GPUs & CPUs & Enthusiast hardware: Questions, Discussion and fanboy slap-fights - Nvidia & AMD & Intel - Separe but Equal. Intel rides in the back of the bus.

[The Ugly One]

I do find it interesting that Dell also had growth while HP lost badly. HP's high end laptops are good, but they use that veneer of quality to sell horrible horrible pieces of crap. Dell has been doing a lot to improve the consistency of their products ever since they went private, i'm running one of their GPUs (got it used) and it's been pretty rock solid.

Dell sells piles of corporate laptops, and various companies have had it with Lenovo and HP selling Chinesium fall-apart shitware.

 

[Betonhaus]

Dell sells piles of corporate laptops, and various companies have had it with Lenovo and HP selling Chinesium fall-apart shitware.

Dell does try to have minimum standards of quality for even their cheapest models, which can be appreciated.

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

We might see more on-die RAM, like the Apple Silicone chips do, in mobile chips? Large amounts of fast and active ram helps for AI systems. The leaked AIs were far more memory intensive then cpu intensive, with the capability of your AI completely dependent on the amount of ram you had.

I think they're starting out with these "AI engines" in mobile to kind of see how it plays out. If evaluating lots and lots of many-parameter functions really does become the next big thing in computing, it'll be deployed in every desktop CPU soon enough. If ChatGPT ends up being a huge fad, then no worries, they didn't go all-in. Intel went all-in on AVX-512 prematurely, and it ended up bein a hot, expensive waste of silicon (in part because, again, most programmers are too retarded to write SIMD-friendly code).

I can almost guarantee on-die RAM is coming. The reason it's not going to be in Meteor Lake or Strix Point is the basic design parameters for those chips were locked in ~2 years ago, so there were still a lot of question marks around whether Apple's move was the right one. And, as it turns out, it was the right move. Most people do not, in fact, ever upgrade their RAM. The US PC (meaning all desktops + laptops, not Windows) market is down 7.3% YOY, but in the same period, Apple's sales were up 18%. I don't have to have any inside info to know that everyone else has noticed that computers with no dGPU and fixed RAM are growing like crazy and are telling Intel and AMD they want a competitive product.

I've been waiting for the multi-gigabyte on-die/package L4 cache for a long time now, and lost a lot of optimism. Especially since AMD went big on L3 instead, with staggered releases on the desktop, and nothing on mobile yet. It seems like they would add 32 MB of extra L3 to APUs and treat it like the Infinity Cache used in discrete GPUs (compensating for a smaller memory bus, etc.), before messing around with adding gigabytes of L4 to an APU.

Meteor Lake with 64 EU and 128 MB of L4 has been spotted, so I don't think 256 MB would be out of the question for the 128 EU halo product. But you can't expect even a gigabyte out of the starting gate.

I think Microsoft in particular is pushing hard for the AI accelerators, coming up with uses for them, and has demoed software using them. It's only a matter of time before it reaches every new chip. AMD could skip it for Granite Ridge Zen 5 desktop CPUs, but if they include it in that, it's a wrap. Over at Intel, I wouldn't expect Raptor Lake Refresh desktop CPUs to have anything new, but we'll see about Arrow Lake.

I'd like to see how Intel fixes the AVX-512 on consumer CPUs situation.

 

[The Ugly One]

I've been waiting for the multi-gigabyte on-die/package L4 cache for a long time now, and lost a lot of optimism.

I'm not expecting huge L4. Apple Silicon is now putting LPDDR on the package, and that's what I'm expecting from x86 in the future, at least in laptops. The power savings alone are just too significant to ignore.

I'd like to see how Intel fixes the AVX-512 on consumer CPUs situation.

I think removing it is the fix. It doesn't add much value to consumer CPUs.

 

[Freedom Fighter]

Very excited to see the release of Alder Lake-Refresh-Refresh later this year. What magic will it hold?

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

I think removing it is the fix. It doesn't add much value to consumer CPUs.

The one thing I can think of off the top of my head is that it improved emulator performance:

https://hothardware.com/news/rpcs3-adds-avx512-on-zen-4

AMD's "double-pumped" implementation of AVX-512 is sane. It's not as fast as it could be but it avoids the pitfalls of Intel's.

Very excited to see the release of Alder Lake-Refresh-Refresh later this year. What magic will it hold?

Probably:
* Digital Linear Voltage Regulator enabled for a small performance or bigger efficiency boost.
* 8+12 i7-14700K model to replace the 8+8 i7-13700K. Why they couldn't make that before is beyond me, if 8+8 was using the 8+16 die. Maybe binning groups of 4 E-cores is more difficult than it appears.

 

[Pee Cola]

This Britbong boomer in the black shirt is one of the very few tech YouTubers I take seriously.

No soy thumbnails, no free $5k GPUs from sponsors, no water cooling setups stolen from a prime mover, no RGB LEDs or any other gay shit... just a sensible real world build by someone who actually knows what he's talking about.

 

[The Ugly One]

The one thing I can think of off the top of my head is that it improved emulator performance:

https://hothardware.com/news/rpcs3-adds-avx512-on-zen-4

Emulator coders are by and large the sort of hotshots that most coders used to be. Unfortunately, 99% of application devs have no idea how to write a loop over an array without shitting it up with branches and hash table lookups, so their code doesn't vectorize. That's if they actually know what an array is and how to use malloc/free without crapping their pants - they're probably just going to bring in 500 node.js libs to do something trivial and call it d ay.

