General Computer Thread

[Haggis and tatties]

should be big sellers in Europe the way electricity prices are going there Max out your processor and gpu card you're pulling close on a 1kilowatt of power (though not sure what you'd be doing that would redline everything - maybe a game at 4K max detail).

At that leads to the question - what do these cards really achieve other than some dick waving? Then again nVidia likes taking the pretty the chips sticking the name Tesla on them and charge businesses a fuckton to use them for vGPU in virtualised evironments, machine learning or HPC (though accept there is some extra cost when they have to certified the cards for floating point accuracy).

Though people might prefer to by slightly late model cards second hand now that the arse has fallen out of gpu crypto mining

You are not joking, it would cost you £42 a month for 4 hours a day at our present locked 0.34p lekky tarrif here in the UK, just for this 40xx 1000w desktop pc.........oh and just for giggles over those same 4 hours a month it would cost you £2 on the steam deck or £4 on the series S. Lol

 

[Hedbergian]

^ Add on to that, the cost of a new ATX 3.0 psu (not yet available, MAY be available in December). BECAUSE ... word is the y-adapter for ATX 2.0 psu's (multiple 8-pin to the new 12VHPWR connector on 40xx cards) can MELT under certain conditions. Nvidia selling 40-series like "we DARE you to buy one of these cards"

Start video at 5:18

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[Haggis and tatties]

^^^My god, we are nearing warrage draws that are up there with electric cooker hobs and rings. Lol

 

[Marc]

^^^My god, we are nearing warrage draws that are up there with electric cooker hobs and rings. Lol

and not really achieving anything for all that power consumption!!

According the monitor from my UPS, I'm pulling about 288 watts for my server and PC which would barely turn over a new nVIDIA card!!

Server is a dual Xeon v2 with 80GB ram and a Tesla M40 for vGPU and my workstation (4th gen i5 with 16GB).

 

[Hedbergian]

^^^My god, we are nearing warrage draws that are up there with electric cooker hobs and rings. Lol

With Apple's M1 (now M2), I'm thinking it's only a couple years 'til we start seeing any significant SOC efforts from Teams Green/Red/Blue ... but they ALL need to start playing catchup in a HURRY. Of all companies, APPLE has set the bar for powerful AND efficient desktop processors. ... Who the hell saw THAT one coming???

'Cause 450W TDP with 600W spikes ... that's not revolutionary, not even EVOLUTIONARY ... reminds me more of the old GTX 690, the chonky dual gpu card. "Just increase the power draw!!!" No. SOCs are the future. Just HOW they'll be implemented on PC (separating/combining CPU/GPU/RAM), is still murky.

 

[Marc]

With Apple's M1 (now M2), I'm thinking it's only a couple years 'til we start seeing any significant SOC efforts from Teams Green/Red/Blue ... but they ALL need to start playing catchup in a HURRY. Of all companies, APPLE has set the bar for powerful AND efficient desktop processors. ... Who the hell saw THAT one coming???

'Cause 450W TDP with 600W spikes ... that's not revolutionary, not even EVOLUTIONARY ... reminds me more of the old GTX 690, the chonky dual gpu card. "Just increase the power draw!!!" No. SOCs are the future. Just HOW they'll be implemented on PC (separating/combining CPU/GPU/RAM), is still murky.

every x86 architecture is moving closer to SoC but whether goes as far as Apple's M1 is yet to be been scene. For better or worse Apple has never been big on expandability since the Mac era began (yes the was nuBus on some of the 68000 series Macs and PCI/PCIe in the power Macs) so shrinking everything down the new ARM envirionemtn wasn't that big a leap.

You just have to remember to order the system with as much memory as you think you'll ever need and that you out grow the storage you go external.

I don't think the x86-64 market will be quite so willing to go that way. For a lot of people it would be fine but for others yeah not happening - plus I can see the peripheral makers having an absolute shitfit.

