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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

#571

Post by wolvesechoes »

dominotw wrote: post #330
robotresearcher wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s completely technically possible to have cloud services where customer data is opaque to the provider. Some of Apple’s services are like this already, for example. I think there’s a sweet spot currently with munging your data blindly on the server so that your client device battery still lasts all day. Meanwhile Apple and others push on with making client side models more efficient so that eventually the server c…

dont want to share my pics with "cloud services"

You may not, but experience shows that most people are just fine sharing the most personal stuff not only with cloud services, but with hole world through anti-social media.

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

#572

Post by Shorel »

valleyer wrote: post #490
Shorel wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That exact quote? No, never. He said something like: current computers at the time had 64kb of RAM, so the OS was designed with a limit of 640kb, and he believed this would give them 10 years of future proofing. As it happened, that limit was reached much faster, in about 6 years.

MS-DOS didn't create that limit; the physical memory map of the 5150 did. So Microsoft (and Gates) would not have made that decision.

You are right. The quote must have been slightly different then. I'm sure about the 10 years part.

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

#573

Post by wtallis »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #562
wtallis wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Framework already sells LPCAMM2 at 8533MT/s with full validation: From your link: > Framework Laptop 13 Pro (Intel® Core™ Ultra Series 3) supports one slot of LPCAMM2 memory up to 96GB at the native 7467 MT/s speed. It is compatible with LPCAMM2 modules with memory speed rated above 7467 MT/s, but the speed will be capped at 7467 MT/s because of the platform limitation. The modules in question can only theoreticall…

> You're either doing the math wrong, or just plain looking at the wrong systems. Try looking at the M5 generation. The M5 generation isn't "1.5 years old" and even those aren't all that speed. The M5 Max with the 32-core GPU is ~7200MT/s, while the one with the 40-core GPU is over $4000. > Yes, that's a problem, and Apple has solved it by moving the DRAM on-package. There is no "package" here. Apple's processors are…

> The M5 Max with the 32-core GPU is ~7200MT/s,

Ok, so the problem is you doing the math wrong. Note that the MacBook Pro configuration you're talking about has a DRAM capacity of 36GB, compared to 48+ GB for the ones with all the cores enabled and the full memory bandwidth. That 32-core config isn't running the DRAM slower, it's running with a narrower bus and fewer DRAM chips: https://theapplewiki.com/wiki/MacBook_Pro_(16-inch,_M5_Max)

> There is no "package" here. Apple's processors are soldered to the logic board, as are Intel's in laptops.

Denying the difference between putting the RAM on-package vs on the motherboard doesn't make that difference stop being real.

> Apple being the first to ship LPDDR5-9600 when it was that recent doesn't imply that it needs to be soldered

Apple wasn't even close to being the first to ship LPDDR5-9600. Android phones using DRAM at that speed started shipping at the end of 2023, and moved on to 10700MT/s starting in 2024. The situation here is not anywhere close to being one of Apple paying a premium to get faster DRAM chips that other laptop manufacturers can afford. Rather, for most of the past several years, laptop manufacturers (especially on the x86 side) have been unable to buy DRAM chips with a rating slow enough to match what their processors are capable of running at. It's become quite common to see on a Thinkpad spec sheet that eg. the DRAM parts are rated for 7467MT/s but will only operate at 6400MT/s due to processor limitations, then the next year see that the DRAM parts are rated for 8533MT/s but run at 7467MT/s, and so on. LPDDR speed increases have been driven primarily by flagship smartphones, and even the leftover slower-binned parts are faster than what most laptops can handle.

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

#574

Post by marcosdumay »

trumpdong wrote: post #555
marcosdumay wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You meant a 128GB (instead of 12GB)? And yes, a L4 cache can be one way out of that problem. Another way is making the L3 cache lines wider and working the hell out of improving your management algorithm. It's not a theoretically impossible problem. It's also not something you can solve automatically with a bit more money or some simple decisions. It's possible this is the best architecture available, but it's not ce…

I mean 12GB, an amount that is typical in such a system today, which you can buy at any computer store.

Oh, I entirely misunderstood your comment :)

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

#575

Post by reactordev »

dylan604 wrote: post #191
reactordev wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

10000000x this. They have been sleeping on Arm since windows phone. I just don’t see them ever having an original thought again. They could have had a 128core arm chip by now.

Unless the chip was called Copilot, they are not thinking anything about it. If was called Copilot, they'd have already figured out how to shove it down your throat.

I'm sure there's an AI diagram of it on a powerpoint slide on some mid-level executive's deck that he thought would probably be clever.

