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Ubuntu runs 20% faster than Windows 11 on AMD's new 96-core Ryzen
- ilaksh 3y agoAMD has a new chip for LLMs, right? Can that also be used for things like Blender rendering? I like the idea of having plenty of general purpose cores, but after around 16 it starts to feel like I need the AI stuff more now. It seems inefficient to have all of the parallel stuff like graphics/AI in what amounts to basically a second computer that plugs in. I am guessing that Apple has a lead in this stuff. Are Intel or AMD copying them at all?
- brucethemoose2 3y ago> I am guessing that Apple has a lead in this stuff. Are Intel or AMD copying them at all? Not exactly. The AMD chip you are thinking of is the MI300, and it was originally a giant server APU with 24 cores. It was marketed as a HPC supercomputer chip. Intel had something similar, Falcon Shores, a big APU. ...And as it turns out, almost no one cared. The ML industry doesn't want unified memory APUs, an inference chip, a training chip, a bigger training chip, and so on. They want Nvidia GPUs. Everything is already coded to work with this "second computer that plugs in," as you said, so thats what customers want. Even Nvidia themself seems to be spinning their wheels with grace-hopper. So AMD spun a MI300 into a variant with an even bigger GPU and no CPU. And they emulated CUDA (a work in progress). Intel canceled Falcon shores and redid it as a pure GPU, with their other AI IP (Gaudi) baked in like tensor cores. With a 2 year delay. And they are moving heaven and earth to support PyTorch and other frameworks out-of-the-box. I can't emphasize how disruptive this is, especially for Intel. Silicon takes years and 9+ figures to design. They would not have made these moves if there was even modest short-term interest in unified memory chips for AI.
- brucethemoose2 3y agoAlso, forgot to mention, AMD does have an M3-Pro like chip in the pipe: https://hothardware.com/news/amd-strix-halo-cpu-rumors https://hothardware.com/news/amd-strix-halo-cpu-rumors Intel probably does too, but the rumors are even less solid.
- washadjeffmad 3y agoIf you mean Ryzen AI, a product of AMD's Xilinx acquisition: https://www.amd.com/en/developer/resources/ryzen-ai-software-platform.html https://www.amd.com/en/developer/resources/ryzen-ai-software... "Select models of [AMD Ryzen™ 7040 series processors] offer the new XDNA architecture with built in AI Engines, the first dedicated AI processing silicon on a Windows x86 processor." It seems to be a more fully featured parallel to Intel's current GNA: https://github.com/intel/gna https://github.com/intel/gna Apple Silicon Macs only have a lead at a substantial markup over computers without modern dGPUs, and if Intel has a lead anywhere in hardware, they're keeping it well hidden. We're not saying that too loudly, though, because latest gen AMD prices could stand to be a little more competitive.
- ThrowawayR2 3y agoRehash of the original Phoronix article previously discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38378455 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38378455
- 15457345234 3y ago> At its best, Ubuntu was twice as fast as Windows in ASTC, asmFish, CPU encoding with AV1 I'd expect some variance but being able to achieve a 2x speedup on what should be a fairly tight loop is ludicrous
- ilrwbwrkhv 3y agoI'm sure the windows engineers will claim you need PHDs to make things fast like they did with windows terminal and were proven completely false.
- deafpolygon 3y agoIs Windows Terminal not fast for the features that they have? I didn't hear anything about PHDs but I am curious about your mention of being proven completely false, PHDs and the story behind that.
- jorams 3y agoThey're referring to a situation described here[1] (HN discussion [2]). [1]: https://blog.royalsloth.eu/posts/it-takes-a-phd-to-develop-that/ https://blog.royalsloth.eu/posts/it-takes-a-phd-to-develop-t... [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28743687 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28743687
- deafpolygon 3y agoThanks, I understand more of the story now.
- intelVISA 3y agoWhilst I know this was the M$ PM being deliberately obtuse here, in some cases modern SaaS marketing has elevated previously routine CS topics to "PhD material" to the layperson for a sale - and it's quite a shame when the propaganda drips through to tech-adjacent people.
- nmstoker 3y agoPutting aside the speed of code that runs, Windows often has a load of things you don't want wasting CPU resources - in a corporate environment, you can often sense when they kick in, as the fans whir and certain things get subtly slower. They put all that effort into making it fast and nice (and it's lightyears better than it was) yet it still struggles with one of the simplest things: getting out of your way!
- kramerger 3y agoUbuntu is not that lean either. Something like Debian may fair better here. There are also distros like Clear Linux that are extremely lean and efficient. Unfortunately that particular one is owned by Intel :( PS. So sad to see another HN post about AMD CPUs quickly turn into a discussion about Apple CPUs
- happymellon 3y agoCan you explain how Ubuntu is less lean than Debian? The only difference that people would notice are snaps, which are slow for starting but it shouldn't keep spinning up pointless services like Windows does.
- kramerger 3y agoI've identical machines running latest Ubuntu and Debian. The difference in speed & size is very noticeable, for example when you do update or look at memory usage. Ubuntu has a bunch of apps and services running in background that slow down the system. A lot of stuff related to their way of doing packaging or containers or cloud init.
- d_tr 3y agoYou can still easily disable and uninstall anything you want on Ubuntu through systemctl or apt. Windows is much more opaque and messy in that regard.
- clircle 3y agoIs this the kind performance gap that a windows patch is going to narrow ?
- hulitu 3y agoYes. They need to patch svchost.exe to not use the whole computer.
- jmakov 3y agoAnd probably 20% faster on Clear linux
- theknocker 3y ago[dead]
- reportgunner 3y agoThat headline reads like Ubuntu is slow.
- KenArrari 3y agoIt's happening guys, it's finally the year of the linux desktop
- up2isomorphism 3y agoOnly 20% faster than windows seems to be a bad news for Ubuntu.