• 0 Posts
  • 33 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 5th, 2023

help-circle


  • If we are talking the manufacturing side, rather than design/software i am very curious to see how SIMC develops. You are absolutely right that there is a big advantage for the second mover, since they can avoid dead ends and already know on an abstract level what is working. And diminishing returns also help make gaps be slightly less relevant.

    However i think we can’t just apply the same timeline to them and say “they have 7nm now” and it took others x years to progress from there to 5nm or 3nm, because these steps include the major shift from DUV to EUV, which was in the making for a very long time. And that’s a whole different beast compared to DUV, where they are also probably still relying on ASML machines for the smallest nodes (although i think producing those domestically is much more feasible). Eventually they’ll get there, but i think this isn’t trivial and will take more than 2 years for sure.

    On the design side vs Nvidia the hyperscalers like Alibaba/Tencent/Baidu or maybe even a smaller newcomer might be able to create something competitive for their specific usecases (like the Google TPUs). But Nvidia isn’t standing still either, so i think getting close to parity will be extremely hard there aswell.


    Of course, the price gap will shrink at the same rate as ROCm matures and customers feel its safe to use AMD hardware for training.

    Well to what degree ROCm matures and closes the gap is probably the question. Like i said, i agree that their hardware seems quite capable in many ways, although my knowledge here is quite limited. But AMD so far hasn’t really shown that they can compete with Nvidia on the software side.


    As far as Intel goes, being slow in my reply helps my point. Just today Intel canceled their next-generation GPU Falcon Shore, making it an internal development step only. As much as i am rooting for them, it will need a major shift in culture and talent for them to right the ship. Gaudi 3 wasn’t successful (i think they didn’t even meet their target of $500mio sales) and now they probably don’t have any release in 2025, assuming Jaguar Lake is 2026 since Falcon Shore was slated for end of this year. In my books that is the definition of being behind more than 1 year, considering they are not even close to parity right now.


  • Yeah. I don’t believe market value is a great indicator in this case. In general, I would say that capital markets are rational at a macro level, but not micro. This is all speculation/gambling.

    I have to concede that point to some degree, since i guess i hold similar views with Tesla’s value vs the rest of the automotive Industry. But i still think that the basic hirarchy holds true with nvidia being significantly ahead of the pack.

    My guess is that AMD and Intel are at most 1 year behind Nvidia when it comes to tech stack. “China”, maybe 2 years, probably less.

    Imo you are too optimistic with those estimations, particularly with Intel and China, although i am not an expert in the field.

    As i see it AMD seems to have a quite decent product with their instinct cards in the server market on the hardware side, but they wish they’d have something even close to CUDA and its mindshare. Which would take years to replicate. Intel wish they were only a year behind Nvidia. And i’d like to comment on China, but tbh i have little to no knowledge of their state in GPU development. If they are “2 years, probably less” behind as you say, then they should have something like the rtx 4090, which was released end of 2022. But do they have something that even rivals the 2000 or 3000 series cards?

    However, if you can make chips with 80% performance at 10% price, its a win. People can continue to tell themselves that big tech always will buy the latest and greatest whatever the cost. It does not make it true.

    But the issue is they all make their chips at the same manufacturer, TSMC, even Intel in the case of their GPUs. So they can’t really differentiate much on manufacturing costs and are also competing on the same limited supply. So no one can offer 80% of performance at 10% price, or even close to it. Additionally everything around the GPU (datacenters, rack space, power useage during operation etc.) also costs, so it is only part of the overall package cost and you also want to optimize for your limited space. As i understand it datacenter building and power delivery for them is actually another limiting factor right now for the hyperscalers.

    Google, Meta and Amazon already make their own chips. That’s probably true for DeepSeek as well.

    Google yes with their TPUs, but the others all use Nvidia or AMD chips to train. Amazon has their Graviton CPUs, which are quite competitive, but i don’t think they have anything on the GPU side. DeepSeek is way to small and new for custom chips, they evolved out of a hedge fund and just use nvidia GPUs as more or less everyone else.



  • I have to disagree with that, because this solution isn’t free either.

    Asking them to regulate their use requires them to build excess capacity purely for those peaks (so additional machinery), to have more inventory in stock, and depending on how manual labor intensive it is also means people have to work with a less reliable schedule. With some processes it might also simply not be able to regulate them up/down fast enough (or at all).

