Month: July 2023
Intel returns to profitability after two quarters of losses
submitted by /u/brand_momentum [link] [comments]
submitted by /u/brand_momentum
[link] [comments]
Esther Crawford on Twitter, Before and After Musk
Esther Crawford (previously mentioned here, when she bragged about sleeping at work to meet an unnecessary deadline at Twitter), wrote a fascinating essay about her time at the company, before and after Musk’s acquisition.
Although I didn’t know much about Elon I was cautiously optimistic — I saw him as the guy who built incredible and enduring
companies like Tesla and SpaceX, so perhaps his private ownership
could shake things up and breathe new life into the company.
Crawford was inside the company, and I’m far outside it, but that’s exactly why I was optimistic about Twitter under Musk too. Twitter had ossified years ago — maybe a decade ago — and needed a drastic shake-up, but in the company’s culture and the product. And while I think Twitter under Musk is now far worse, he absolutely did shake things up, and the overall state of Twitter-like-services is today far, far better than it was before. Mastodon was irrelevant pre-Musk-buying-Twitter. The growth it saw after November never would have happened otherwise. I’m now optimistically bullish on Threads, and I don’t think Threads would even exist if not for Musk buying and wrecking Twitter.
I thought this was a keen insight:
Elon has an exceptional talent for tackling hard physics-based
problems but products that facilitate human connection and
communication require a different type of social-emotional
intelligence.
Another way to think about this (and I’m cribbing from something Ben Thompson said on Dithering this week) isn’t about Musk’s lack of empathy, but simply the nature of software itself. The immutable laws of physics push back against Musk’s unreasonable demands in ways that aren’t applicable to software. He doesn’t seem to listen to people who disagree with him, but he has to listen when physics disagrees. (Today’s earlier story about Tesla fudging range estimates is purely dictated by software.)
Software demands more creative discipline than hardware, because so much discipline is baked into the nature of creating hardware. Hardware instills discipline in people; people must instill discipline into software.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that in all of this there is also a
cautionary tale for anyone who succeeds at something — which is
that the higher you climb, the smaller your world becomes. It’s
a strange paradox but the richest and most powerful people are
also some of the most isolated.
I found myself frequently looking at Elon and seeing a person who
seemed quite alone because his time and energy was so purely
devoted to work, which is not the model of a life I want to live.
What a keen insight.
★
Esther Crawford (previously mentioned here, when she bragged about sleeping at work to meet an unnecessary deadline at Twitter), wrote a fascinating essay about her time at the company, before and after Musk’s acquisition.
Although I didn’t know much about Elon I was cautiously optimistic — I saw him as the guy who built incredible and enduring
companies like Tesla and SpaceX, so perhaps his private ownership
could shake things up and breathe new life into the company.
Crawford was inside the company, and I’m far outside it, but that’s exactly why I was optimistic about Twitter under Musk too. Twitter had ossified years ago — maybe a decade ago — and needed a drastic shake-up, but in the company’s culture and the product. And while I think Twitter under Musk is now far worse, he absolutely did shake things up, and the overall state of Twitter-like-services is today far, far better than it was before. Mastodon was irrelevant pre-Musk-buying-Twitter. The growth it saw after November never would have happened otherwise. I’m now optimistically bullish on Threads, and I don’t think Threads would even exist if not for Musk buying and wrecking Twitter.
I thought this was a keen insight:
Elon has an exceptional talent for tackling hard physics-based
problems but products that facilitate human connection and
communication require a different type of social-emotional
intelligence.
Another way to think about this (and I’m cribbing from something Ben Thompson said on Dithering this week) isn’t about Musk’s lack of empathy, but simply the nature of software itself. The immutable laws of physics push back against Musk’s unreasonable demands in ways that aren’t applicable to software. He doesn’t seem to listen to people who disagree with him, but he has to listen when physics disagrees. (Today’s earlier story about Tesla fudging range estimates is purely dictated by software.)
Software demands more creative discipline than hardware, because so much discipline is baked into the nature of creating hardware. Hardware instills discipline in people; people must instill discipline into software.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that in all of this there is also a
cautionary tale for anyone who succeeds at something — which is
that the higher you climb, the smaller your world becomes. It’s
a strange paradox but the richest and most powerful people are
also some of the most isolated.
I found myself frequently looking at Elon and seeing a person who
seemed quite alone because his time and energy was so purely
devoted to work, which is not the model of a life I want to live.
What a keen insight.
