The Rise, Fall and Revival of AMD (2020) • Hacker News Board

Re: The Rise, Fall and Revival of AMD (2020)

#41

Post by floatboth » Sat, Mar 20, 2021, 10:02 AM UTC

dragontamer wrote: post #19

floatboth wrote: post #12

Huh, TIL: the K6 came from an acquisition. > Graphics Core Next (GCN). This design would last for nearly 8 years […] still in use today as the integrated GPU And in desktop GPUs. The goddamn power of marketing! Even tech writers seem to assume that "RDNA" is some kind of revolutionary from-scratch change. It's still the same ISA!! Look at the drivers and compilers. It's simply the regular evolution, just with a rebra…

> The goddamn power of marketing! Even tech writers seem to assume that "RDNA" is some kind of revolutionary from-scratch change. It's still the same ISA!! Look at the drivers and compilers. It's simply the regular evolution, just with a rebrand. GCN 1.2 changed the opcodes from GCN 1.0. If the machine code doesn't line up anymore, is it really fare to call it the same ISA? In the case of RDNA: its all 32-wide SIMD i…

In the gpu world it's common to change instructions in iterative updates, since assembly is not really a popular way to program these. I think it's fair to call it the same as long as the compiler backends and drivers are still the same ones. Still amdgpu in LLVM, still RadeonSI and RADV in Mesa, etc.

Re: The Rise, Fall and Revival of AMD (2020)

#42

Post by greggyb » Sat, Mar 20, 2021, 2:32 PM UTC

aidenn0 wrote: post #37

greggyb wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doing a quick spec out of a Talos II that is similar[0] to my Threadripper 3970x workstation puts the price at ~2x.

And a typical TR workstation is 2x the price of an "average desktop" so maybe a 4x multiplier?

You could price out a desktop for your own comparison. I don't think it's fair to compare something explicitly designed to be a workstation to a desktop-class machine.

Re: The Rise, Fall and Revival of AMD (2020)

#43

Post by aidenn0 » Sat, Mar 20, 2021, 10:18 PM UTC

greggyb wrote: post #42

aidenn0 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And a typical TR workstation is 2x the price of an "average desktop" so maybe a 4x multiplier?

You could price out a desktop for your own comparison. I don't think it's fair to compare something explicitly designed to be a workstation to a desktop-class machine.

It's both fair and not; if you want a desktop, the cheapest POWER desktop is 3k, and at 4 cores it's arguably not competing against TR. Yes it's IO throughput will put a desktop class part to shame, but you can't go any cheaper.

Re: The Rise, Fall and Revival of AMD (2020)

#44

Post by deaddodo » Mon, Mar 22, 2021, 12:38 AM UTC

setpatchaddress wrote: post #26

I can't get past this sentence: > From these humble beginnings, and a quick move from Santa Clara to Sunnyvale (Silicon Valley in California) Is the rest of the article better than this? For those outside the Bay Area: Santa Clara and Sunnyvale are physically adjacent, and I'm guessing all of the sites where AMD's HQ has been historically located are probably within 0.5 miles of each other near that border.

Meh, people generally get confused by California's municipalities.

"Los Angeles is so sprawling"....I mean yeah, it definitely is; but it's especially so when you erroneously believe Pasadena and Santa Monica to be part of LA. Or worse so, parts of OC, Ventura and the IE.

Re: The Rise, Fall and Revival of AMD (2020)

#45

Post by greggyb » Mon, Mar 22, 2021, 2:29 PM UTC

aidenn0 wrote: post #43

greggyb wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could price out a desktop for your own comparison. I don't think it's fair to compare something explicitly designed to be a workstation to a desktop-class machine.

It's both fair and not; if you want a desktop, the cheapest POWER desktop is 3k, and at 4 cores it's arguably not competing against TR. Yes it's IO throughput will put a desktop class part to shame, but you can't go any cheaper.

Agreed. There isn't really a viable desktop-class offering from Raptor. This is a shame.

For those who have need for the workstation-ish features Raptor offers in its Talos line, the premium isn't too great over a roughly equivalent x86 workstation-class machine.