Comment on 1U mini PC for AI?
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 3 weeks agoRumor 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.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 3 weeks 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 3 weeks 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.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Eh, but you’d be way better off with an X3D CPU in that scenario, which is both faster in games, about as fast outside them (unless you’re dram bandwidth limited) and more power efficient (because they clock relatively low).
You right about the 395 being a fine HTPC machine by itself.
But I’m also saying even an older 7900, 4090 or whatever would be way lower power at the same performance as the 395’s IGP, and whisper quiet in comparison. It just doesn’t make sense to pair them without some weirdly specific use case that can use both at once.