Your 9900k at 5ghz does work slower than a Ryzen 9800X3D at 5ghz. A lot slower (1700 single core geekbench vs 3300, and just about any benchmark will tell the same story). Clock speed alone doesn't mean anything.
>8 Cores and 16 processing threads, based on AMD "Zen 5" architecture
which is the same thread geometry as my 9900K.
My main concerns at the time were:
1. More cores for running large workloads on k8s since I had just upgraded to 128G RAM
2. More thread level parallelism for my C++ code
Naively I thought that, ceteris paribus and assuming good L1 cache utilization, having more physical cores with a higher clock rate would be the ticket for 2.
Does the 9800X3D have a wider pipeline or is it some other microarchitectural feature that makes it faster?
You don't even need to go into the pipeline details. The 9800X3D has 8x more L2 cache, 6x more L3 cache, 2x the memory bandwidth than the now 8 years old i9 9900K. 3D V-cache is pretty cool.
I purposely picked a CPU with the same thread geometry as your 9900K to avoid calls of "apples & oranges" or whatever. If you want more threads, the 9950X is right there in the same socket. Or Core Ultra 9 285k. Either of which will run circles around a 9900K in code compilation.
I think my i9 was released right after the Spectre and Meltdown mitigations in 2019, but I seem to remember even more recent vulns in that family… so that could also be a factor.
If M5 has 9-18 cores and takes ~20w, then that's ~1-2w per CPU core. If these are 200-300W, and have ~100-200 CPU cores, then guess what? That's also ~1-2w per CPU core.
Xeons, Epycs, whatever this is - they are all also typically optimized for power efficiency. That's how they can fit so many CPU cores in 200-300W.
The CPU is capable. The 8GB of RAM not so much. If this had even just the 12GB of the A19 Pro that'd be a huge upgrade. Unless the RAM shortage gets developers to actually start giving a shit about RAM efficiency, but that seems unlikely to happen honestly.
Especially not when a certified macbook air refurb straight from Apple isn't that much more if you're not able to get the $500 EDU pricing on the Neo. $850 gets you a 16GB RAM / 512GB M4 Air, which is significantly better than the $700 Neo in every way.
Honestly the 8GB is not really an issue. As opposed to basically every other computer on this price range, Apple puts real storage in their machines, making a well-tuned swap simply transparent. I'd also bet they have very performant hardware engines for memory (de)compression.
A few years ago, my parents asked me for a laptop for my sisters, for university use. We targeted this price range. It's shocking but pretty much all laptops from Dell, HP, etc come with some form of eMMC storage. And I'm not speaking about the other specs like display or build quality. We ended up buying second-hand M1 and M2 macbook airs, and both I and my sisters are very happy about it.
(also, as the "tech support guy" of the family, I'm oh my so happy about them not running windows)
The SSD in the Neo only manages around 1,500 MB/s in sequential benchmarks, it's not an impressive drive.
> It's shocking but pretty much all laptops from Dell, HP, etc come with some form of eMMC storage.
I just went to Dell's website and picked a random $400 laptop and it had an NVME SSD. The $650 Dell 14 Essential also is NVME. Both of which are M.2 so easily upgraded, replaced, or have data recovery done on them. The only eMMC options I'm seeing are the $300 Chromebooks? Which is no where close to "pretty much all laptops." In fact it'd be "pretty much none of the laptops"
> The SSD in the Neo only manages around 1,500 MB/s in sequential benchmarks, it's not an impressive drive.
That's sequential, not what you want for swap, but already a good start. I agree that it's not impressive, but already leagues ahead of a SATA SSD. And for swapping a 8GB machine it's more than enough (when the swap pattern is sequential though): you swapped your whole system memory in 3 seconds, which is impressive.
> The only eMMC options I'm seeing are the $300 Chromebooks? Which is no where close to "pretty much all laptops." In fact it'd be "pretty much none of the laptops"
Then it's good the situation improved, genuinely! Less e-waste being on the store shelves. Pretty sure windows is nigh unusable on eMMC. And yes, those were sold alongside chromebooks, but at a markup of a "real computer" despite having roughly the same internals.
Another thing that could impact, though, is availability in different markets. I am in France, and the offerings are perhaps worse than in the US? (quite likely, in fact). Add to that the usual price markup where US companies tend to do, at best, 1 USD = 1 EUR, and we get worse machines for the equivalent price range.
> you swapped your whole system memory in 3 seconds, which is impressive.