AMD unveils its first laptop processor with 3D V-Cache
AMD has revealed its first mobile gaming processor with 3D V-Cache. As the name suggests, 3D V-Cache enables AMD to stack more cache on top of the CPU. The tech arrived on desktop processors last year, and soon you’ll be able to pick up a laptop with a 3D V-Cache CPU.This approach allows AMD to cram extra 64MB of L3 cache onto the Ryzen 9 7945X3D. For a total of 144MB. That helps mitigate the chances of cache miss. If your system can’t find information it’s looking for in the cache, it has to go to system memory. That could result in processes taking 10 times longer to carry out, according to AMD. The company claims its 3D V-cache approach can help increase the frame rates of games.By moving vertically instead of padding more cache onto a CPU’s typical 2D plane, AMD is able to increase the size of the cache without having to make the chip wider or longer. In essence, the company can get more performance out of a CPU while avoiding any increase to the horizontal real estate it takes up on a motherboard.The company claims this is the fastest mobile gaming processor on the planet, and that it’s more than 15 percent faster than the Ryzen 9 7945HX on average. It has 16 cores, 32 threads, up to 5.4 Ghz boost speeds and 55W+ TDP. The CPU is built on the Zen 4 architecture.You won’t have to wait too long to get your hands on a laptop that uses the Ryzen 9 7945X3D. ROG’s Strix Scar 17 X3D machine will be available on August 22nd.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/amd-unveils-its-first-laptop-processor-with-3d-v-cache-010028830.html?src=rss
AMD has revealed its first mobile gaming processor with 3D V-Cache. As the name suggests, 3D V-Cache enables AMD to stack more cache on top of the CPU. The tech arrived on desktop processors last year, and soon you’ll be able to pick up a laptop with a 3D V-Cache CPU.
This approach allows AMD to cram extra 64MB of L3 cache onto the Ryzen 9 7945X3D. For a total of 144MB. That helps mitigate the chances of cache miss. If your system can’t find information it’s looking for in the cache, it has to go to system memory. That could result in processes taking 10 times longer to carry out, according to AMD. The company claims its 3D V-cache approach can help increase the frame rates of games.
By moving vertically instead of padding more cache onto a CPU’s typical 2D plane, AMD is able to increase the size of the cache without having to make the chip wider or longer. In essence, the company can get more performance out of a CPU while avoiding any increase to the horizontal real estate it takes up on a motherboard.
The company claims this is the fastest mobile gaming processor on the planet, and that it’s more than 15 percent faster than the Ryzen 9 7945HX on average. It has 16 cores, 32 threads, up to 5.4 Ghz boost speeds and 55W+ TDP. The CPU is built on the Zen 4 architecture.
You won’t have to wait too long to get your hands on a laptop that uses the Ryzen 9 7945X3D. ROG’s Strix Scar 17 X3D machine will be available on August 22nd.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/amd-unveils-its-first-laptop-processor-with-3d-v-cache-010028830.html?src=rss
AMD Ryzen 7945X3D could be a fast, super-efficient choice for your new gaming laptop
The chip is only launching in a single laptop from Asus, at least for now.
The Ryzen 9 7945X3D is essentially a desktop Ryzen 9 7950X3D repackaged for laptops. [credit:
AMD ]
For a couple of years now, AMD has offered special versions of its desktop processors with an extra 64MB chunk of L3 cache included. This cache is layered over top of the existing CPU silicon, earning it the name “3D V-Cache,” and it has proven especially successful for accelerating cache-sensitive software like games.
Today, AMD is announcing the first 3D V-Cache processor for laptops, the Ryzen 9 7945X3D. It’s a version of the regular 16-core Ryzen 9 7945HX with that same 64MB chunk of cache added in, giving it a total of 144MB of L3 cache.
The 7945HX is essentially a version of the desktop Ryzen 9 7950X repackaged for use in laptops instead of high-end desktops; while chips like the similarly named 7940HS use one monolithic silicon die for everything from the CPU cores to the chipset to the integrated GPU, the 7950HX uses a pair of 8-core CPU chiplets and a separate I/O die.
AMD’s Ryzen 9 7945HX3D could be its slam-dunk gaming laptop chip
AMD and Asus have announced the ROG Strix Scar 17 X3D, a beefy 17-inch gaming laptop with an RGB lightstrip on the bottom. Which, sure, whatever. The exciting news is what’s inside this device. This Strix is powered by AMD’s 7945HX3D mobile laptop, which could, if the stars align, provide gaming performance that we haven’t seen in AMD’s current laptop landscape and fulfill last year’s “extreme gaming laptop” promise.
The chip has 16 cores and 32 threads with boost clock up to 5.4GHz, with “55W+” TDP — those things alone put it at the top of AMD’s laptop processor stack. But it’s also the first mobile processor to feature AMD’s 3D V-Cache (144MB of it, to be specific), which allows AMD to place additional layers of cache directly onto the CPU.