 

[Hedbergian]

Expandability is DEFINITELY an issue, and there WILL be outliers who scoff at SOC. But just like phones and tablets, for better or worse, I think desktop SOC is coming. I envision something akin to what automakers do now with subscription-pricing. Chips built with maxed-out specs, but firmware limits in place. "Upgrading ur processor/memory is now a click away", etc. No I don't particularly like the idea either and think it's EXTREMELY invasive ... but I think Apple's proof-of-concept is far too enticing; so's the convenience of "click-to-upgrade".

"But that'd be cost-prohibitive". I'm not so sure. Instead of multiple fabrication lines making various SKUs, they'd be making a single SKU. All the R&D for variants gets funneled to one SKU. One size fits all.

... I'll just leave this here.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

But just how much of a PC can you integrate into one or a couple of chips and get the same performance that current parts would give you for the same specifications? How far can you go?

 

[Hedbergian]

With M1/M2, it's CPU/GPU/RAM all on the chip. And with PROPER driver/software optimization, I think it could run damned-near anything. Its future potential need only be showcased running 18 (eighteen) 8K streams simultaneously. Not sure ANY PC today can claim such an insane spec. (an aside, M1 Mac Mini can edit 12bit 8K RAW with no dropped frames)

No PCIe slots for M1 tho (but that'll change when M1 Mac Pro gets released). So that'd have to be a consideration for PC SOCs.

 

[Unicron]

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[Gingerbread Demon]

Single board computers are interesting...... Check this out.

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I have an 8gig Pi 4 but apart from linux and retro gaming I never got much use out of it but this one looks a bit more tempting,

 

[Santaman]

Ryzen CPU's are already combining the chipset etc in one module the new ones are all APU's as well so that's out of the way, heck in 1997, yes you read that correctly 1997 Cyrix already had an APU, the MediaGX which IIRC also included a soundcard on chip so it's nothing really new.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Ryzen CPU's are already combining the chipset etc in one module the new ones are all APU's as well so that's out of the way, heck in 1997, yes you read that correctly 1997 Cyrix already had an APU, the MediaGX which IIRC also included a soundcard on chip so it's nothing really new.

Oh I know that, just these devices seem to be popping up a lot more and becoming more versatile. That one in the video seems to me more tempting then the Pi 4 that I already have. Just have to debate whether it's worth the actual cost of buying / shipping, and whether or not I actually would put it to more use then the Pi.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Just when I think I'm out, vi pulls me back in.

 

[Marc]

Just when I think I'm out, vi pulls me back in.

but not vim or vile?

 

[CorporalCaptain]

but not vim or vile?

Yeah, it's vim.

 

[publiusr]

Some interesting news of late--

It seems traditional computers still have some use:
https://phys.org/news/2022-09-traditional-quantum-problems.html
A new Caltech-led study in the journal Science describes how machine learning tools, run on classical computers, can be used to make predictions about quantum systems..

Now--YOU can do super-computing
https://phys.org/news/2022-09-machine-scientists-peer-future.html
Their method is also less computationally expensive; while solving complex computing problems previously required a supercomputer, they used a laptop running Windows 10 to make predictions in about a fraction of a second—about 240,000 times faster than traditional machine learning algorithms.

Another boost.
https://phys.org/news/2022-09-artificial-intelligence-equation-quantum-physics.html
Using artificial intelligence, physicists have compressed a daunting quantum problem that until now required 100,000 equations into a bite-size task of as few as four equations—all without sacrificing accuracy.

The old days
https://www.secretprojects.co.uk/threads/facit-mechanical-calculators-and-other-devices.40325/

 

[Marc]

Yeah, it's vim.

have to admit despite kicking around with Unix and Unix-like systems for 30 odd years I've never learnt vi and it's derivatives (used SunOS/Solaris at uni, ran FreeBSD starting with v1 at home for a number of years, drifted away but have run some Linux vms at home for several years now)

Found nano (or pico as it was on the time) on the Vax VMS system at uni and have used it ever since.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Ooh another piece of retro hardware. Although bad idea just replacing a fuse with jumper wire

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[Haggis and tatties]

^^Yeap, and i nice power surge will see that who system ruined in seconds. Lol