PCs and Steam: Thread 01

[Brad]

And so it begins. Sell your intel stock…

[briareos_kerensky]

Yeah, I'm really curious on how Intel and AMD are going to react to ARM architecture becoming relevant outside the mobile market.

[Neon Ignition]

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/directstorage-developer-preview-now-available/

In a u-turn DirectStorage SDK will now be coming to Windows 10

[Brad]

Yeah, I'm really curious on how Intel and AMD are going to react to ARM architecture becoming relevant outside the mobile market.

Yep. I want to see what (if anything) Apple can do in the desktop Mac space. Macbooks and iMacs and Mac Minis with a max of 16GB ram outperforming their Intel/AMD counterparts in performance and price is great but can they make something that has 32 cores and supports 128GB ram? It feels like Laptops will become ARM (MS have an ARM Surface Pro already but their intel emulation layer lets it down currently as I understand it).

[briareos_kerensky]

It will be absolutely interesting to see how the CPU market will evolve, and what role GPUs will take on.
ARM is incredibly effective in fanless chips, will scaling it to desktop or even HEDT levels will bring the same benefits? Apple's chips are fantastic because of their major customisation inside the chips and how the whole ecosystem (HW+SW) are tightly woven together, which puts them way ahead of any other competitor, being it MS, Intel, AMD, or nVidia.
GPUs are taking on more and more tasks, even outside gaming. 3D and video rendering (OpenCL and CUDA) on GPUs is waaaaaaaay faster than on CPUs, so the importance on really high-power CPUs might be significantly lower in the future.

I think the next step will be to see what Apple delivers with the M2, and what will come of nVidia acquiring ARM.

[Brad]

What Apple have done in transitioning to ARM is amazing. I was running an M1 native version of the Reaper DAW yesterday and loaded up an Intel VST instrument which just seems like magic really.

[MartyG]

x86 isn't going anywhere for a decade or two - it's far too embedded for it to disappear in a couple of years so I wouldn't be selling the Intel shares just yet.

If the CPU inside doesn't impact the performance or compatibility of the software I used or start using kilowatts of power, I really don't care what's running inside it from an end user point of view - I just want the best performance I can afford.

[Brad]

... and soon (I won't define what soon means :-) )the best performance you can afford will be ARM based. Intel have had a stranglehold for so long that they stopped innovating. Hopefully this wakes them up. They're losing to AMD on the x86/64 CPU front, they have no GPU to speak of. They need to get their act together.

[Neon Ignition]

https://www.windowscentral.com/amazons-new-world-bricking-rtx-3090-graphics-cards

Amazon's New Worlds MMORPG beta is bricking RTX3090's

[wakka]

Yep, the M1 chip is pretty incredible. I'm excited to see what happens with the next generation iMacs and Mac minis that we should be seeing soon.

I'm still running a 2016 MacBook with an Intel m3 chip (Y series), so I am long, long, LONG overdue for a new machine. This thing was underpowered when I bought it. Beautifully light and a terrific screen but holy **** does it get slow. Also the fact that it's light is basically meaningless since I've barely left my house in 18 months.

[MartyG]

But can it run Crysis?

The work that Intel and AMD are doing on Big/Little might go some way to combat the M1 in terms of power usage.

I'm not seeing much in the way of M1 vs Ryzen vs Intel in the gaming benchmark comparisons. I've seen some productivity comparisons, such as 4K rendering, but it does seem to be selective. On paper Ryzen R7/9 absolute destroys the M1 in multicore power, it just seems that for certain tasks, the M1 has been very well tuned - the single core ability is certainly impressive tho, especially given the power usage it has.

I think I'll be hanging onto my Ryzen gaming rig a bit longer tho

[Brad]

AMD/Intel cpus were the achilles heel of Laptops; their power draw was too high. It was clear we could do better when Apple's own iPads were as powerful as their laptops, half the size and lasted all day. The desktop space remains to be seen but you could conceive of a situation where an Ryze/Radeon rig needed a 1000watt CPU and crazy cooling and the ARM competitor needed a smaller, cheaper PSU, less (cheaper) cooling and a smaller (cheaper) case. Not predicting that change though. So for now it's gamers and servers that will keep AMD and Intel going because regular users don't buy desktop PCs, they buy laptops.

[MartyG]

Yeah, it's the efficiency that's impressive in the M1, they sip power - but actually the latest Ryzen laptop chips are not that far behind - reductions in process node size (Apple is smaller) and Big/Little designs along with firmware optimisations will bring it closer.

It's good to have competition and I'd definitely be interested in an ARM based laptop with similar performance to a 5800H.

[wakka]

I'm sure if you're into building dedicated rigs using Intel/AMD chips, you can build something that creams a MacBook Air (if you couldn't, that would be bizarre).

But speaking as a long time Mac user, I am so glad we are out from under the yoke of Intel's molasses-slow chip development. When Apple first moved from PowerPC, it was great - the Core Duo chips offered massive gains over what we'd had before. But the last 5 years have seen exceedingly slow progress in Mac performance. With such great performance right out of the gate with the M1, I'm excited to see what updates to rest of the Mac line will look like in terms of capability.

[Neon Ignition]

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2021-07-21-humankind-dev-pulls-controversial-denuvo-drm-from-game-before-launch#comments

The devs of upcoming game Humankind have pulled Denuvo from the release following the concerns about performance issues