5 ms·

What's the proposal here, just convince everyone to stop demanding more powerful hardware?

• bongodongobob 2y ago
  Idk but if computers are drawing enough power to melt themselves just to play ray traced Minecraft or write boilerplate Python code, perhaps we've gone wrong somewhere.
  • ChrisRR 2y ago
    > write boilerplate Python code This is my biggest issue. I'm still impressed that we need GHz and GBs to run simple apps that were achievable with MHz and MBs 20+ years ago
    • bongodongobob 2y ago
      I meant local AI.
    • fennecfoxy 2y ago
      Because we only need hours to write such things, rather than months or years. The market wants rapid development, not necessarily developers. I usually just see the old-heads implying younger devs can't hack it.
• MBCook 2y ago
  Stop and try again? Either you’re not going to get a choice, or you’ll need a 240v three phase outlet installed and possibly an expanded electrical panel. Nvidia has been all about “as fast as possible, no compromise” for a very long time now. So was Intel, until the Pentium 4 forced a big reset. At a certain point this stuff is just totally untenable. Throw more amps at it stops being workable. Apple seems to be able to get a decent fraction of the performance using drastically less power. I have the impression Intel is doing the same, though I’m less sure on that one. Given how parallel graphics problems are, maybe it’s time to give up on 100 cores that go uber fast as behave like a space heater and move to 250 cores that go quite fast but use 1/4 of the power each.
  • shawnz 2y ago
    Plenty of people are working hard to tackle the performance-per-watt problem while others simultaneously tackle the absolute performance problem. There's no one single metric you can focus exclusively on that's going to satisfy everyone's use cases. Obviously not everyone needs a high-end enthusiast product like the 5090 and plenty of people are going to be seeking out a middle-of-the-road product that focuses on performance-per-watt instead, which will be accommodated by the lower-tier products in the lineup as well as their competitors' products. > Given how parallel graphics problems are, maybe it’s time to give up on 100 cores that go uber fast as behave like a space heater and move to 250 cores that go quite fast but use 1/4 of the power each. It wasn't too long ago that people were saying the same things about single-core and dual-core NetBurst CPUs and how we need to start considering dual-core and quad-core for consumer CPUs. And now we have consumer CPUs with 64 cores and more, so aren't we moving in the direction you want already? Performance-per-watt is improving, parallelism is improving, and also absolute performance is improving too in addition to those other metrics.
  • zymhan 2y ago
    > I have the impression Intel is doing the same, though I’m less sure on that one. That may be true on the low-power end of their lineup, but certainly not for the high end i9 chips. Those will increase the power budget for minuscule performance gains.
    • MBCook 2y ago
      Sorry, I meant their GPUs. I should have clarified that.
  • bufferoverflow 2y ago
    Don't be ridiculous. Nobody is going to stop anything. If the only way to scale up is to build more and more power-hungry hardware, that's where the market will go. Even if some GPU of the future consumes 10kW, it's still just $1.5 per hour. Which is a lot cheaper than most other forms of entertainment.
  • cameronh90 2y ago
• ChrisRR 2y ago
  Seems like the Pentium 4 issue. Realise that your current approach isn't sustainable long term and change your approach
• satvikpendem 2y ago
  Perhaps that will incentive people to innovate and invent better and more optimized software instead.