Their laptop naming scheme at least is fairly straightforward once you figure it out.
U = Low-TDP, for thin & light devices
H = For higher-performance laptops, e.g. Dell XPS or midrange gaming laptops
HX = Basically the desktop parts stuffed into a laptop form factor, best perf but atrocious power usage even at idle. Only for gaming laptops that aren't meant to be used away from a desk.
And within each series, bigger number is better (or at least not worse - 275HX and 285HX are practically identical).
Don't forget the V series in there. I have an Intel(R) Core(TM) Ultra 7 258V in my Thinkpad. I think they're still being made. I bought an open box Thinkpad T14s Gen 6 with it - they come with a nicer GPU than the Ultra 7 255U.
The V series is a one-off thing Intel did, but they don't have a direct successor planned.
Previously, they had a P series of mobile parts in between the U and H series (Alder Lake and Raptor Lake). Before that, they had a different naming scheme for the U series equivalents (Ice Lake and Tiger Lake). Before that, they had a Y series for even lower power than U series.
So they mix up their branding and segmentation strategy to some extent with almost every generation, but the broad strokes of their segmentation have been reasonably consistent over the past decade.
Very interesting. I was a bit out of the loop on Intel mobile CPUs; I looked up the benchmark specs for it when purchasing and saw that it generally trounces the 255U.
I've been really quite happy with it - most of the time the CPU runs at about 30 deg C, so the fan is entirely off. General workloads (KDE, Vivaldi, Thunderbird, Konsole) puts it at about 5.5 watts of power draw.
You don't need CUDA for gaming but software is still just as big of a moat. Gaming GPU drivers are complex and have tons of game-specific patches.
With their new Radeon/RDNA architecture it took AMD years to overcome their reputation for having shitty drivers on their consumer GPUs (and that reputation was indeed deserved early on). And I bet if you go read GPU discussion online today you'll still find people who avoid AMD because of drivers.
That won't stop them, but it's a big barrier to entry.
Oh and that's just to get the drivers to work. Not including company-specific features that need to be integrated by the game devs into their game codebase, like DLSS / FrameGen and FSR. And in the past there was other Nvidia/AMD-specific stuff like PhysX, hair rendering, etc.
> Gaming GPU drivers are complex and have tons of game-specific patches.
I don't think the Chinese government will be too upset if cheap Chinese GPUs work best with China-made games. It will be quite the cultural coup if, in 20 years time, the most popular shooter is a Chinese version of Call of Duty or Battlefield.
They made the most popular RPG last year already - why do you think it'll take 20 years for them to make the most popular shooter? For that matter, the Singapore-HQed SEA makes Free Fire, which topped Google Play in 2019.
Im aware of Genshin Impact, and that NetEase is behind Marvel Rivals. FPS tend to have sticker fanbases, but I chose 20 years because that's what I guess is how long it may take not only for the domestic EUV to launch and get yields good enough for a cheap but competitive GPU out the door.
Gacha mobages are rarely considered the same kind of entertainment as actual RPGs, and even then the Japanese and the Koreans give them stiff competition. When it's not a skinner box FOMO with titillating skins the Chinese barely register on the radar.
Cuda is 20 years old and it shows. Time for a new language that fixes the 20 years of rough edges. The Guy (Lattner) who made LLVM is working on this: https://www.modular.com/mojo
What I gather from this comment is that you haven't written CUDA code in a while, maybe ever.
Mojo looked promising initially. The more details we got though, the more it became apparent that they weren't interested in actually competing with Nvidia. Mojo doesn't replace the majority of what CUDA does, it doesn't have any translation or interoperability with CUDA programs. It uses a proprietary compiler with a single implementation. They're not working in conjunction with any serious standardization orgs, they're reliant on C/C++ FFI for huge amounts of code and as far as I'm aware there's no SemVer of compute capability like CUDA offers. The more popular Mojo gets, the more entrenched Nvidia (and likely CUDA) will become. We need something more like OpenGL with mutual commitment from OEMs.
Lattner is an awesome dude, but Mojo is such a trend-chasing clusterfuck that I don't know what anyone sees in it. I'm worried that Apple's "fuck the dev experience" attitude rubbed off on Chris in the long run, and made him callous towards appeals to openness and industry-wide consortiums.