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

#576

Post by nearbuy »

gmueckl wrote: post #542
nearbuy wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But do you think you'll reach 1.8 TB/s?

Quite likely, but the transfer throughput is required in bursts, not necessarily continously. Let me put it this way: what I care about is how quickly data arrives after a bunch of shader threads request it. Throughput is one way for hardware to reduce that time. The other way is to hide the latency (GPUs do a lot to keep themselves busy while waiting for memory), but those strategies can only do so much. Lower memor…

Empirically, these benchmarks are showing it doesn't make much difference once you reach this level of bandwidth: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/early-rtx-50...

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

#577

Post by nearbuy »

maccard wrote: post #563
nearbuy wrote: post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All good points. Absolutely an RTX 3060 is a more normal gamer GPU than the 5090, but you're also not playing in 4k without DLSS on a 3060. Drop to the most common resolution on Steam (1080p), and turn on DLSS and you've basically cancelled out that 6x factor in bandwidth. Even if the 3060 had more bandwidth, it doesn't have enough processing power for native 4k gaming in typical games. So 360 GB/s is still a lot of…

Playing at 1080p doesn’t reduce your texture size, for the most part. You still use those 4k textures because you’re only seeing a subset of the texture projected at a close distance. We’re still using 4k textures for terrain brushes to cover the 6km open worlds. DLSS isn’t just a magic on switch for free perfect up scaling. If you rendered at 720p and DLSS’ed up to 1080 it’s still going to look pretty rubbish.Its al…

> Playing at 1080p doesn’t reduce your texture size, for the most part. You still use those 4k textures because you’re only seeing a subset of the texture projected at a close distance.

That greatly reduces your GPU memory bandwidth though. Sampling a subset of the texture only transfers that subset. Reading from higher mip levels uses less bandwidth. If your textures are high enough resolution to appear sharp at both resolutions (at least one texel per pixel), you need 4x more bandwidth to sample your material textures at 4k screen resolution for the same scene.

More importantly, material texture sampling is not most of your bandwidth to begin with. At 4k, most of your bandwidth is going to your full screen render passes. Especially with deferred rendering.

> DLSS isn’t just a magic on switch for free perfect up scaling. If you rendered at 720p and DLSS’ed up to 1080 it’s still going to look pretty rubbish.

I don't find this true at all. DLSS 4 Balanced looks excellent and renders at less than 720p for 1080p output.

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

#578

Post by strictnein »

latch wrote: post #475
strictnein wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Ahh, thanks, that explains things a little more. I wasn't familiar with the author, and his tweet just read like one of those people on Linkedin who regurgitates knowledge and passes it off as their own insight.

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

#579

Post by Silhouette »

throw0101a wrote: post #526
Silhouette wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I'm bearish on Anthropic, OpenAI, and friends. I am not confident that we will continue to see the same pace of improvement in frontier model capabilities as we have seen over the past year or two - not using similar mathematics at least. But I think that getting results that are close enough to the same standard to be a realistic substitute but in a model small enough to run locally may well happen quite…

> This is why I'm bearish on Anthropic, OpenAI, and friends. Just because you can do more and more things at home (thanks Moore and Dennard), doesn't preclude needing things also done remotely. The number of at-home systems seems to have fed a growing number of remote systems (especially once always-on connectivity became ubiquitous). It's basically the angle Apple is going for: do as much locally (for the sake of pr…

I agree that one doesn't preclude the other. But the sky high valuations we've been seeing for the AI industry recently can only be justified if they bring about a fundamental change in our society and those companies continue to bring in the lion's share of the resulting profits. I don't see why everyone else in our society - particularly other large businesses with lots of money to invest - is going to play a game by the AI companies' rules once they can take their ball and go home and still have most of the fun without paying much for it by comparison.

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

#580

Post by Rohansi »

throwaway27448 wrote: post #405
Rohansi wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything that doesn't have a discrete GPU has unified memory these days. If you're asking for something closer to the RTX Spark or Apple Silicon then look at AMD's Strix Halo systems.

> Everything that doesn't have a discrete GPU has unified memory these days. Sorry, I meant before the M1 came out. And you and I both know that "unified memory" doesn't refer to allocating ram to the gpu for zero-swap sharing.

Also, if you'd like to know of an earlier example, the very first Raspberry Pi has fully unified memory. Released 2012, SoC from 2011. It's not exposed in the usual APIs which is why you have a configurable RAM allocation for the GPU, so you need to write special code targeting the GPU cores. You can pass a pointer from the CPU and have the GPU read data directly. Results are written back to RAM which can be read by the CPU.
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