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vient

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reverse engineer

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Wonder if AMD MI350P release will affect setups like this. From what I've heard, the price will be pretty similar to RTX PRO 6000 while having 50% more VRAM which is additionally an HBM3E instead of GDDR7.

A lot of 'premium' branded instant coffee is ~£42/kg. That's £3/kg more than my premium, locally-roasted, single-estate Colombian coffee beans.

You need 7-10 times less instant coffee to make a cup though, so your beans are a lot more expensive in the end. From my experience, cup of coffee is either 2 grams of Nescafe Gold or 16 grams of beans.

I wonder if Windows and Linux just can't yet work on heterogeneous CPUs as well as macOS does. Intel chose an interesting direction here, going straight from one to three kinds of cores in one chip. I almost never see LPE cores being used on Windows, and on Linux you have obscure soft like Intel LPMD which I tried but was not able to notice any battery life improvements.

You can easily download unsigned binaries and run them

Of course, but I assume you don't really need to install third-party apps to control hardware. In my case Alienware and Dell bloat came from me setting up an Alienware monitor. MSI bloat came from setting up MSI GPU. Intel Killer stuff just got automatically installed by Windows Update, it seems.

Microsoft Defender

This one I immediately disable after Windows installation so no problems here :)

On work we get CrowdStrike Falcon, it seems pretty tame for now. Guess it depends on IT-controlled scan settings though.

building a CPU that doesn't guzzle battery

It may be the software problem as well. On Windows I regularly need to find which new app started to eat battery like crazy. Usually it ends up being something third-party related to hardware, like Alienware app constantly making WMI requests (high CPU usage of svchost.exe hosting a WMI provider, disabling Alienware service helped), Intel Killer Wi-Fi software doing something when I did not even know it was installed on my PC (disabling all related services helped), Dell apps doing something, MSI apps doing something... you get the idea.

It seems like a class of problems which you simply can't have on macOS because of closed ecosystem.

Without all this stuff my Intel 155H works pretty decently, although I'm sure it is far away from M-series in terms of performance.

For reference, I get 29 tokens/s with the same model using 12 threads on AMD 9950X3D. Guess it is 2x faster because AVX-512 is 2x faster on Zen 5, roughly speaking. Somewhat unexpectedly, increasing number of threads decreases performance, 16 threads already perform slightly worse and with 32 threads I only get 26.5 tokens/s.

On 5090 same model produces ~170 tokens/s.

Won't say I got much longer battery life, and even what I got may be as well explained as "TLP made energy profile management almost as good as on Windows, and then Windows's tendency to get a bunch of junk processes seeping on your battery tipped the scales to favor Linux". Also I ended up switching back to Windows because of never-ending hardware issues with Linux, installing it on 155H back in February 2024 was especially rough but even 6 months later I randomly got Bluetooth not working anymore after Ubuntu update.

My TLP and LPMD configs: https://gist.github.com/vient/f8448d56c1191bf6280122e7389fc1...

TLP: don't remember details now, as I recall scaling governor does not do anything on modern CPUs when energy perf policy is used. CPU_MAX_PERF_ON_BAT=30 seems to be crucial for battery savings, sacrificing performance (not too much for everyday use really) for joules in battery. CPU_HWP_DYN_BOOST_ON_BAT=0 further prohibits using turbo on battery, just in case.

LPMD: again, did not use it much in the end so not sure what even is written in this config. May need additional care to run alongside TLP.

Also, I used these boot parameters. For performance, I think, beneficial one are *mitigations, nohz_full, rcu*

    quiet splash sysrq_always_enabled=1 mitigations=off i915.mitigations=off transparent_hugepage=always iommu=pt intel_iommu=on nohz_full=all rcu_nocbs=all rcutree.enable_rcu_lazy=1 rcupdate.rcu_expedited=1 cryptomgr.notests no_timer_check noreplace-smp page_alloc.shuffle=1 tsc=reliable

Oh, I see - hard refresh consistently shows HTTP/2 but after one or two soft refreshes it becomes HTTP/3 for me until next hard refresh.

Edit: it is always second soft refresh for me that starts showing HTTP/3. Computers work in mysterious ways sometimes.

AMX is indeed a very strong feature for AI. I've compared Ryzen 9950X with w7-2495X using single-thread inference of some fp32/bf16 neural networks, and while Zen 5 is clearly better than Zen 4, Xeon is still a lot faster even considering that its frequency is almost 1GHz less.

Now, if we say "Zen5 is the leading consumer CPU for AI" then no objections can be made, consumer Intel models do not even support AVX-512.

Also, note that for inference they compare with Xeon 8592+ which is the top Emerald Rapids model. Not sure if comparison with Granite Rapids would have been more appropriate but they surely dodged the AMX bullet by testing FP32 precision instead of BF16.