As a user a 3 second hang is unusable. Also, critically, swap consumes the life of the drive. Since the Neo's isn't user-replaceable, a 3-5 year lifespan before death is actually a non-trivial compromise, although time will tell on that one I suppose.
Should be fast enough to swap in a browser page I guess. Overall you're right that it's the wrong device for memory hungry applications, but it's not the target audience.
Not sure why you're taking the rk3588 as a milestone for ARM, when it's a low end chip using core designs that were old when it released. Cortex-A76 is from 2018, so if that's the yardstick then the K3 is 8 years behind. Even then at the time the A76 was released Apple was significantly ahead with their own ARM CPUs.
> SpacemiT K3 is on par with Rockchip RK3588. So, about 4 years behind ARM.
That'd be ~7 years behind, not 4. Cortex A76 came out in late 2018. Also what benchmarks are you looking at?
> Tenstorrent Atlantis (first Ascalon silicon) should ship in Q2/Q3 and be twice as fast. About as fast as Ryzen5. So, about 5 years behind AMD.
Which Ryzen 5? The first Ryzen 5 came out in 2017, which was a lot more than 5 years ago.
> But even the K3 has faster AI than Apple Silicon or Qualcomm X Elite.
Which isn't RISC-V. Might as well brag about a RISC-V CPU with an RTX 5090 being faster at CUDA than a Nintendo Switch. That's a coprocessor that has nothing to do with the ISA or CPU core.
> Current trend-lines suggest ARM64 and RISC-V performance parity before 2030.
L. O. fucking. L. That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works.
Many of these, like RGB or YUV, are intermediate "simplifications", not what you're necessarily supposed to be working in to generate them. It's like a physics calculation where everyone just decides to randomly stop half way through and use that as a transport medium. RGB exists because that's how the display physically operates, it's how bright those literal subpixels should be. Thus the RGB intermediate transport. YUV (particularly 4:2:2 and 4:2:0) is then essentially a lossy-compression format that's very easy to compress/decompress, and that's why it exists.
If you're doing rendering work, like in a game, those do operate in a more physical domain. That's the so-called "Physically Based Rendering" or PBR that you might see if you hang out in game dev circles.
No, it isn't. RGB is just a color model. You cannot convert between a color model and a color space any more than you can covert between float and Euros.
In order to convert between RGB and L*a*b you need a color space. That could be an ICC profile, sure, but it could also just be any well defined color space like sRGB, Display P3, or bt2020
It seems like you two agree on everything except what "device dependence" means...? GP acknowledged that there is no direct conversion between RGB and Lab, distinguished RGB from sRGB (implying the former is not a colour space), and indicated that a colour space like sRGB does solve the problem (since TFA is about using it to solve the problem).
The 5k iMac was introduced in 2014. There was one change in 2015 that added P3 color gamut, so it appears to have been the exact same LG-manufactured panel for at least 11 years.
> you an also just buy a RPI for a fraction of the price of the GMKtec G10.
Sadly not really. The Pi 5 8gb canakit starter set, which feels like a more true price since it's including power supply, MicroSD card, and case, is now $210. The pi5 8gb by itself is $135.
A 16gb pi5 kit, to match just the RAM capacity to say nothing of the difference in storage {size, speed, quality} and networking, is then also an eye watering $300
>Sadly not really. The Pi 5 8gb canakit starter set, which feels like a more true price since it's including power supply, MicroSD card, and case, is now $210. The pi5 8gb by itself is $135.
It doesn't need to. The reality is companies are going to go for whatever the cheapest cost for electricity is, and solar w/ batteries has taken that lead. Capitalism happens to align with a renewable energy green transition, regardless of whatever the US political engine wants. At the end of the day most companies are going to choose profit over political ideology.
Sadly they might not be allowed to choose profit. ~25% of US counties have adopted regulation effectively blocking new solar and wind (1). Up from 15% a year ago!
Peoples stupidity and self sabotage truly knows no bounds.
You're right but the problem is subsidies change that math. If the US gov subsidizes oil, then the economics of that work out even if solar wins in a free market.
That's true, but also requires that companies believe those subsidies will remain in place over ~20-30 years. Assuming US elections remain fair, that's not going to be the case. By contrast solar / wind subsidies are effective since the bulk of their cost is up-front, so you can generally rely on getting full value out of those subsidies.
Subsidies can certainly delay things at this point, but it's hard to see how it'd stop it.
I agree. Subsidies will delay, but they will not change the outcome.
Considering we are racing against CO2 release and the warming planet, I worry that the delay makes a large difference in outcome, not for energy breakdown, but in quality of life for humanity.
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