    This problem is simply a function of whether it is cheaper to a) build excess capacity or b) build enough capacity to meet demand with steady production and add battery storage as needed.

    Compared to most manufacturing lines battery tech is relatively simple tech, requries little to no human labor and still makes massive gains in price/performance. So my bet is that it’ll be the cheaper solution.

    That said it is of course not a binary thing and there might be some instances where we can optimize energy demand and supply, but i think in the industry those will happen naturally through market forces. However this won’t be enough to smooth out the gap difference in the timing of supply/demand.


  • It’s a reaction to thinking China has better AI

    I don’t think this is the primary reason behind Nvidia’s drop. Because as long as they got a massive technological lead it doesn’t matter as much to them who has the best model, as long as these companies use their GPUs to train them.

    The real change is that the compute resources (which is Nvidia’s product) needed to create a great model suddenly fell of a cliff. Whereas until now the name of the game was that more is better and scale is everything.

    China vs the West (or upstart vs big players) matters to those who are investing in creating those models. So for example Meta, who presumably spends a ton of money on high paying engineers and data centers, and somehow got upstaged by someone else with a fraction of their resources.


  • As a logo the new one seems much worse from a functional perspective than the previous two.

    It has much more and finer details, which I assume will be harder to replicate when printed and look worse the smaller it is. And it’s the only one that includes multiple colours with the American flag on top, rather than being two toned.

    Personally I like Bidens the best out of those three. The first is ok, but the flag looks really weird and again the finer details of the railing on top don’t work for a logo.





  • golli@lemm.eetoTechnology@lemmy.worldDell kills the XPS brand
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    edit-2
    2 months ago

    I never really understood the purpose of the XPS line anyway.

    The issue here is that you are comparing it to their business lineup, while it was a consumer product.

    Dell XPS (“Extreme Performance System”) is a line of consumer-oriented laptop and desktop computers manufactured by Dell since 1993.

    My understanding is that it was their premium consumer line sitting above the more entry level Inspiron line.


  • golli@lemm.eetoTechnology@lemmy.worldDell kills the XPS brand
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    edit-2
    2 months ago

    Imo this kind of shows the basic problem with the xps line. As I understand it it was basically the premium consumer line, not something meant for business use. Meaning it had the nice specs on paper, but not the durability you’d need in a setting with extensive use and where downtime means serious money. But as you demonstrate this distinction was too blurry.


  • Yeah, sadly everything has to sound fancy. Imo this is partially to blame on consumers, but I do wonder how much of it is basic psychology vs induced demand that could be reversed if a company would stick with sensible product names for a while.

    Instead of basic they could also go with something like “essential” or “home” that maybe have slightly less negative associations.



  • Trying to do 10nm without EUV was a forgivable error

    How so? Literally no one uses EUV for 10nm and this wasn’t the problem. Isn’t SMCI even pushing DUV toproducing 5nm?

    My limited understanding is that they were too ambitious with e.g. using cobalt interconnects and at the same time had the issue that they tied their chip designs to specific nodes. Meaning that when the process side slipped they couldnt just take the design and use it on a different node without a lot of effort.

    Also I think they were always going to lose apple at some point. With better products they might have delayed it further. But apple fundamentally has an interest in vertical integration and control. And they were already designing processors for their phones and tablets.


  • Yeah, I guess it depends on what kind of work. I thought that for demanding office stuff the 8gb RAM might end up mattering after all.

    But your $700 with warranty are an amazing deal that make this irrelevant. That really only leaves the single external monitor (without using workarounds) as downside.

    Where I am in Europe however I don’t think I could find the better specced models anywhere close to that price


  • Honestly agreed. For the majority of users that just do light office work and browsing it is a great piece of technology. Although i would say it is less about performance (because those people would be fine with even less) and more about build quality, battery life, fanless design and good screen.

    The one issue i have with it is the 256gb non-removable storage. More actually than the 8gb RAM, which tbh for many people is enough for casual use.

    I am still waiting for anyone not named apple to release a similarly priced fanless laptop with good build quality. With lunar lake it should finally be possible imo.



  • Is YouTube doing it with small creators actually in mind? Who knows, other than them?

    I am pretty confident in guessing that they are not doing it for selfless reasons. Imo the reason is that the less information they give the user, the more you are beholden to the algorithm choosing for you.

    But depending how they hide it it actually might not just be users, but also companies that e.g. buy ads from them. The less information they get, the more they need to trust whatever metric google offers them