 8GB laptops are still very much a thing, and RAM hasn't been growing at quite the same rate that it had been. But I'd bet most of those models with 8GB of RAM are much closer to the $800 range (if not more like $600).
I maintain that a closer statement is that typical RAM configurations increased by 4x over 10 years (aka doubling every 5 years). That is admittedly still a far cry from Moore's law doubling every 18 months.
And: the Steam hardware survey is obviously biased toward people who play video games on their computers, which in turn is biased toward people who like to play video games on higher-spec machines. Some of that takes the form of better graphics cards with more VRAM, but you certainly can find gaming laptops on the market with 64GB or even 128GB of RAM, whereas 10-15 years ago, that was the size of the SSD.
I remember in 2011 that 16GB was a lot of RAM even in a desktop (I purchased a kit of 4x4GB for about $100); these days, you can buy twice that amount in a single stick for cheaper. Manufacturers can put more RAM in machines if they want, but there isn't really enough demand to justify a different model with a corresponding increase in sticker price.