3 ms·

Apple makes nice hardware. Nice case (milled aluminum), nice heatsinks/airflow, and killer memory systems. Not a fan of their OS though. Generally the compet

by sliken 4y ago

Apple makes nice hardware. Nice case (milled aluminum), nice heatsinks/airflow, and killer memory systems. Not a fan of their OS though. Generally the competition from AMD, Intel, and Nvidia generally has much less memory bandwidth (2 to 4 times less), much larger, and full of pitfalls. Oh you bought the wrong GPU that's catching on fire? Or the GPU with the fans that die or whine? Or a system with a iGPU severely hamstrung by a 128 bit wide memory interface? Or the motherboards with active cooling muffin fans that die/squeak/whine? Oh you bought brand X motherboard which was good last year but terrible this year? Even the PC case designs are terrible. Why do GPUs form a cube with minimal airflow on nearly every standard desktop chassis in existence? AMD/Intel desktops remind me of non-tesla EVs where often the suspension, drive train, battery, in car entertainment, traction control and similar departments don't talk, compete for resources, and minimize shared designs. PC airflow is engineered for each device separately. Even simple things like front to back airflow can not be assumed. Some GPUs don't exhaust air, just stir it. Others intake air (fighting front to back airflow). Others exhaust air ... often sucking in hot air from the CPU side. Sadly the hottest component (generally the GPU) has the worst airflow, while the CPU at 1/3rd the power often has 2x the airflow in a normal ATX case. Why do motherboard chipsets depend on tiny high rpm fans that make more noise/vibration than airflow? Why do high performance M.2 cards often require heat sinks ... that violate the size specifications for the M2? Why are dimms often perpendicular with the airflow? Why does even a small PC case require 5 or more fans instead of just 1? Except for gaming a Mac Mini with a M2 Pro or a Mac Studio M1 Max seems plenty fast, likely to last a long time, silent, and plenty fast for a wide variety of purposes while being substantially quieter, smaller, and lower power than it's PC competition. Personally I'm waiting for apple to bring out a Mac Studio with the M2 max. I'd love to see something arm or x86-64 that would make a nice quiet, fast, small, power efficient desktop with good memory bandwidth to support a decent iGPU. Sadly I'm not expecting anything. It's possible AMD will sell a small/cheaper version of the MI300 or Nvidia will sell a smaller/cheaper version of the Grace+Hopper, but that seems like years away.

midoridensha 4y ago
>AMD/Intel desktops remind me of non-tesla EVs where... >... while the CPU at 1/3rd the power often has 2x the airflow in a normal ATX case. That's the problem: the ATX standard. It's almost 30 years old at this point. It was never designed for modern GPUs or good thermal performance, it was just a step up from the creaky old IBM PC-AT standard that came before. The only way to get a desktop PC designed for good airflow and proper thermal management is to abandon the ATX standard and do something custom and proprietary, like the small-form-factor or workstation corporate desktops from Dell. But that means you need to buy the entire system at once (just like buying a laptop), and not put it together from parts like in the 1990s. And it's impossible to have a new open standard because no huge players are stepping up to make such a standard and then force everyone else to use it, and it's impossible for the industry as a whole to sit down and make a standard together that doesn't suck.
- sliken 4y ago
  Agreed. Sadly Intel didn't make the NUC a standard. There are decent SFF around, but sadly they all use 128 bit memory interfaces which is severely limiting for an iGPU. Sadly Apple can build low power small systems with 2x, 4x, and 8x the memory bandwidth, but nobody else seems interested.
  - midoridensha 4y ago
    >Sadly Intel didn't make the NUC a standard. They didn't? Admittedly I don't know that much about it, but the Wikipedia page is very thorough. I don't remember IBM making the PC-AT a standard either; it became a de-facto standard because everyone just copied it, and the ISA bus was open. I don't see what's stopping anyone else from copying Intel's NUC form factor. The difference between the 80s/90s and now is that there isn't a single 800lb gorilla for everyone to copy, and for some reason other companies just don't care to take the stuff Intel has done and copy that. According to the Wikipedia article, Gigabyte made their own version of NUC that was similar but not the same, so of course parts aren't going to be compatible; when companies are doing this instead of just copying a single big competitor, then there's no de-facto standard, just a bunch of competing and incompatible standards.
    - dragonwriter 4y ago
      > > Sadly Intel didn’t make the NUC a standard. > They didn’t? Correct, they did not. They did with ATX and BTX (but BTX was dropped before it caught on broadly, in a focus shift.) > I don’t remember IBM making the PC-AT a standard either Yeah, but you are the one who brought IBM up, so what? > It became a de-facto standard because everyone just copied it, Yeah, its not the 1980s, and there isn’t one manufacturer that is both as dominant as IBM and as unconcerned with protecting itself from cloning as as IBM was until the PS/2. > The difference between the 80s/90s and now is that there isn’t a single 800lb gorilla for everyone to copy, and for some reason other companies just don’t care to take the stuff Intel has done and copy that. There wasn’t an 800lb gorilla to copy in the 1990s, either, because IBM went proprietary with the PS/2. The =difference between the 1990s/2000s and today is that Intel (or someone else similarly situated; Nvidia could plausibly do it) isn’t actively promoting form factor standards, the way it did with ATX (from 1995) and BTX (from 2004, but stopped being actively promoted in a few years because Intel temporarily shifted business focus to low power designs, and BTX was centered around improved airflow for high power applications.)

