GPU and CPU news and discussions

Tadasuke
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Re: GPU and CPU news and discussions

Post by Tadasuke »

My predictions for AMD Zen 4 desktop CPUs:
> come out about 2 years after Zen 3
> improve IPC by 40% (quite a lot)
> at least one model will go over 5 GHz on turbo clocks
> feature 1.5x more cores and 4.5x more cache than Zen 3 (because of V-cache)
> no 2 core CPUs anymore
> Athlons will get 4 cores 8 threads (>$100)
> Ryzen 3 will get 6 cores 12 threads ($100-200) - will be the 3rd most popular
> Ryzen 5 will get 8 cores 16 threads ($200-300) - will be the most popular
> Ryzen 7 will get 10 cores 20 threads and 12 cores 24 threads ($300-400) - will be the 2nd most popular
> Ryzen 9 will get 18 cores 36 threads and 24 cores 48 threads ($500-800)
> Threadripper will get 32-96 cores 64-192 threads
> highest Threadripper model will feature over 1 GB of cache
> Zen 4 will fight against Intel Raptor Lake
> I personally may upgrade to Zen 4 and you might consider that too (if prices are reasonable)
Global economy doubles in product every 15-20 years. Computer performance at a constant price doubles nowadays every 4 years on average. Livestock-as-food will globally stop being a thing by ~2050 (precision fermentation and more). Human stupidity, pride and depravity are the biggest problems of our world.
Tadasuke
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Re: GPU and CPU news and discussions

Post by Tadasuke »

This chart shows show much interconnected can layers in a 3D chip be, depending on year and bump density. Currently 3D SoC are only beginning, because interconnect density doesn't even allow for cores on cores or cores on uncore. At best, we will see L3 Cache layered on top of CPUs this year, tripling their L3 Cache size (which can be important for some workloads). In 2022, TSV technology process is at 9000 nm compared to 5nm for transistors. So you see, how far engineering needs to go, to match interconnect size with transistor size (which will be obviously smaller) to link everything together, allowing for true 3D architectures. Doubling every 2 years, it won't be possible even in 2050. However, we can be sure that performance will be improving every decade and 3D chips will be more and more popular and more and more interconnected. Both Intel and AMD are working on that. Fabs are working on that too. It's all official info.
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Global economy doubles in product every 15-20 years. Computer performance at a constant price doubles nowadays every 4 years on average. Livestock-as-food will globally stop being a thing by ~2050 (precision fermentation and more). Human stupidity, pride and depravity are the biggest problems of our world.
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wjfox
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Re: GPU and CPU news and discussions

Post by wjfox »

Intel to blend CPU, GPU cores into monster supercomputing chip

By Joel Khalili published 1 day ago

Intel has teased new Xeon chips that will collect CPU and GPU hardware into one socket to maximize performance across high performance computing (HPC) use cases.

Codenamed Falcon Shores, the new line of processors will combine x86 CPU cores with Xe-HPC GPU cores, with varying ratios depending on the intended workload. These cores will connect up to shared “high-bandwidth memory developed by Intel”.

The company says it expects Falcon Shores processors to arrive some time in 2024, paving the way for zettascale supercomputing systems.

https://www.techradar.com/news/intel-to ... uting-chip
Tadasuke
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Re: GPU and CPU news and discussions

Post by Tadasuke »

I don't believe in fp64 zettascale in 2027. I do believe in int4 (AI inferencing, neural nets) zettascale in 2027 or 2028.

Intel CPU roadmap:
Q4 2021 - Q1 2022: Alder Lake (laptops are just coming out)
Q3 - Q4 2022: Raptor Lake
Q2 - Q3 2023: Meteor Lake
2024: Arrow Lake
2025: Luna Lake
2026: Nova Lake

AMD CPU roadmap:
Q1 2022 - Zen 3+ (for laptops)
Q3 - Q4 2022 - Zen 4
Q3 2023 - Zen 5
2024 - Zen 6
Global economy doubles in product every 15-20 years. Computer performance at a constant price doubles nowadays every 4 years on average. Livestock-as-food will globally stop being a thing by ~2050 (precision fermentation and more). Human stupidity, pride and depravity are the biggest problems of our world.
Tadasuke
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Re: GPU and CPU news and discussions

Post by Tadasuke »

