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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

#471

Post by wtallis »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #460
to11mtm wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't -have- to be that way necessarily... LPCAMM2/SOCAMM2 exist, heck I think Framework is using LPCAMM2 in one of their new laptops. Heck, I'm willing to bet that a lot of manufacturers would rather go that route than soldered in, if for no other reason than the relative cost of warranty work between the two. However, people probably need to stop being obsessed with ultrathin laptops for that to happen.

> However, people probably need to stop being obsessed with ultrathin laptops for that to happen. I've never been able to understand this. Once we made it down to ~20 mm (which for the record still accommodates dual-stacked SO-DIMMs, a 2.5 inch bay, and a user replaceable battery but not an RJ45 jack) I don't understand what the practical impact of any further reduction is supposed to be. Regardless of how thin you m…

> Regardless of how thin you make it the thing will still be a massive rectangle that you can't flex or press on.

There's very wide variation between laptops in how noticeably they'll flex or yield or creak when pressed. Laptops with a build quality that actually feels solid are far from being ubiquitous or even a majority.

Doubling the thickness of my MacBook Air would probably make it regress on that solid feeling, unless the weight was also significantly increased.

And regardless of whether current laptop form factors could accommodate a 2.5" drive, there's no use in doing so. That drive form factor is entirely obsolete for laptops and is just a waste of space and materials, and has been for about a decade.

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

#472

Post by oofbey »

wmf wrote: post #206
dagmx wrote: post #76

This feels fluff to me on the part of the author (whose work I don’t want to trivialize) but I don’t think they’ve actually looked deeper than a paper spec sheet on this. 1. Yes it has the same number of cores as a 5070 mobile. It’s also running at a shared peak of 2/3 the bandwidth and a shared peak of 2/3 the TDP. The GPU by itself will likely perform at half the dedicated units performance 2. Apple may not have SV…

Lemire is very narrowly interested in CPU SIMD so within that niche it may be interesting. As you said, overall the Spark is good but not great.

I cannot fathom why he brings up CPU SIMD as a potential comparative weakness on the NVIDIA Spark when it has teraflops of CUDA sitting right there.

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

#473

Post by wtallis »

ValentineC wrote: post #457
cm2187 wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And conveniently, by making your machine non upgradeable, it allows the manufacturer to enforce market segmentation / charge a huge premium for small RAM upgrade ( a la Apple)

I wish manufacturers could consider a hybrid approach. There should be no reason an architecture can't support both unified memory (effectively L4(?) cache), and cheaper, upgradeable system memory on sticks for old-school application use.

Upgradable memory and unified memory aren't entirely mutually exclusive. You can design a chip that uses DDR5 and has a decently-powerful iGPU that can use that whole memory pool. But you'll be starving that GPU of bandwidth relative to what you'd achieve with soldered LPDDR, and it's not really worth the trouble of building a large iGPU unless you're also going to feed it with the fastest memory you can reasonably put down.

If you look at eg. an Intel laptop chip, you'll see they design and build a memory PHY that can interface with either DDR5 or LPDDR5x. They don't support splitting it to have one controller operating with DDR5 and the other with LPDDR5x, for fairly obvious reasons: more complex hardware, harder for software/operating systems to manage optimally, and not a lot of benefits to drive demand and justify the expenses. The speed difference between LPDDR5x and DDR5 isn't really large enough to use LPDDR5x as an L4 cache; it would be more like two different NUMA nodes, with complications for laptop power management.

If you want somebody to build a chip with more than the usual 128-bit bus and make some of the memory controllers use LPDDR and some DDR5, then you're asking for a significant increase in chip cost due to the extra memory PHYs and pin count. That cost is only justified if almost all products using the bigger chips are going to actually take advantage of the full complement of memory controllers.

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

#474

Post by fc417fc802 »

wtallis wrote: post #471
fc417fc802 wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, people probably need to stop being obsessed with ultrathin laptops for that to happen. I've never been able to understand this. Once we made it down to ~20 mm (which for the record still accommodates dual-stacked SO-DIMMs, a 2.5 inch bay, and a user replaceable battery but not an RJ45 jack) I don't understand what the practical impact of any further reduction is supposed to be. Regardless of how thin you m…

> Regardless of how thin you make it the thing will still be a massive rectangle that you can't flex or press on. There's very wide variation between laptops in how noticeably they'll flex or yield or creak when pressed. Laptops with a build quality that actually feels solid are far from being ubiquitous or even a majority. Doubling the thickness of my MacBook Air would probably make it regress on that solid feeling,…

I wasn't saying that I want a 2.5 inch drive, I was merely listing off a number of rather large things that fit just fine within a 20 mm budget.

