Comment on 1U mini PC for AI?
MalReynolds@piefed.social 1 week agoIt's PCIe 4.0 :(
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 1 week 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 6 days 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.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 6 days ago
Eh, actually that’s not what I had in mind:
Discrete desktop graphics idle hot. I think my 3090 uses at least 40W doing literally nothing.
It’s always better to run big dies slower than small dies quicker. In other words, if you underclocked a big desktop GPU to 1/2 its peak clockspeed, it would use less than a fourth of the energy and run basically inaudible… so why keep a big iGPU around?
My use case was multitasking and compute stuff. EG game/use the discrete GPU while your IGP churns away running something. Or combine them in some workloads.
princessnorah@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 days ago
That’s all valid for your usecase, but you were saying that you didn’t think many people would use it that way at all and that’s what I was saying I didn’t agree with. As well, a HTPC is kind of a different use case altogether to a lounge room gaming computer. There’s some overlap for sure, but if you want zero compromise gaming then you’re going to want all that CPU.