AMD Announces The Ryzen 8040 Series Mobile Processors With Better Ryzen AI

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMD Announces The Ryzen 8040 Series Mobile Processors With Better Ryzen AI

In addition to AMD using its AI event today for launching the Instinct MI300A and MI300X along with ROCm 6.0, AMD also announced the Ryzen 8040 series mobile processors. A big emphasis with these forthcoming laptop processors is on the AI capabilities between the dedicated NPU with AMD XDNA, Zen 4 CPU cores with AVX-512 VNNI support, and AMD RDNA3 graphics capable of accelerating AI.

https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-ryzen-8040-ryzen-ai

[kylew77]

With Strix point coming in 2024 why buy Hawk point today? Same problem intel has with why buy Meteor Lake with Arrow and Lunar Lakes coming soon?

[fallingcats]

With Strix point coming in 2024 why buy Hawk point today? Same problem intel has with why buy Meteor Lake with Arrow and Lunar Lakes coming soon?

Because Strix Point releasing some time in 2024 shouldn't be much of a factor. Ofcource the future will see improvements, But since we don't even have a date or any numbers yet for Strix Point it might as well not be real. 2024 can mean Q4, with Techradar even reporting it might be delayed to 2025

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

Time is flying by because it feels like the 7040 series laptops just came out.

[Eirikr1848]

Time is flying by because it feels like the 7040 series laptops just came out.

And it feels like they still don’t have great Linux support, so they are still in the “introductory” phase in that regard I suppose.

[uid313]

Meh, whatever. 🤷

I don't really care about any AI thing on the CPU, nor do I care about any special-purpose instruction like AVX-512 that is useless to most people.
All these CPUs the last few years use very much electricity and are difficult to cool.
I would like to see x86-S (the Intel proposal to remove some of the 32-bit stuff and other legacy stuff from x86), and Intel APX (the new instructions which seems like a major improvement over x86 and I think it kind of makes it a new ISA almost), or I would like Intel or AMD to make ARM or RISC-V CPU.

[Dukenukemx]

Meh, whatever. 🤷

I don't really care about any AI thing on the CPU, nor do I care about any special-purpose instruction like AVX-512 that is useless to most people.
All these CPUs the last few years use very much electricity and are difficult to cool.
I would like to see x86-S (the Intel proposal to remove some of the 32-bit stuff and other legacy stuff from x86), and Intel APX (the new instructions which seems like a major improvement over x86 and I think it kind of makes it a new ISA almost), or I would like Intel or AMD to make ARM or RISC-V CPU.

AMD's Dragon Range had caught up to Apple's ARM in power efficiency. I agree with AI, but I do like AVX-512. Why an ARM or RISC-V CPU? What benefit could be had from those?

[nranger]

...or I would like Intel or AMD to make ARM or RISC-V CPU.

Why? No seriously, why? I've been hearing people say "x86 is bloated, x86 is dying, RISC will change everything" since 1993. That was THIRTY YEARS AGO.

Yes, the x86 ISA has some clunky stuff in it. But the vast majority of the cruft is not in the hot path. Instruction decoding is a tiny part of actual core real-estate. And now that performance critical compute is dominated by GPU and NPU workloads, it's going to be even less so.

Intel spent almost a decade worried about electricity usage and cooling. To the point where they tried to make Atom processors a thing in cell phones. What doomed them was not x86. It was trying to use a manufacturing process that was unoptimized below 5 watts. AMD meanwhile has been going gangbusters with TSMC from 7nm on down. The SteamDeck uses a 6nm chip that's fairly easy to cool and games better than anything below 10 watts.

[uid313]

AMD's Dragon Range had caught up to Apple's ARM in power efficiency. I agree with AI, but I do like AVX-512. Why an ARM or RISC-V CPU? What benefit could be had from those?

I haven't heard about this AMD Dragon Range but I really hope it is good. My impression is that both Intel and AMD have had power hungry CPUs that got outperformed by CPUs from Apple.

Why? No seriously, why? I've been hearing people say "x86 is bloated, x86 is dying, RISC will change everything" since 1993. That was THIRTY YEARS AGO.

Yes, the x86 ISA has some clunky stuff in it. But the vast majority of the cruft is not in the hot path. Instruction decoding is a tiny part of actual core real-estate. And now that performance critical compute is dominated by GPU and NPU workloads, it's going to be even less so.

Intel spent almost a decade worried about electricity usage and cooling. To the point where they tried to make Atom processors a thing in cell phones. What doomed them was not x86. It was trying to use a manufacturing process that was unoptimized below 5 watts. AMD meanwhile has been going gangbusters with TSMC from 7nm on down. The SteamDeck uses a 6nm chip that's fairly easy to cool and games better than anything below 10 watts.

Well I haven't seen anything interesting from AMD or Intel. It seems both of them just make power hungry CPUs, every new generation just consumes more and more power, it is ridiculous. They have like 300 W or more.

[Modu]

Meh, whatever. 🤷

I don't really care about any AI thing on the CPU, nor do I care about any special-purpose instruction like AVX-512 that is useless to most people.
All these CPUs the last few years use very much electricity and are difficult to cool.
I would like to see x86-S (the Intel proposal to remove some of the 32-bit stuff and other legacy stuff from x86), and Intel APX (the new instructions which seems like a major improvement over x86 and I think it kind of makes it a new ISA almost), or I would like Intel or AMD to make ARM or RISC-V CPU.

I had read many times that ISA's and modern CPU architectures (most of them are RISC now) are different things.