AMD's "double-pumped" implementation of AVX-512 is sane. It's not as fast as it could be but it avoids the pitfalls of Intel's.

For most applications, which are bandwidth-bound, it's just as fast. AVX-512 should have just been AVX-3 and stayed 256-bit, but Intel was trying to salvage technology from the Larrabee project.

* 8+12 i7-14700K model to replace the 8+8 i7-13700K. Why they couldn't make that before is beyond me, if 8+8 was using the 8+16 die. Maybe binning groups of 4 E-cores is more difficult than it appears.

Probably weren't enough 8+12 cores passing to justify a separate SKU. They've really dragged Alder Lake out a long time...that said, it's a pretty good architecture. I've got no complaints with mine.

 

[Betonhaus]

What case style do people prefer? I like the cube styles like my Thermaltake Suppressor F1, but if my next computer doesn't need a GPU I'd problably go with a lian li or something smaller.

 

[Susanna]

What case style do people prefer? I like the cube styles like my Thermaltake Suppressor F1, but if my next computer doesn't need a GPU I'd problably go with a lian li or something smaller.

I’m a big fan of SFF+watercooling. Preferably slim tower-style cases.

 

[The Backwards Man]

Gonna miss EVGA when they're gone. Not just for their GPU's but for their power supplies as well.

Which begs the question: which brand is now the premier go-to for geforce cards and power supplies? I wanna get a 4090 and a 1000+ watt psu but I don't wanna buy dogshit from someone like gigabyte.

What case style do people prefer? I like the cube styles like my Thermaltake Suppressor F1, but if my next computer doesn't need a GPU I'd problably go with a lian li or something smaller.

I miss thermaltakes older case designs like the Soprano or the Tsunami Dream. They looked too flashy for some peoples tastes but I like them.

But right now I have to agree with snov, SFF cases are always cool and stand out more than the millionth black box tower.

 

[Post Reply]

What case style do people prefer? I like the cube styles like my Thermaltake Suppressor F1, but if my next computer doesn't need a GPU I'd problably go with a lian li or something smaller.

I picked up a Seasonic Syncro Q704 when it went on sale from Newegg the other day, so I'm going to be trying out a Reverse ATX build. I understand the appeal of the little cube cases though, I have my NAS in a Fractal Node 804.

 

[Lone Wandering Courier]

What case style do people prefer? I like the cube styles like my Thermaltake Suppressor F1, but if my next computer doesn't need a GPU I'd problably go with a lian li or something smaller.

I like having a full atx tower, but I really miss having optical drive bays and even an external 3.5" bay. Installing hard drives used to be easier honestly.

 

[The Ugly One]

What case style do people prefer? I like the cube styles like my Thermaltake Suppressor F1, but if my next computer doesn't need a GPU I'd problably go with a lian li or something smaller.

I prefer small cases that have skulls on them for true gamer power.



I think I'm done with big towers forever. For gaming purposes, at least for me, there's no need for a heatbox the size of a small fridge. I have negative interest in triple-slot GPUs or CPUs that require heat sinks as big as my head. My last computer was a monstrosity from iBuyPower that I got on Black Friday. This time around, I was kind of tempted to get the Enthusiast model, but Arc GPUs have compatibility problems with older games, and I play a lot of old games.

 

[Lone Wandering Courier]

I think I'm done with big towers forever. For gaming purposes, at least for me, there's no need for a heatbox the size of a small fridge. I have negative interest in triple-slot GPUs or CPUs that require heat sinks as big as my head. My last computer was a monstrosity from iBuyPower that I got on Black Friday. This time around, I was kind of tempted to get the Enthusiast model, but Arc GPUs have compatibility problems with older games, and I play a lot of old games.

In theory I like smaller PCs, but I always feel like in the long term I'd be screwing myself in terms of upgrades and expansion. I certainly felt that way when for a few years I daily drived a pc with a mini itx board.

 

[The Ugly One]

In theory I like smaller PCs, but I always feel like in the long term I'd be screwing myself in terms of upgrades and expansion. I certainly felt that way when for a few years I daily drived a pc with a mini itx board.

IME, midrange hardware gives you a good, solid four or five years now, and can be stretched quite a bit longer than that if you're willing to fiddle with settings to keep it going. The machine I replaced had an i7-7700 and a 5700XT, and frankly, it was fine. I just thought the NUC was cool, so I bought it. What I have now is an i9-12900 with a 6700 XT (the 5700 didn't fit). That smaller model pictured has an A770M 16 GB.

 

[Road Work Ahead]

I still like my full atx tower. It just sits next to my desk on floor space that otherwise be unused, so it doesn't really take up that much space. It also has 2 5.25" bays. They'll have to pry my optical drive from my cold dead hands.

 

[DavidS877]

What case style do people prefer? I like the cube styles like my Thermaltake Suppressor F1, but if my next computer doesn't need a GPU I'd problably go with a lian li or something smaller.

The one case to rule them all:

 

[Betonhaus]

Has anyone been familiar with PicoPSUs? Where there's a DC converter on the wall plug and the entire PSU sits on the motherboard's power socket?

 

[Susanna]

Has anyone been familiar with PicoPSUs? Where there's a DC converter on the wall plug and the entire PSU sits on the motherboard's power socket?

I’ve seen them a few times in SFF builds. It’s not something I would use myself, 200W is a very tight constraint to build within and Flex PSUs are small enough with decent power density that there’s rarely a need for anything smaller.