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]

People gave Pat a ton of shit during his tenure, but he had something that the current CEO doesn't. Pat knew Intel was a semiconductor company and had the background for it. Whichever schmuck that runs it now doesn't, and that'll ultimately do more damage to the company. Like Steve Jobs said, when the marketing department starts running the company, that's when it dies. And IIRC he was the one to greenlight and risk Intel Arc despite the disastrous launch of Alchemist, and the current leadership will kill it off without any moment's notice the moment the green line dips slightly down.

Lip-Bu Tan ran Cadence, which sells semiconductor design software & has its own in-house semiconductor IP that it licenses out, for 13 years. He's not just some random asshole. Everybody in the semiconductor industry knows this guy. The reason to still be concerned is Cadence has no formal QA. Lip-Bu is one of those guys who sees QA as dead weight in the chase for quarterly revenue. So out of the big three, Cadence, Synopsys, and Mentor Siemens, Cadence's software is easily the shittiest. He grew Cadence primarily by acquiring smaller companies that were in the toolchain Cadence's customers used and rolling them into attractively priced offerings. Can't argue with what it did to the stock price, but that kind of thing isn't what's needed to save intel. Bureaucracy definitely needs to be burned to the ground inside Intel, so maybe he'll apply some badly-needed medicine. Pat G didn't seem to think the machine itself needed changing. But the question is what Lip-Bu will replace it with.

 

[Agent Abe Caprine]

X3D is for sick-ass gamer cred when money's no object. I'd argue that $200 is better spent on a better GPU or a better monitor (way too many people spend thousands on a gaming PC and then play games on shitty 1080p60 office monitors).

Playing at 1080p makes that 1000+ pc last longer. I can play current gen games with my 8 year old computer(GPU is 5 years old) because of this.

 

[Fcret]

Playing at 1080p makes that 1000+ pc last longer. I can play current gen games with my 8 year old computer(GPU is 5 years old) because of this.

A 5 year-old GPU is still current-gen. That's on par with what's in the PS5 and XBX.

 

[Susanna]

I really don't get the idea of gaming laptops. I guess if you want something like a SFF PC with a screen and keyboard when you move frequently and want to set up a full system for work and gaming instead of having a full tower PC it kinda makes sense, but they're so impractical as a laptop.

The ones that are worth a shit, so the ones with a powerful dedicated GPU and a powerful CPU, will be those 18 inch, 2.6kg bricks requiring a high power charger to be plugged in at all times since running demanding workloads on those components will drain the battery in a second. It's massive and heavy to be able to cool those high performance parts, so you're not gonna be hauling it around in your backpack. Maybe if you go full autismo and get one of those massive hiking backpacks with support straps, but still, it's not really a laptop when it's so big, heavy and power hungry that you only carry it to set it up on a desk.

IMO if you already have a powerful rig at home, all you realistically need for a laptop is a 14-inch, sub-2kg laptop with an AMD APU. It has enough performance for all the standard desktop tasks, realistically the iGPU will be more than enough for your average use case outside the house and it will be able to run older games, the battery life will be much better, it's slightly larger than an A4 notebook and even if it's not a sub-1kg ultrabook it's still decently light. Plus, with everything using USB-C nowadays, you can get something like a 100W charger, and it'll be enough to charge your laptop and your phone simultaneously as well as charge your laptop from a powerbank as those smaller laptops need 45W/65W to charge and not 100W.

Do you really need your entire home PC to fit in your backpack? Or do you just need a middle ground between your home PC and a smartphone?

There is a laptop that combines great power with good battery life. It’s called the MacBook Pro. Living with the ten minute battery lives of Windows laptops is a torment you can choose to eschew.

Yes.
I run a ton of VMs for work, when I travel I need the same capability as when I'm home. Being not near a plug isn't an issue and even my gaming laptop will deal with the 1-2 hours being in a meeting when needed. At home I have a personal desktop and then my gaming laptop where work usually runs. Now, sure, I'd like a 128GB gaming laptop and 4TB instead of 40GB and 2TB.

I have a powerful PC at home and a MacBook Air for work and travel. The Air on its own is a pretty capable machine, but when I really need power I’ll use RDP over Wireguard to connect to my home computer and remote control it. Depending on how far I am I can even play video games way, GPU acceleration works fine, the only real issue is latency.

 

[WULULULULU]

People gave Pat a ton of shit during his tenure, but he had something that the current CEO doesn't. Pat knew Intel was a semiconductor company and had the background for it. Whichever schmuck that runs it now doesn't, and that'll ultimately do more damage to the company. Like Steve Jobs said, when the marketing department starts running the company, that's when it dies. And IIRC he was the one to greenlight and risk Intel Arc despite the disastrous launch of Alchemist, and the current leadership will kill it off without any moment's notice the moment the green line dips slightly down.

