GPU and CPU news and discussions

Tadasuke
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Re: GPU and CPU news and discussions

Post by Tadasuke »

Ryzen 7900X3D and 7950X3D will be available on February 28th. 7800X3D will be available on April 6th. They can be about 15% faster than their non-3D counterparts from September 2022, at the same MSRP, which makes them attractive for high-refresh gamers (displays are now reaching up to 540 Hz). If you play in 4K or higher, it will be the graphics card that bottlenecks the system. So this is in line with what I wrote last year about expecting 15% faster CPUs every year for the same price and energy consumption.
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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.
Tadasuke
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comparison table of Intel i5(K) CPUs from 2009 to 2022

Post by Tadasuke »

This time, I made a comparison table of Intel i5(K) CPUs from 2009 to now. It nicely shows what improvements have taken place since 2009. Comparing Raptor Lake to Lynnfield (Nehalem): the price is 63% higher, there are 250% more cores and 400% more threads, frequency is 82% higher, there is 390% more cache (L1+L2+L3), memory bandwidth has increased by 320%, power draw (or Thermal Design Power - TDP) is 91% higher (according to Intel), multi-threaded PassMark score is 15.36x higher and single-thread PassMark score is 3.4x higher. Such improvements can be considered decent or disappointing, depending on a person (on a good day I see them as decent and on a bad day as very disappointing). You won't see 15.36x speed improvement in most programs, because they aren't all written to utilize all 20 threads. But you will see at least 3.4 times better performance. For example, 1% and 0.1% framerate lows in games, tend to be much worse with only 4 threads available (there is more frametime variation) and you can feel that. 2500K was overclockable to 4.8 GHz on all 4 cores (if you had a good P67 or Z68 motherboard, good power supply with some headroom, good thermal paste and a good, proper cooler - certainly not the stock one). Unfortunately, you won't be able to overclock 13600K by as much. I predict frequencies to continue rising, so expect 6 GHz i5 (K) in the late 20s. The i9 will probably reach 7 GHz by 2030-2031. Pentium 4 reached 3 GHz already in 2002, but its performance per clock and performance per watt really weren't great. AMD had better CPUs at that time, but people mistakenly thought that Intel is always better, so they were buying Intel, and because of that, AMD didn't have enough money to later compete with Intel as equals.
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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

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Tadasuke
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Re: GPU and CPU news and discussions

Post by Tadasuke »

Let's look at the top of the line Intel Xeon CPUs in the past and today. In Q1 2010 it was the X5680 - Westmere 6 cores 12 threads running all at 3.47 GHz at the same time, LGA1366 socket, 384 KB L1, 1.5 MB L2 and 12 MB L3 cache, 130 watts TDP, scalability to 2 CPUs, 36 lanes of PCI-E 2.0, 32 GB/s memory bandwidth and 288 GB maximum RAM per CPU. The price? 1,663 USD. link to the official Intel page I remember nearly salivating over this in early 2010, I wished I could get something as amazing as that for my PC. Today I've got a significantly faster CPU, better in every way (except maximum RAM) and using half the energy.

Now in Q1 2023 there is the 8490H - Sapphire Rapids 60 cores 120 threads running all at 2.9 GHz at the same time, LGA4677 socket, 4.69 MB L1, 120 MB L2 and 112.5 MB L3 cache, 350 watts TDP, scalability to 8 CPUs, 80 lanes of PCI-E 5.0, 307.2 GB/s and 6 TB maximum RAM per CPU. The price? 17,000 USD... link to the official Intel page 10x more cores and threads, 10x higher memory bandwidth and 10x higher price, after 13 years. These huge hikes in MSRPs is not something that I had expected. I used to think that no one in their right mind would ever pay more than $2K for a single CPU (or a single graphics card). Of course, single core performance is now higher than in 2010, the exact number varying and depending on the use case.
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 »

Now a more positive outlook: let's compare the last 4 generations of almost top of the line Intel Xeon (server) CPUs:
2017: Platinum 8180; 10,009 USD, 66.5 MB L2+L3 cache, 28 cores * 3.2 GHz = 89.6 GHz, 127.9 GB/s
2019: Platinum 8280; 10,009 USD, 66.5 MB L2+L3 cache, 28 cores * 3.3 GHz = 92.4 GHz, 140.8 GB/s
2021: Platinum 8380; 8,099 USD, 110 MB L2+L3 cache, 40 cores * 3.0 GHz = 120 GHz, 204.8 GB/s
2023: Platinum 8480+; 10,710 USD, 217 MB L2+L3 cache, 56 cores * 3.0 GHz = 168 GHz, 307.2 GB/s

