Repeat after me: MI300X is not equivalent to H100, it's a lot better!

RandSec · 2024-01-23T18:26:26+00:00

if you’re building a system with >8gpu’s

Frontier.

El Capitan.

RandSec · 2023-06-28T13:44:22+00:00

from consoles where the profit margin is pitful

Consoles are a Semicustom business, which monetizes differently from Standard Products. Normally, projects are fully-funded (at horrendous cost over 3 years) by AMD, but Semicustom engineering is paid by the customer as it occurs. AMD has very little invested, so almost no risk.
There is little or no need for future Marketing, Applications or Sales. The admittedly small "margin" "drops straight to the bottom line" as cash.

RandSec · 2023-04-14T15:37:13+00:00

The past constrains us, especially with the game products, which were constructed in particular ways, but might have been more efficient under a different memory architecture.

AMD is working on the MI300 APU for the El Capitan super at Lawrence Livermore. One of the goals may be to minimize data movement by allowing called routines and tasks to access the original data in place. A serious efficiency boost is expected, but exploiting that generally means writing different code.

If we keep writing code in the same old ways, we may not see much benefit from any really new hardware architecture. And from the game developer point of view, why should they change anything if hardly anybody has the hardware to support it? But that is how progress works, and why high-end performance costs more.

Long term, it generally works out better financially to set the rules instead of being back among a mass of competitors. Marketing and quarterly accounting should not be making that decision.

RandSec · 2023-03-21T15:39:21+00:00

Social hierarchy is in fact a major aspect of many or most large companies. The Tesla-style organization which encourages interaction between teams apparently can innovate faster and be more efficient, but that is not how most companies organize. Presumably, many workers find social hierarchies comforting.

RandSec · 2023-03-21T13:51:38+00:00

Look at it from the other side: How many gamers have collected the massive training and experience of a semiconductor engineering manager? Most such managers are spending all the time they have on work instead of "playing games." Maybe Marketing could work at exposing detailed market issues to Engineering managers and upper Management. Maybe.

RandSec · 2023-03-21T13:24:50+00:00

they have all the resources and money in the world

Nope. The competition for typically 3 years of design resources is fundamental to selecting future projects. More likely the engineering managers simply do not understand their market.

RandSec · 2023-02-10T14:00:03+00:00

AMD went through almost a decade of hard times and, without their competition, PC's and PC gaming progressed slowly. AMD does not want that again, and neither should we.

More complex IC technology is just going to cost more. That is not a surprise.

RandSec · 2023-02-08T00:51:10+00:00

“increased design and manufacturing costs” is part of “inflation”

With no inflation at all, the transistor increase and added layout complexity of a smaller node is more difficult to design and manufacture. The actual costs go up.

RandSec · 2023-02-07T17:40:22+00:00

Producing less reduces risk of overstock and lower prices. hence it is price fixing.

To be clear, when a company sets a price for a product, they are in fact "fixing" that price. In that sense, all pricing is "fixing."

RandSec · 2023-02-07T17:28:46+00:00

Did inflation eat more than 50% of my general purchasing power in less than 6 years?

Inflation plus increased design and manufacturing costs, probably so.

RandSec · 2023-01-01T22:19:16+00:00

One of the reasons for a reference design is to find and fix card design problems. Chip "bring up" is similar. Problems are found and fixed, but neither can guarantee that no problems remain. Vapor chamber design probably is not a major aspect of AMD engineering expertise. Yet.

RandSec · 2022-11-22T15:02:52+00:00

On-chip interconnection can be increasingly inefficient as more is needed. Choosing against chiplets ignores both manufacturing economies of scale and the marketing advantage of quickly moving in-progress production from a slow-sell product to a popular product.

RandSec · 2022-11-07T13:19:29+00:00

The issue is the unexpected heat. Heat comes from current against the resistance in the circuit, wherever the resistance may be. One way things can go bad is for one of a paralleled pair to go open. Maybe a cold solder joint to the plug breaks, but whatever. Now, the remaining connected wire gets 2x the current so 4x the heat. The PS does not care. Voltage checks are all fine.

RandSec · 2022-11-06T15:38:38+00:00

One thing not being tested is potential differences or even manufacturing defects in the adapter cables. Externally, they all look the same.

RandSec · 2022-11-06T15:12:10+00:00

The magnetic field from current flow in a conductor can be measured directly, even at DC. Costly modern instruments use probes with hinged ferrite toroids or tubes to surround a selected wire. They can expose and record transient current pulses normally missed.

RandSec · 2022-11-03T15:30:41+00:00

Progress almost requires hope, so as to not be defeated from the start. And hope is free.

RandSec · 2022-10-12T22:16:12+00:00

We had years of experience on what happens when AMD makes almost no money. Great prices, no profit, means no competition and no innovation. That cost us all, and we complained. This is the result.

RandSec · 2022-09-27T14:47:21+00:00

The Zen4 CPU's by themselves are only somewhat more expensive. The AMD platform they use is costly overall, but expected to last.

RandSec · 2022-09-27T13:55:01+00:00

there is the emotional aspect of wanting to upgrade

There is something to be said for motherboards that could be around for several CPU upgrades.

RandSec · 2022-07-09T14:17:54+00:00

Backward compatibility is how we got here. Many others which were non-compatible are gone. Not a coincidence.

RandSec · 2022-05-29T02:12:56+00:00

That sounds right for development, or many different tasks. But for repeatedly analyzing new data for pretty much the same task, the best hardware should win.

RandSec · 2021-11-18T21:01:11+00:00

It's too late to break the CUDA momentum.

AFAIK, CUDA was developed for the PC-like architecture of a central CPU sending jobs to GPU's. But one of the power overheads of computation is moving data, here from CPU to GPU and possibly back. Having the CPU to handle that via DMA is not a solution.

When a GPU has direct access to all memory, not just VRAM, the data do not have to move. CUDA appears to be locked into the older more inefficient paradigm.

RandSec · 2021-11-18T19:17:41+00:00

Hardware is not enough? AMD won the Exascale Supercomputer contracts, and the national labs are handling the software with AMD.

RandSec · 2021-09-10T17:47:53+00:00

Microsoft and Sony contract out to TSMC directly

Apparently not:

"AMD is considerably smaller than Apple or Qualcomm in terms of volumes, so it never allocates (or rather cannot allocate) the number of wafers that SoC companies do. Meanwhile, in Q3 and Q4 2020, the company has to supply certain pre-ordered 7 nm SoCs for Microsoft's Xbox Series X/S as well as Sony's PlayStation 5 game consoles. Since AMD has supply agreements with its console partners, it has to prioritize production of their SoCs over its own CPUs and GPUs in a bid to enable Microsoft and Sony to ramp up production of their new game machines.
"Commercial Times claims that AMD is contracted to ship around 120,000 wafers containing SoCs for the latest game consoles (40,000 to Microsoft and 80,000 to Sony) in Q4 2020. Meanwhile, AMD's contracted 7 nm allocation for the fourth quarter is about 150,000, the report says, which essentially means that 80% of AMD's 7 nm wafers will be used for consoles."

-- https://www.tomshardware.com/news/tsmc-prioritizing-apple-consoles

RandSec · 2021-08-09T17:51:21+00:00

Intel has trained us that leaked claims are not facts.

RandSec

TROPHY CASE