6 ms·

A lot of commentators have pointed out that Intel is reaching nowhere near the performance/mm2 of Nvidia or AMD designs, though contrary to what I thought that

A lot of commentators have pointed out that Intel is reaching nowhere near the performance/mm2 of Nvidia or AMD designs, though contrary to what I thought that might imply, it seems that power consumption is very much under control on Battlemage. So it seems the primary trade-off here is on the die cost. Can anyone explain what might be going on here, especially as it relates to power consumption? I thought (bigger die ^ bigger wires -> more current -> higher consumption).

tonetegeatinst 2y ago
It mainly seems to boil down to design choice and process technology. They might be targeting a lower power density per squad mm than compared to amd or nvidia, focusing more on lower power levels. Instruction set architecture and layout of the chips and PCB also factor into this as well.
MisterTea 2y ago
> I thought (bigger die ^ bigger wires -> more current -> higher consumption). I am not a semi expert but bigger die doesn't mean bigger wires if you are referring to cross-section, the wires would be thinner meaning less current. Power is consumed pushing and pulling electrons from the transistor gates which are all of the FET type, field effect transistor. The gate is a capacitor that needs to be charged to open the gate to allow current to flow through the transistor. discharging the gate closes it. That current draw then gets multiplied by a few billion gates so you can see where the load comes from.
- williamDafoe 2y ago
  Actually the wires don't scale down like the transistors do. I remember in graduate school taking VLSI circuit complexity theory and the conclusion was for two dimensional circuits the wires will end Moore's Law. However I've seen articles about backside power delivery and they are already using seven+ layers so the wires are going through three dimensions now. Copper interconnects were a one-time bonus in the late 90s and after that wires just don't scale down-signal delay would go up too fast. Imagine taking a city with all the streets and houses and the houses now become the size of dog houses but you can't shrink the streets they have to stay the same size to carry signals quickly!
gruez 2y ago
>I thought (bigger die ^ bigger wires -> more current -> higher consumption). All things being equal, a bigger die would result in more power consumption, but the factor you're not considering is the voltage/frequency curve. As you increase the frequency, you also need to up the voltage. However, as you increase voltage, there's diminishing returns to how much you can increase the frequency, so you end up massively increasing power consumption to get minor performance gains.
wmf 2y ago
If it's a similar number of transistors on a larger die then I can believe the power consumption is good. Less dense layout probably requires less design effort and may reduce hotspots. If Intel is getting similar performance from more transistors that could be caused by extra control logic from a 16-wide core instead of 32.
kimixa 2y ago
Increasing clocks tends to have a greater-than-linear cost on power, as you need transistors to switch quicker so often need a higher voltage, which causes more leakage and other losses on top of the switching cost itself (that all turn into heat). Higher clock targets also have a cost for the design itself, often needing more transistors for things like extra redrivers to ensure you get fast switching speed, or even things like more pipeline stages. Plus not all area is "transistors" - it's often easier to place related units that need a lot of interconnectivity with shorter interconnects if an adjacent, less interconnected unit isn't also trying to be packed into much of the same space, routing on modern chips is really difficult (and a place where companies can really differentiate by investing more). For tasks that tend to scale well with increased die area, which is often the case for GPUs as they're already focused on massively parallel tasks so laying down more parallel units is a realistic option, running a larger die at lower clocks is often notably more efficient in terms of performance per unit power. For GPUs generally that's just part of the pricing and cost balance, a larger lower clocked die would be more efficient, but would that really sell for as much as the same die clocked even higher to get peak results?
- netbioserror 2y ago
  >For tasks that tend to scale well with increased die area, which is often the case for GPUs as they're already focused on massively parallel tasks so laying down more parallel units is a realistic option, running a larger die at lower clocks is often notably more efficient in terms of performance per unit power. I should've considered this, I have an RTX A5000. It's a gigantic GA102 die (3090, 3080) that's underclocked to 230W, putting it at roughly 3070 throughput. That's ~15% less performance than a 3090 for a ~35% power reduction. Absolutely nonlinear savings there. Though some of that may have to do with power savings using GDDR6 over GDDR6X. (I should mention that relative performance estimates are all over the place, by some metrics the A5000 is ~3070, by others it's ~3080.)
  - bgnn 2y ago
    Yeah the power consumption scales, to first order, with Vdd^2 (square of power supply voltage) but performance scales with Vdd. Though you cannot simply reduce the Vdd and clock rate and do more pipelining etc to gain back the performance. If you are willing to back off on performance a bit you can gain hugely on power. Plus thermal management of it is more manageable.
bloomingkales 2y ago
They are holding back the higher vram models of this card. GPU makers always do some nerfing of their cards in the same product line. Often times there’s no good reason for this other than they found specs that they can market and sell simply by moving voltages around. Anyway, expecting good earnings throughout the year as they use Battlemage sales to hide the larger concerns about standing up their foundry (great earnings for the initial 12gb cards, and so on for the inevitable 16/24gb cards).
elric 2y ago
I couldn't find any information regarding power consumption in the article. I'd love to upgrade my aging gaming rig, but all modern AMD/Nvidia graphics cards consume significantly more power than my current card.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
p1necone 2y ago
performance/mm2 This strikes me as not a particularly useful metric, or at least one only indirectly related to the stuff that actually matters. Performance/watt and performance/cost are the only metrics that really matter both to consumer and producer - performance/die size is only used as a metric because die size generally correlates to both of those. But comparing it between different manufacturers and different fabs strikes me as a mistake (although maybe it's just necessary because identifying actual manufacturing costs isn't possible?).

tonetegeatinst 2y ago

It mainly seems to boil down to design choice and process technology. They might be targeting a lower power density per squad mm than compared to amd or nvidia, focusing more on lower power levels. Instruction set architecture and layout of the chips and PCB also factor into this as well.