by sliken 4y ago

midoridensha 4y ago

>AMD/Intel desktops remind me of non-tesla EVs where... >... while the CPU at 1/3rd the power often has 2x the airflow in a normal ATX case. That's the problem: the ATX standard. It's almost 30 years old at this point. It was never designed for modern GPUs or good thermal performance, it was just a step up from the creaky old IBM PC-AT standard that came before. The only way to get a desktop PC designed for good airflow and proper thermal management is to abandon the ATX standard and do something custom and proprietary, like the small-form-factor or workstation corporate desktops from Dell. But that means you need to buy the entire system at once (just like buying a laptop), and not put it together from parts like in the 1990s. And it's impossible to have a new open standard because no huge players are stepping up to make such a standard and then force everyone else to use it, and it's impossible for the industry as a whole to sit down and make a standard together that doesn't suck.

sliken 4y ago
Agreed. Sadly Intel didn't make the NUC a standard. There are decent SFF around, but sadly they all use 128 bit memory interfaces which is severely limiting for an iGPU. Sadly Apple can build low power small systems with 2x, 4x, and 8x the memory bandwidth, but nobody else seems interested.
- midoridensha 4y ago
  >Sadly Intel didn't make the NUC a standard. They didn't? Admittedly I don't know that much about it, but the Wikipedia page is very thorough. I don't remember IBM making the PC-AT a standard either; it became a de-facto standard because everyone just copied it, and the ISA bus was open. I don't see what's stopping anyone else from copying Intel's NUC form factor. The difference between the 80s/90s and now is that there isn't a single 800lb gorilla for everyone to copy, and for some reason other companies just don't care to take the stuff Intel has done and copy that. According to the Wikipedia article, Gigabyte made their own version of NUC that was similar but not the same, so of course parts aren't going to be compatible; when companies are doing this instead of just copying a single big competitor, then there's no de-facto standard, just a bunch of competing and incompatible standards.
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    > > Sadly Intel didn’t make the NUC a standard. > They didn’t? Correct, they did not. They did with ATX and BTX (but BTX was dropped before it caught on broadly, in a focus shift.) > I don’t remember IBM making the PC-AT a standard either Yeah, but you are the one who brought IBM up, so what? > It became a de-facto standard because everyone just copied it, Yeah, its not the 1980s, and there isn’t one manufacturer that is both as dominant as IBM and as unconcerned with protecting itself from cloning as as IBM was until the PS/2. > The difference between the 80s/90s and now is that there isn’t a single 800lb gorilla for everyone to copy, and for some reason other companies just don’t care to take the stuff Intel has done and copy that. There wasn’t an 800lb gorilla to copy in the 1990s, either, because IBM went proprietary with the PS/2. The =difference between the 1990s/2000s and today is that Intel (or someone else similarly situated; Nvidia could plausibly do it) isn’t actively promoting form factor standards, the way it did with ATX (from 1995) and BTX (from 2004, but stopped being actively promoted in a few years because Intel temporarily shifted business focus to low power designs, and BTX was centered around improved airflow for high power applications.)