Comment on 1U mini PC for AI?
MalReynolds@piefed.social 3 weeks agoPretty sure that's a x4 PCIe slot (admittedly PCIe 5x4, but not many video cards speak PCIe5), would totally trade a usb4 for a x8, but these laptop chips are pretty constrained lanes wise.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
It’s PCIe 4 :(.
Indeed. I read Strix Halo only has 16 PCIe 4 lanes in addition to its USB4, which is resonable given this isn’t supposed to be paired with discrete graphics. But I’d happily trade an NVMe slot (still leaving one) to for x8.
MalReynolds@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
Boo! Silly me thinking DDR5 implied PCIe5, what a shame.
Feels like they're testing the waters with Halo, hopefully a loud 'waters great, dive in' signal gets through and we get something a bit fitter for desktop use, maybe with more memory (and bandwidth) next gen. Still, gotta love the power usage, makes for one hell of a NAS / AI inference server (and inference isn't that fussy about PCIe bandwidth, hell eGPU works fine as long as the model / expert fits in VRAM.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Rumor is it’s successor is 384 bit, and after that their designs are even more modular:
techpowerup.com/…/amds-next-gen-udna-four-die-siz…
Hybrid inference actually is pretty sensitive to PCIe bandwidth, unfortunately, but again I don’t think many people intend on hanging an AMD GPU off these Strix Halo boards, lol.
princessnorah@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
I don’t know that that is necessarily true. Having a gaming machine that can play any game and dynamically switches between a high-power draw dGPU and a genuinely capable low-power draw iGPU actually sounds amazing. That’s always been possible with every laptop that has a dGPU but their associated iGPU has often been bottom of the barrel bc “why would you use it” for intensive tasks. But a “desktop” build as a lounge room gaming PC, where you can throw whatever at it and it’ll run as quietly as it can, while being able to play AAAs at 4K60, sounds amazing.