Intel's CPUs Linpack results in gigaflops (gflops) from 2013 to 2022. 13900K is supposed to be 40% faster than 12900K. Finally a mainstream 1 teraflop CPU. As you can see, performance grew 5x in 9 years since the introduction of AVX-2 instructions in Haswell microprocessors. Vertical axis is logarithmic.
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Nvidia and AMD HPC (supercomputer) GPUs from 2007 to 2022. As you can see, performance roughly doubles every 2 years. Unfortunately, prices don't remain the same, but are rising.
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Memory bandwith and transistor count are also growing exponentially and predictably in supercomputer accelerator cards. We still don't know the specs of upcoming Nvidia's flagship HPC card.
Global economy doubles in product every 15-20 years. Computer performance at a constant price doubles nowadays every 4 years on average. Livestock-as-food will globally stop being a thing by ~2050 (precision fermentation and more). Human stupidity, pride and depravity are the biggest problems of our world.
Tadasuke
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Re: GPU and CPU news and discussions

Post by Tadasuke »

From what I heard (don't know if that's entirely correct), Amdahl's Law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law for GPU scaling limits the justifiable and commonsensical core count to 131 072. This year, AMD is going to triple (!) their top-end compute units count from 5120 to 15360 (61.44 Tflops), roughly doubling effective performance in games. Diminishing returns can already be felt by looking at scaling from Nvidia Turing to Ampere. If you were to double compute units count from 131072 to 262144, you would probably gain only 10% in framerate, because of the impossibility of 100% parallelizing computer graphics or physics, thus ending the era of large gains.

Frequency of silicon GPUs is probably going to improve exponentially up to about 4 GHz, after which we can perhaps expect maybe +100 MHz a year. Intel Pentium 4 Extreme achieved 3.8 GHz in 2005 and since then, they were able to on average raise the frequency by 100 MHz a year every year to 5.5 GHz in 2022 and probably 6.5 GHz in 2032.

The thing that will continuously add more performance is performance per cycle or per clock or per flops (commonly referred to as IPC). For example: AMD from GCN 5.0 (Vega) to RDNA 1.0 (Navi) added +25%. Intel Alder Lake similarly adds +25% to gaming performance at the same clocks compared to Comet Lake (if you look at 10100F vs 12100F). But it won't be sufficient for doubling of performance every 2 - 4 years. So just like today Alder Lake i7 is only usually 2x faster in games than an old Sandy Bridge i7, GPUs of 2045 might be only 2x faster in games than GPUs of 2035.

Unless of course a revolution happens and we get computers which work in a different way or use completely different materials and photons instead of electrons. Until then, we will have to be content with using 1 petaflops GPUs which won't even be 32x faster in practice than 32 teraflops GPUs.
Global economy doubles in product every 15-20 years. Computer performance at a constant price doubles nowadays every 4 years on average. Livestock-as-food will globally stop being a thing by ~2050 (precision fermentation and more). Human stupidity, pride and depravity are the biggest problems of our world.
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Yuli Ban
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Re: GPU and CPU news and discussions

Post by Yuli Ban »

It’s a given that Nvidia’s upcoming Lovelace graphics cards will be more powerful than their current Ampere counterparts, but more information is emerging on just how much more powerful they’ll be as we draw closer to the RTX 4000 release date. Now, new leaks suggest the GeForce RTX 4090 will offer a generational performance leap over the company’s current flagship GPU, the RTX 3090.

Sources close to Moore’s Law Is Dead (MLID) are highly confident that RTX 4090 cards built with the full AD102 GPU die will boost fps in videogames using standard rasterization by 80-110%, compared to the RTX 3090. We can also expect ray tracing performance to “at least double”, but MLID is unable to provide any exact metrics at this point in time.

However, in its bid to create the best graphics card in its Lovelace lineup, it appears that Nvidia may push the RTX 4090’s TDP up to an alarmingly high 450-600W. So, don’t be too surprised if you need to upgrade your gaming PC with a pricey power supply if you snag yourself team green’s soon-to-be most powerful pixel pusher.
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
Tadasuke
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Re: GPU and CPU news and discussions

Post by Tadasuke »

I have more graphs on computing to share. I create them to better understand how things are and aren't rolling. In 2022 we do have a substantial amount of data to look at, so we can better predict the future than people in the past (even 5 years ago). Super optimists were wrong, but super pessimists were also wrong. There is progress, but not as steep as some have been predicting since the late 80s.