MisterTea 2y ago

> I thought (bigger die ^ bigger wires -> more current -> higher consumption). I am not a semi expert but bigger die doesn't mean bigger wires if you are referring to cross-section, the wires would be thinner meaning less current. Power is consumed pushing and pulling electrons from the transistor gates which are all of the FET type, field effect transistor. The gate is a capacitor that needs to be charged to open the gate to allow current to flow through the transistor. discharging the gate closes it. That current draw then gets multiplied by a few billion gates so you can see where the load comes from.

williamDafoe 2y ago
Actually the wires don't scale down like the transistors do. I remember in graduate school taking VLSI circuit complexity theory and the conclusion was for two dimensional circuits the wires will end Moore's Law. However I've seen articles about backside power delivery and they are already using seven+ layers so the wires are going through three dimensions now. Copper interconnects were a one-time bonus in the late 90s and after that wires just don't scale down-signal delay would go up too fast. Imagine taking a city with all the streets and houses and the houses now become the size of dog houses but you can't shrink the streets they have to stay the same size to carry signals quickly!

gruez 2y ago

>I thought (bigger die ^ bigger wires -> more current -> higher consumption). All things being equal, a bigger die would result in more power consumption, but the factor you're not considering is the voltage/frequency curve. As you increase the frequency, you also need to up the voltage. However, as you increase voltage, there's diminishing returns to how much you can increase the frequency, so you end up massively increasing power consumption to get minor performance gains.

wmf 2y ago

If it's a similar number of transistors on a larger die then I can believe the power consumption is good. Less dense layout probably requires less design effort and may reduce hotspots. If Intel is getting similar performance from more transistors that could be caused by extra control logic from a 16-wide core instead of 32.

kimixa 2y ago

Increasing clocks tends to have a greater-than-linear cost on power, as you need transistors to switch quicker so often need a higher voltage, which causes more leakage and other losses on top of the switching cost itself (that all turn into heat). Higher clock targets also have a cost for the design itself, often needing more transistors for things like extra redrivers to ensure you get fast switching speed, or even things like more pipeline stages. Plus not all area is "transistors" - it's often easier to place related units that need a lot of interconnectivity with shorter interconnects if an adjacent, less interconnected unit isn't also trying to be packed into much of the same space, routing on modern chips is really difficult (and a place where companies can really differentiate by investing more). For tasks that tend to scale well with increased die area, which is often the case for GPUs as they're already focused on massively parallel tasks so laying down more parallel units is a realistic option, running a larger die at lower clocks is often notably more efficient in terms of performance per unit power. For GPUs generally that's just part of the pricing and cost balance, a larger lower clocked die would be more efficient, but would that really sell for as much as the same die clocked even higher to get peak results?

netbioserror 2y ago
>For tasks that tend to scale well with increased die area, which is often the case for GPUs as they're already focused on massively parallel tasks so laying down more parallel units is a realistic option, running a larger die at lower clocks is often notably more efficient in terms of performance per unit power. I should've considered this, I have an RTX A5000. It's a gigantic GA102 die (3090, 3080) that's underclocked to 230W, putting it at roughly 3070 throughput. That's ~15% less performance than a 3090 for a ~35% power reduction. Absolutely nonlinear savings there. Though some of that may have to do with power savings using GDDR6 over GDDR6X. (I should mention that relative performance estimates are all over the place, by some metrics the A5000 is ~3070, by others it's ~3080.)
- bgnn 2y ago
  Yeah the power consumption scales, to first order, with Vdd^2 (square of power supply voltage) but performance scales with Vdd. Though you cannot simply reduce the Vdd and clock rate and do more pipelining etc to gain back the performance. If you are willing to back off on performance a bit you can gain hugely on power. Plus thermal management of it is more manageable.

bloomingkales 2y ago

They are holding back the higher vram models of this card. GPU makers always do some nerfing of their cards in the same product line. Often times there’s no good reason for this other than they found specs that they can market and sell simply by moving voltages around. Anyway, expecting good earnings throughout the year as they use Battlemage sales to hide the larger concerns about standing up their foundry (great earnings for the initial 12gb cards, and so on for the inevitable 16/24gb cards).

elric 2y ago

I couldn't find any information regarding power consumption in the article. I'd love to upgrade my aging gaming rig, but all modern AMD/Nvidia graphics cards consume significantly more power than my current card.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

p1necone 2y ago

performance/mm2 This strikes me as not a particularly useful metric, or at least one only indirectly related to the stuff that actually matters. Performance/watt and performance/cost are the only metrics that really matter both to consumer and producer - performance/die size is only used as a metric because die size generally correlates to both of those. But comparing it between different manufacturers and different fabs strikes me as a mistake (although maybe it's just necessary because identifying actual manufacturing costs isn't possible?).