Golden Cove cores are about 50% faster per clock than Skylake cores. 8480+ is 87.5% faster in cores * clocks, but when accounting for ~50% faster architecture, it's 1.875x * 1.5x = 2.8125x, so 181% faster than the 8180 from 2017, at about the same price. ~6 years and ~180% more performance. That's why I write that performance/price doubles about every 4 years on average. 🙂
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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peekpok
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Re: GPU and CPU news and discussions

Post by peekpok »

It is kind of funny to watch hardware improving really fast these days even with the slowdown in node shrinks. Only single-core performance has leveled off, multi-core is still on an insane trajectory. Even then the single core is still exponential, just not as much. Once chip-stacking comes into its own it will probably get kinda crazy again at least for a while.
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Re: GPU and CPU news and discussions

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Apple Orders Entire Supply of TSMC's 3nm Chips for iPhone 15 Pro and M3 Macs

Wednesday February 22, 2023

According to a paywalled DigiTimes report, Apple has procured 100% of the initial N3 supply, which is said to have a high yield, despite the higher costs involved and the decline in the foundry's utilization rate in the first half of 2023. Mass production of TSMC's 3nm process began in late December, and the foundry has scaled up process capacity at a gradual pace with monthly output set to reach 45,000 wafers in March, according to the report's sources.

Apple is widely expected to adopt TSMC's 3nm technology this year for the A17 Bionic chip likely to power the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max models. The 3nm technology is said to deliver a 35% power efficiency improvement over 4nm, which was used to make the A16 Bionic chip for the iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max.

The latter two iPhone models were the first smartphones to feature chips built on the 4nm process, and it looks like Apple is again attempting to be first to market with models based on the latest cutting-edge semiconductor technology.

https://www.macrumors.com/2023/02/22/ap ... 3nm-chips/


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Tadasuke
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Re: GPU and CPU news and discussions

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So let's be real here: Intel's new Sapphire Rapids 3400 series workstation results are simply terrible. The 56-core W9-3495X loses to AMD's 7nm Zen 3 (2020 technology) 64-core Threadripper 5995WX, while using more energy at the same time. We are talking their newest, greatest product. There's no visible real-world improvement over their 2021 38-core flagship workstation product. It really doesn't look well. AMD would destroy them with a Zen 4 Threadripper. An eight-core AMD Zen 4 CCX while using 50 watts is 35% faster than an eight-core Zen 3 using also 50 watts. 10 watts eight-core Zen 4 has 80% the performance of a 50 watts eight-core Zen 3. One can hope that Intel changes something to make their new tile-based SR workstation CPUs faster, better, more efficient (especially at idle). At the moment, they are clearly a worse buy than AMD's Threadripper Pro. I'm honestly disappointed. 3495X maximum OC results (der8auer) are in Cinebench R23 at about the same level as 5995WX's results, but Intel's product uses more energy.

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source: https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/artic ... n-preview/
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 »

Just like CPUs in 2022 were 180% faster than in 2016 for the same price, I predict 180% faster CPUs for the same price in 2028 compared to 2022. That would be 7.84x faster between 2016 and 2028 for the same price. Because CPUs in 2016 were also 180% faster for the same price compared to those from 2010, CPUs in 2028 will be 22x faster than those in 2010 for the same price. 🙂

For comparison, between 1990 and 2000, CPUs became 100x faster for the same price. So it depends how you look at it. 22x in 18 years can be decent or not decent, depending on your point of reference. An 18th century person would be amazed at something becoming 22x better for the same cost in just 18 years.
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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Joined: Tue Aug 17, 2021 3:15 pm
Location: Europe

some quick conclusions of the trends ongoing in the industry

Post by Tadasuke »

My general "rule of thumb" for this, is that usually, on average, general performance tends to double every 4 years. Like, if you compare a Haswell i3 from 2014 and an Alder Lake i3 from 2022, you get exactly 4x faster (2x cores and threads * 2x single core performance) CPU for about the same exact price. You can even check the Coffee Lake i3 from 2018 and it will be exactly between these two : 2x faster than Haswell and ½ of an Alder Lake i3.

Maxon's Cinebench R20 scores for $1000 HEDT Intel CPUs:
32nm i7-980X from the beginning of 2010 : 1550 points
22nm i7-5960X from the middle of 2014 : 3200 points (2.06x more)
14nm i9-10980XE from the end of 2019 : 8800 points (2.75x more)
for comparison, $500 i9-9900K from the end of 2018 gets 4800 points or 50% more than the i7-5960X

If you look at accelerator specific single task oriented performance, it certainly doubles more often on average. Like AI-specific performance. Current Nvidia cards have built-in accelerators, similarly to modern smartphones or new Apple MacBooks. But what I'm writing about is more broad, universal performance, not only for one type of a task. :)
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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