This technology first appeared on AMD’s Ryzen 7 5800X3D desktop chip, which outclassed Intel’s 12th Gen Core i9-12900K for PC gaming — but this laptop chip actually has more cache than any of AMD’s desktop X3D chips yet.
AMD claims that the 7945HX3D will be the “world’s fastest mobile gaming processor”, and will be more than 15 percent faster than the average-Joe 7945HX. More specifically, the company states that the 3D V-Cache will increase Shadow of the Tomb Raider performance by 11 percent at 70W TDP and 23 percent at 40W TDP.
But all of those gaming tests were performed at 1080p resolution, where CPU gains are more pronounced — don’t expect the same advantage on a 1440p or 4K panel.
Asus’s new laptop does look like it will come in a 1080p version, though, as AMD’s presentation footnotes say its benchmarks were performed on an Asus Strix Scar 17 at “1080p native” alongside Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 graphics, with 32GB of DDR5 RAM and a 1TB SSD. They were also run at turbo mode, not that you expected long battery life from such a machine.
X3D chips form the basis of AMD’s current domination in the desktop gaming scene. They’ve closed the major gap that we saw between AMD’s and Intel’s top CPUs last year, providing massive gaming performance boosts at lower wattages.
The big question is whether the mobile iteration of this chip will have the same impact on the gaming laptop space. Intel is currently losing (hard) to AMD in the battery life competition, but it’s also much more heavily represented among high-end gaming laptops.
If AMD has a chip here that can outcompete Intel on both raw performance and efficiency, that could be a big benefit to AMD (and, hopefully, gamers) in the premium laptop space. “In an era where chip makers don’t always focus on efficiency, AMD’s 7950X3D shines through as an exception to the rule,” Verge editor Tom Warren wrote in his review of the recent 7950X3D desktop chip, and that’s even more important in the laptop space than it is for desktop parts.
The Strix Scar 17 X3D will be available on August 22nd. We’ll bring you more details on the laptop as we get them.
AMD and Asus have announced the ROG Strix Scar 17 X3D, a beefy 17-inch gaming laptop with an RGB lightstrip on the bottom. Which, sure, whatever. The exciting news is what’s inside this device. This Strix is powered by AMD’s 7945HX3D mobile laptop, which could, if the stars align, provide gaming performance that we haven’t seen in AMD’s current laptop landscape and fulfill last year’s “extreme gaming laptop” promise.
The chip has 16 cores and 32 threads with boost clock up to 5.4GHz, with “55W+” TDP — those things alone put it at the top of AMD’s laptop processor stack. But it’s also the first mobile processor to feature AMD’s 3D V-Cache (144MB of it, to be specific), which allows AMD to place additional layers of cache directly onto the CPU.
This technology first appeared on AMD’s Ryzen 7 5800X3D desktop chip, which outclassed Intel’s 12th Gen Core i9-12900K for PC gaming — but this laptop chip actually has more cache than any of AMD’s desktop X3D chips yet.
AMD claims that the 7945HX3D will be the “world’s fastest mobile gaming processor”, and will be more than 15 percent faster than the average-Joe 7945HX. More specifically, the company states that the 3D V-Cache will increase Shadow of the Tomb Raider performance by 11 percent at 70W TDP and 23 percent at 40W TDP.
But all of those gaming tests were performed at 1080p resolution, where CPU gains are more pronounced — don’t expect the same advantage on a 1440p or 4K panel.
Asus’s new laptop does look like it will come in a 1080p version, though, as AMD’s presentation footnotes say its benchmarks were performed on an Asus Strix Scar 17 at “1080p native” alongside Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 graphics, with 32GB of DDR5 RAM and a 1TB SSD. They were also run at turbo mode, not that you expected long battery life from such a machine.
X3D chips form the basis of AMD’s current domination in the desktop gaming scene. They’ve closed the major gap that we saw between AMD’s and Intel’s top CPUs last year, providing massive gaming performance boosts at lower wattages.
The big question is whether the mobile iteration of this chip will have the same impact on the gaming laptop space. Intel is currently losing (hard) to AMD in the battery life competition, but it’s also much more heavily represented among high-end gaming laptops.
If AMD has a chip here that can outcompete Intel on both raw performance and efficiency, that could be a big benefit to AMD (and, hopefully, gamers) in the premium laptop space. “In an era where chip makers don’t always focus on efficiency, AMD’s 7950X3D shines through as an exception to the rule,” Verge editor Tom Warren wrote in his review of the recent 7950X3D desktop chip, and that’s even more important in the laptop space than it is for desktop parts.
The Strix Scar 17 X3D will be available on August 22nd. We’ll bring you more details on the laptop as we get them.