pftbest

@pftbest@sh.itjust.works

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨My new laptop chip has an 'AI' processor in it, and it's a complete waste of space⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I agree, we should push more to get the open and standardized API for these accelerators, better drivers and better third party software support. As long as the manufacturers keep them locked and proprietary, we won’t be able to use them outside of niche copilot features no one wants anyway.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨My new laptop chip has an 'AI' processor in it, and it's a complete waste of space⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  No, it will not save any power at all. The power is only consumed during switching, so when some module is properly clock gated, it will not consume any power. There are many parts of the chip that are dark, for example the full CPU core could be disabled for various reasons and it does not affect power consumption when it’s dark. Maybe you know the Steam Deck, it is a battery operated device with the best power efficiency in its class. But what people don’t know is that it has more than 20% of its chip area disabled, as it relates to stereoscopic displays, because the same exact chip is also used by some AR or VR goggles, I forgot the name.

  Also in general the modern chips are more limited by thermal rather than space. So realistically, even if you remove the NPU, you won’t be able to place anything high power there anyways, maybe you can put a couple hundred K of sram for cache in its place, but it won’t matter much in the end.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨New largest prime number discovered by former Nvidia software engineer⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This is a very dangerous way of thinking. You cannot tell at the time of discovery if specific research will be useful or not down the line. You need to advance the research in all directions, even if some of them seem silly or useless, or else you will handicap your progress in other fields which you didn’t see the connection with at first.