I honestly want Intel to do good with Celestial dGPUs and Nova Lake but hearing this is making it more grim.

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

I honestly want Intel to do good with Celestial dGPUs and Nova Lake but hearing this is making it more grim.

I don't have any hope that they won't stop fumbling dGPUs. As long as they make iGPUs that can challenge at least AMD's mainstream APUs (Strix Point), then they are providing some value in graphics. I would also like to see Intel push into the "mega APU" territory (Strix Halo). As AMD has found out, if you can't get your big discrete graphics any traction in mobile, you can just focus on the APU.

I think Nova Lake will be a hit, and look pretty good if it comes out before Zen 6. Since it appears to be using up to two chiplets with 8 P-cores and 16 E-cores each, there's a possibility for the low-end "Ultra 3" to have 6+8 cores (18 total if counting the LPE-cores).

Intel faces weak Core Ultra “AI PC” demand, Raptor Lake sales surge and cause shortages (archive)

Intel’s CEO Lip-Bu Tan Reportedly Met With TSMC’s CEO To Discuss Foundry Partnership; Raising Possibility of a Deal (archive)

 

[Betonhaus]

There is a laptop that combines great power with good battery life. It’s called the MacBook Pro. Living with the ten minute battery lives of Windows laptops is a torment you can choose to eschew

Let me guess, you're using an Acer gaming laptop in comparison instead of something like a ThinkPad T14s

 

[Susanna]

Let me guess, you're using an Acer gaming laptop in comparison instead of something like a ThinkPad T14s

Lenovo Ideapad Pro 5. This thing doesn't even have a GPU, and it still only lasts a few hours on Linux, less on Windows. That's with the BIOS setting for CPU power turned to Battery Optimiser (as opposed to Balanced or Power), it'll still torque the fans up to max every now and then even though the temperature is only around 40 degrees, it's an awful laptop.
I do get more cores and memory, and vastly more storage, than I would with a Mac, but those aren't really things I value in a laptop. I want a nice keyboard, a good screen, and loads of battery life.

 

[The Ugly One]

Intel faces weak Core Ultra “AI PC” demand, Raptor Lake sales surge and cause shortages (archive)

It really says something that this thread is full of turbo-autists and not one of us has talked about a single interesting consumer-grade AI use case at all, meaning AI-enhanced applications, not hobbyist LLM training and the like.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole 2]

It really says something that this thread is full of turbo-autists and not one of us has talked about a single interesting consumer-grade AI use case at all, meaning AI-enhanced applications, not hobbyist LLM training and the like.

As shocking as it might be there are some very useful applications for it in the workplace for both the group and the individual. I don't mean for people in tech, I mean normal people that use a computer as part of their work.

edit: oh, consumer. Well pretty much the same as up above but related to the domestic and probably via a phone.

 

[The Ugly One]

As shocking as it might be there are some very useful applications for it in the workplace for both the group and the individual. I don't mean for people in tech, I mean normal people that use a computer as part of their work.

Any that actually run on your laptop CPU, or are they all things that run on GPUs living in server farms somewhere?

 

[Mister Fister]

All I can think of is professional uses here, stuff that requires a shit ton of data processing for modeling.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole 2]

Any that actually run on your laptop CPU, or are they all things that run on GPUs living in server farms somewhere?

Zero running on the users hardware! But who knows, maybe that kind of laptop will be bought at some point if it proves to be relatively cost-effective.

 

[Slav Power]

Let me guess, you're using an Acer gaming laptop in comparison instead of something like a ThinkPad T14s

Susanna is to Apple products what The Ugly One is to Nvidia and what I'm to Windows. Meanwhile my ThinkPad has been running for 7 hours now, mostly in the dreaded Win11's S0 mode with some web browsing mixed in, started off with 64% battery and now it's at 54%. For an x86 I'd say that's a pretty good result.

And since she's so infatuated with Apple products for their battery life because Arm, something like the ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 manages to pull over 22 hours of battery life when web surfing, AKA the average workload when working on a laptop. Not that it matters since she would never touch anything that's not running macOS. Windows? Ew, that's like, for peasants or something.

 

[Susanna]

Susanna is to Apple products what The Ugly One is to Nvidia and what I'm to Windows. Meanwhile my ThinkPad has been running for 7 hours now, mostly in the dreaded Win11's S0 mode with some web browsing mixed in, started off with 64% battery and now it's at 54%. For an x86 I'd say that's a pretty good result.

What you're saying is that your computer has been mostly in sleep mode for seven hours? That's not terribly impressive. Even my cheap work laptop usually manages to stay in sleep for sixteen hours without completely draining itself.

And since she's so infatuated with Apple products for their battery life because Arm, something like the ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 manages to pull over 22 hours of battery life when web surfing, AKA the average workload when working on a laptop.