First RAM capacity in iPhones 2010 - 2030 graph. As you can see, RAM capacity goes up by roughly 10x a decade. The optimist in me wants to expect cheaper iPhones to have 32 GB and more expensive iPhones to have 48 or even 64 GB in 2030, but the realist says that it might be lower: 16 GB in iPhone SE and 24 GB in iPhone. iPhone SE 2022 has 4 GB and the upcoming iPhone 14 will have 6 GB.
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Then GPU processing speed of Qualcomm Snapdragon SoCs 2010 - 2030 graph. As you can see, flops went up very steeply between 2010 and 2014, but then stagnated up to 2018, since when, they go up in an ~ordinary way. The trendline suggests 100 teraflops in 2030, but I think that 20-25 teraflops (around RTX 3070 Ti) is more likely (if things go fairly well). That will be more than PS5 anyway, but by then there will be PS6 (even PS6 Pro isn't out of the question).
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And the last graph is mid-range (XX60 class) Nvidia GeForce graphics cards (GPUs) VRAM capacity 2010 - 2030. As you can see, VRAM went up by 12x in a decade. It is theoretically possible that in 2030, a 60 class Nvidia GPU will have 144 GB of VRAM (but more commonsense, down-to-earth, it will have 40 GB), but it may have an SSD (like Radeon SSG) in addition to VRAM. So it may have less VRAM, but a really fast SSD to make up for it. RDNA 2.0 and 3.0 Radeon cards do have something called Infinity Cache, which is L3 Cache, which supplements VRAM. 6900 XT has 128 MB of that stuff, while 7900 XT will have 512 MB (because of V-Cache or second layer of transistors). So Nvidia might also go that way - giving cards layers of extra cache (and SSD) instead of investing heavily in RAM. The hierarchy would look like this: L1 Cache, L2 Cache, L3 Cache, VRAM, SSD and all of this on one card. Currently, there are efforts to improve interoperability between SSDs and GPUs (Big Accelerator Memory), which essentially enables Nvidia GPUs to fetch data directly from system memory and storage without using the CPU, which makes GPUs more self-sufficient than they are today. Here you can read a paper about GPUs directly connected to SSDs: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2203.04910.pdf
Long story short I expect the following:
RTX 8060 in Q1 2031 offering 40 GB of VRAM, no SSD (but direct connection to PCI-E SSDs), 2 GB of L3 Cache, around 120-130 teraflops and 20x higher ray-tracing performance compared to current 3060. Will see how it goes. I think this prediction is realistic and likely to pass.
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And finally, there are rumors that Chinese x86 CPUs could catch up to Intel in 2025. I don't know if that's going to happen that soon, but it will ultimately result in more competition and supply (which hasn't caught up to demand). Russians were trying to create competing arm chips, but they are not going to in current situation.
Global economy doubles in product every 15-20 years. Computer performance at a constant price doubles nowadays every 4 years on average. Livestock-as-food will globally stop being a thing by ~2050 (precision fermentation and more). Human stupidity, pride and depravity are the biggest problems of our world.
Tadasuke
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Re: GPU and CPU news and discussions

Post by Tadasuke »

Transistor count continues to grow exponentially. Nvidia H100 has 2.1x or 110% higher efficiency than A100 from 2 years ago, when measuring PCI-E card performance/watt. PCI-E uses 350 watts and SXM5 version uses 700 watts. H100 SXM5 can output 60 trillion standard floating point operations per second, but its power draw is really high. I used to think that GPUs would never cross 500 watts. Now I think they will cross even 1000 watts. Efficiency gets worse as you clock the card higher. For example MX570 has 4.73 tflops for 25 watts, while 3070 Ti has 21.75 tflops for 290 watts (both are Ampere), which means that MX570 has 2.5x higher efficiency than 3070 Ti (it's 2.5x more environmentally friendly in other words). I wish we would use max efficiency more often, instead of overclocking things, so that their efficiency becomes worse than it could be.
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Global economy doubles in product every 15-20 years. Computer performance at a constant price doubles nowadays every 4 years on average. Livestock-as-food will globally stop being a thing by ~2050 (precision fermentation and more). Human stupidity, pride and depravity are the biggest problems of our world.
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Yuli Ban
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Re: GPU and CPU news and discussions

Post by Yuli Ban »

We'll have to wait for benchmark tests to see whether Intel is right, and the lead might change hands again when AMD releases its much anticipated Zen 4 Ryzen 7000 desktop chips in the second half of 2022. It would be a bit of a pyrrhic victory for end users, however, as the Core i9-12900KS will cost (at least) $739 when it arrives on April 5th — nearly $300 more than the AMD model. That's a pretty high price to pay for bragging rights, particularly when they could be short lived. 
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
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