I'm not sure why you seem to think that making something thicker would reduce the stiffness or strength. It's generally the opposite - see the concept of a torsion box. Anyway that wasn't the point. The point was that regardless of how thin you make the thing it will forever remain a cumbersome and delicate item that you have to treat with care when packing so what meaningful positive impact does shaving off those last few mm have? It's never made any sense to me.

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

#475

Post by latch »

strictnein wrote: post #241
infecto wrote: post #15

"I am not sure how many people will run AI models locally. It still seems like a niche application to me. However, it will make decent machines to play video games." I don't know who will be the winner but with some of the recent releases from gemma it seems more probable that you may run some models locally if only from a cost perspective, not even considering business security. Not sure how this type of architectur…

I also don't get why this twitter user is linked here, versus all the news articles about this new hardware that have been everywhere over the past number of days.

I also dislike his self-promotion, but his work _is_ well know and, as far as I know, well looked upon. I think he has more expertise and knowledge in this area than most (including what you'd find in the news).

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

#476

Post by gmueckl »

nearbuy wrote: post #469
gmueckl wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like a lot, but: modern renderers do between 20 to 40 passes, many of them in screen space. And each screen space pass typically reads from at least two input images, sometimes 3 or 4 even with optimally packed inputs. At 60fps that can quickly get up to way over 2000 full screen buffer reads per second and more for less than optimal access patterns in some algorithms. That also doesn't account for textur…

Very true, but I'll point out that even those 2000 full screen reads per second at 4k are only 4% of the 5090's bandwidth. Sacrificing some of that speed for a unified memory architecture seems like a good trade. Plus, DLSS can greatly reduce the bandwidth requirements for 4K gaming.

I'm being very, very conservative with my estimates here. Based on the renderers I know, I could have easily tweaked the numbers to go up to 8000 full screen texture reads per second. That doesn't include texture or geometry or BVH reads or any memory writes. That is all in addition to those operations.

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

#477

Post by TiredOfLife »

arjie wrote: post #265
modeless wrote: post #119

The Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme trounces Nvidia's chip in single core CPU performance. It beats Intel and AMD's best, too. It has unified memory. It's the only CPU in the same league as Apple's M-series in both CPU performance and power efficiency. And it's available in laptops today, not later this year. People are sleeping on Qualcomm.

Garbage operating system support. If you can’t do Linux support it’s a bit pointless because there’s two platforms for this that matter: Linux and Darwin. Qualcomm is like AMD was for GPUs for like decades. Lots of announcements and people on the Internet are huge fans based on web pages they’ve read but if you try to make it work it’s a nightmare. Snapdragon X Elite doesn’t work on Linux so it’s a pointless platform…

It has Linux support from wsl2

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

#478

Post by satvikpendem »

arjie wrote: post #265
modeless wrote: post #119

The Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme trounces Nvidia's chip in single core CPU performance. It beats Intel and AMD's best, too. It has unified memory. It's the only CPU in the same league as Apple's M-series in both CPU performance and power efficiency. And it's available in laptops today, not later this year. People are sleeping on Qualcomm.

Garbage operating system support. If you can’t do Linux support it’s a bit pointless because there’s two platforms for this that matter: Linux and Darwin. Qualcomm is like AMD was for GPUs for like decades. Lots of announcements and people on the Internet are huge fans based on web pages they’ve read but if you try to make it work it’s a nightmare. Snapdragon X Elite doesn’t work on Linux so it’s a pointless platform…

Alternatively, just use Windows.

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

#479

Post by satvikpendem »

mathgladiator wrote: post #415
siliconc0w wrote: post #406

I can't really see wide adoption of local LLMs unless prices really start to climb. It makes sense to use cheaper hosted smaller models like Sonnet or even Kimi but these won't run a Kimi-class model and that is really the floor for non-toy agentic tasks. Spending 5k to avoid a $20 subscription really only makes sense for niche security reasons.

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?
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