My IdeaPad Pro 5 advertises 16 hours of battery life, but I've been lucky to get four hours out of it, running software like Word and Edge. Is 22 hours something you've actually managed, or just what Lenovo tells you it will do?

Not that it matters since she would never touch anything that's not running macOS. Windows? Ew, that's like, for peasants or something.

I have the IdeaPad, don't I? I've given Windows more than its fair chance, I just plain don't like it. I'm running Linux on the IdeaPad now, it's tolerable but again the battery life is just awful.

Did I tell you the battery life is bad? Because the battery life is really quite bad.

Zero running on the users hardware! But who knows, maybe that kind of laptop will be bought at some point if it proves to be relatively cost-effective.

I just don't really see why you would need to. Heavier things like LLMs and image generators don't run terribly well even on desktops, on power limited laptops they're going to be miserable.

"Let me just generate some art for this presentation."
A full minute of the computer fan running at 100%
"Oh, that turned out awful. I guess I'll try again."
It's just something that works ever so much better as a cloud service.

Lighter things like document classifiers for improved search would be more practical on a laptop, but it's still not really something I particularly see a need for. I'd rather just name my PDF "adjustable power supply instruction manual.pdf" than have the AI tag "download (3).pdf" as "manual, power supply", search works just as well regardless.
Predictive typing I guess? I'd consider that really more of a phone feature though, it's not something you're going to have a lot of use for when you're not limited to tapping on a touchscreen.

 

[The Ugly One]

Susanna is to Apple products what The Ugly One is to Nvidia

@Susanna, how angry should I be at Apple for offering a 4+4 core, 8 GB version of the M1 MB Pro? Note: I bought the 10-core, 32 GB version.

Zero running on the users hardware! But who knows, maybe that kind of laptop will be bought at some point if it proves to be relatively cost-effective.

See, that's the thing. I've used AI-generated PowerPoint slides, AI-generated images, and AI-generated code at work. They were all pretty neat. Also, all of those would have absolutely shat all over the low-power NPUs in Intel laptops and needed to run on dedicated inferencing hardware.

Lighter things like document classifiers for improved search would be more practical on a laptop

Everything I've seen that actually uses the NPU is just "nice to have" enhancements, like better background removal in video conferences and whatever.

 

[Susanna]

Everything I've seen that actually uses the NPU is just "nice to have" enhancements, like better background removal in video conferences and whatever.

Oh, I hadn't even considered that. I've never turned background removal on, because I'm not afraid someone might see the bookcase in my office or my garden if I'm WFH, or the whiteboard if I'm in the office, nor have I ever paid any attention to someone else's video. I just move the call over to the second screen and browse the web while I wait for the meeting to end. Unless someone is actually screen-sharing there's zero reason to pay attention to a conference call.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole 2]

Lighter things like document classifiers for improved search would be more practical on a laptop, but it's still not really something I particularly see a need for. I'd rather just name my PDF "adjustable power supply instruction manual.pdf" than have the AI tag "download (3).pdf" as "manual, power supply", search works just as well regardless.
Predictive typing I guess? I'd consider that really more of a phone feature though, it's not something you're going to have a lot of use for when you're not limited to tapping on a touchscreen.

There's more to it than that, other uses. I've seen examples of specific light workloads where I know ~20 people would be dancing on their desks if they were allowed to use it. Twenty people. That's not much. But then there's another kind of use where it would brighten the day of ~40 people, then there's another kind of use where it would benefit maybe 3 people etc. It starts to add up. AI isn't a rocketship to mars like some is hyping it to be but it could be a spinning jenny. Maybe.

 

[Max Weber]

Everything I've seen that actually uses the NPU is just "nice to have" enhancements, like better background removal in video conferences and whatever.

Oh, I hadn't even considered that. I've never turned background removal on, because I'm not afraid someone might see the bookcase in my office or my garden if I'm WFH, or the whiteboard if I'm in the office, nor have I ever paid any attention to someone else's video. I just move the call over to the second screen and browse the web while I wait for the meeting to end. Unless someone is actually screen-sharing there's zero reason to pay attention to a conference call.

Yeah, what my mind immediately jumped to is removing noise when using integrated mic, that would make a lot more difference.

AI isn't a rocketship to mars like some is hyping it to be but it could be a spinning jenny. Maybe.

That's the funny part - it's the software and hardware companies that are selling it as a solution to every tech problem you ever had, rather than a tool to improve your QoL here and there.

 

[Sooty Soot]

Speaking of gaming and to a more general extent powerful laptops, I know they drain the battery like a bitch unless you keep em' plugged in. When I was a kid, my dad would always tell me not to keep his laptop plugged in 24/7 since it'd fuck up the battery, I never gave it much thought since as I grew older I imagined they'd have something like resistors to lower the voltage when the battery was full so the power could be directly sent to the components. Makes me miss those old removable batteries.