Many of those posts are opinionated and even provably wrong. The very first one about Deepseek's "recent breakthrough" was never proven or replicated in practice. He's drawing premature conclusions, ones that especially look silly now that we know Deepseek evaded US sanctions to import Nvidia Blackwell chips.
I can't claim to know more about GPU compilers than Lattner - but in this specific instance, I think Mojo fucked itself and is at the mercy of hardware vendors that don't care about it. CUDA, by comparison, is having zero expense spared in it's development at every layer of the stack. There is no comparison with Mojo, the project is doomed if they intend any real comparison with CUDA.
Yea, but less than in the past. Modern graphics APIs are much thinner layers.
This was even proven in practice with Intel’s Arc. While they had (and to some extent still have) their share of driver problems, at a low enough price that isn’t a barrier.
On the other hand, all it would take would be one successful Steam Deck/Steam Machine-style console to get all the developers of the world making sure that their games work on that hypothetical GPU.
I don't think that it will happen in the next 5 years, but who knows?
I believe the software will follow the hardware. Not immediately, of course, but if I want to learn to do ML and have to pick between a $2500 Nvidia GPU and a $500 Chinese GPU that's 80% as fast, I would absolutely take the cheap one and keep an eye out for patches.
When it comes to drivers, IMO all they really need is reasonable functionality on linux. That alone would probably be enough to get used in a budget steam machine or budget pc builds, with Windows 11 being a disaster and both RAM and GPU prices shooting through the roof. The choice may soon be Bazzite Linux with a janky GPU or gaming on your phone.
Its not really just that AMD drivers are not that great (they are not) but they have been stable for a long time.
Its that nvidia relentlessly works with game developers to make sure their graphics tricks work with nvidia drivers. Its so obvious you miss it. Look in the nvidia driver updates they always list games that have fixes, performance ect. AMD never (used?) to do this they just gave you the drivers and expected developers to make their game work with it. The same strategy that MS used for their OS back in the 90's.
AMD provides this. Example:
"Fixed Issues and Improvements
Intermittent driver timeout or crash may be observed while playing Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 on some AMD Graphics Products, such as the AMD Ryzen™ AI 9 HX 370.)
Lower than expected performance may be observed in Delta Force on Radeon™ RX 7000 series graphics products.
Intermittent stutter may be observed while playing Marvel Rivals when AMD FidelityFX™ Super Resolution 3 frame generation is enabled. "
Glad to see. Ive been 100% certian that nvidia will ultimately abandon the gfx market since 2022. If AMD doesnt pick up the torch computer gfx will stagnate for at least a decade. Its already regressing.
They definitely do it some, like Starfield came out with FSR out of the box but they didn’t add DLSS for several months. I got Starfield for free when I bought my 7800X3D which was a nice bonus. Definitely to a lesser degree than Nvidia though.
Frankly, this always seemed like dirty hacks - either the game or the drivers don't actually comply woth the graphics API and then the drivers need to hack around that. :P
I don't work in the industry but as I've understood from reading stuff from people that are. Basically the entire industry is dirty hacks from the top down and bottom up.
That is not to say this is good or bad. Just that it appears common.
Afaik if your account is banned Valve still lets you log in to Steam and access your existing library of purchased games. You just lose access to all the other platform features. Obviously that's their policy that they can change anytime... but in this case, it's not inconsistent to their "nice Linux guys" persona.
Yeah, you need a much smaller number for e.g. giving access to journalists/media pre-release. But the key mechanism is also used for any legitimate sales or giveaways that happen outside the Steam platform.
If you buy a Humble Bundle, you get a set of Steam keys for the games in the bundle. If Intel/AMD/Nvidia are doing a promotion for a free game with a purchase of their product, they give you Steam keys. Etc.
And a 15 second look at that page makes it extremely obvious that (as expected) all this feedback is coming from the 1% of extremely vocal terminally online losers who haven't left their house in the past 6 months and spend their free time consuming furry porn and "tooting" on Mastodon, and for whom hating AI is 75% of their personality. Not actual normal people.
I was just selling my RTX 4090 on Ebay recently and got a ton of bids from Chinese accounts. The winner ($2,325) had Australia set as the country on their profile, but a Chinese name on the account, and the order shipping address was to a different Chinese name (to a regular single-family house in Delaware). Most bidders straight up had China as their profile country.
So my 4090 (24 GB) is probably going to get turned into a 48/96 GB VRAM frankenstein in a Chinese chop shop. I haven't watched the full 3.5 hour documentary you linked but from the first few minutes, it seems quite interesting. And covers this exact thing.
Edit: Again, I checked the address, it was a house, not a freight forwarder warehouse. And if it was actually going to AU, the forwarder would be on the west coast in CA/WA, not east coast (had another order go to Thailand with a forwarder in SF. And Miami is the big hub for South America). For legit freight forwarding they also wouldn't have different names on the account & shipping address. As the parent comment's YT video describes, these are often just normal Chinese-Americans or international students who do this to make a bit of extra money.
Do they all live at the same address of the overseas freight forwarder too? I've sold stuff on eBay to someone in Europe who had me ship to the same address in Delaware. I was confused so I googled the address and turned up the freight forwarding service.
This has happened to me a couple of times with eBay sales.
Is it safe to transact with people who use freight forwarders in your experience? Do you lose any protections?
Out of fear, in my cases, I cancelled the auctions.
On second thought though, I wonder if it's actually the buyer using the service that is more at risk (introduction of 3rd party, more complex delivery, probably impossible to return, etc)
What's not safe for you? They pay you the money, then you send the item to the address they ask. You already got the money! Cancelling the sale because the buyer wants to spend a bit less on shipping seems like an awful thing to do. International shipping gets ridiculously expensive, so combining multiple small packages into one shipment makes perfect sense.
If you are selling in the US, and an account with a primary address overseas buys your item and uses a US shipping address, you are likely shipping to a package forwarder. These services are common because many people and businesses in the US only ship to the US.
I have my eBay account set this way, and I still get bids from overseas accounts -- I always Google the shipping address, 100% of the time it has been a package forwarder.
I would like to point out that in Australia and NZ, it can be a massive pain to find someone who will ship internationally.
Normally this is for things like Amazon US, and other US-based companies. There are services[1][2] that advertise virtual postal addresses in your purchase-country where they’ll box and ship it to you.
So yes, a Chinese name based in Australia with a shipping address in the US isn’t immediately a red flag. Lots of Chinese in Australia and NZ, and lots of people here like to use shipping services like this.
I got a work laptop stolen (in my favorite bag, which they don’t make anymore) and found out from the police that there’s a chain from fences for drug addicts to criminal organizations in the Middle East. They’ve found American hardware there a number of times. Little harder to steal a desktop graphics card in general, but breakins happen.
Yeah, the Reddit front page (not logged in) is always 50% full of politics and raging about how much this admin sucks. Yet in real life for 99% of people it's business as usual, no observable change, you'd have no idea anything was going on.
I wonder if the raging about it online has a cooling effect that makes people less likely to take irl action. Even if you do enter the left media bubble, you can't help but think that they've accomplished absolutely nothing. The "protests" (more like "100 people had a picnic in front of the capital") were pretty pathetic.
That's part of what I mean, actually. You go downtown here on the last big weekend they organized, and its 10 blocks of shouting people in a small/mid sized city, media representation at the local level was good - there is still a newspaper here - on the evening news it was a 10 second clip, and outside of that - "personalities" talking about the whole event nationally and a 30 second spot on Seattle and New York?
Like, compare some pictures of these protests to the 4 guys with a sign locally during Iraq?
On one hand, true, my mom still uses Yahoo. But email has a strong network effect - you need to update everyone & every service who has your @yahoo address. Switching does happen there are no network effects. Nobody uses Mapquest or Ask Jeeves.
Foldables get this job done well. My (OG) Pixel Fold is a great size & aspect ratio while folded, easy to use one-handed, but has a giant screen when you open it up. The newer Pixel Folds and the other foldables on the market have all grown the screen vertically but they're still more compact than most flagships.
Their laptop naming scheme at least is fairly straightforward once you figure it out.
U = Low-TDP, for thin & light devices
H = For higher-performance laptops, e.g. Dell XPS or midrange gaming laptops
HX = Basically the desktop parts stuffed into a laptop form factor, best perf but atrocious power usage even at idle. Only for gaming laptops that aren't meant to be used away from a desk.
And within each series, bigger number is better (or at least not worse - 275HX and 285HX are practically identical).
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