Posts by Tom Womack

And the reason you run AI workloads on super-expensive GPUs is precisely that the GPUs have large quantities of extremely fast RAM.

If your RAM Is running at 70Gbytes per second, which is a pretty good measured performance from fast DDR5 on current desktop platforms, then even in int4 you're not going to get more than twenty tokens a second out of a 7B model; or two a second out of a 70B model which uses more than 32GB of platform memory.

(I don't have a very good idea why the model sizes are 7B, 13B, and 70B, rather than being just below the memory capacities of common GPUs - I'd have guessed that 7B was so you fit the model and a bit of extra data in a 16GB GPU, but the next bigger GPU is 24GB and the one after that 40GB, so I was expecting 11 and 18)

Re: You just cant get more bread and butter

A dozen clerks is half a million pounds a year; an 800,000-row database fits easily on a Raspberry Pi with an SSD hanging off the USB port.

Re: GPT-4 is a thing

But the GPT-3 paper described the number of parameters and the compute intensity of the training, whilst the GPT-4 paper decided to be deliberately uselessly vague about that to free up pages to fill with useless analysis of 'AI risk' and of how they had crippled the model so that it didn't regurgitate bomb- or drug-making instructions which could be found in moments with an obvious Google search.

Re: Intel

If the technology is more efficient, you can stick more of it in a box to use the same amount of power at the same temperature. There was a brief period where people used individual low-power servers, before realising that collecting jobs using virtual machines onto big machines hosting 256 vCPU in 2U and 1kW was a much more efficient use of the very-expensive space.

Re: Two years to tender

Not really - what's bankrupted Birmingham is spending years underpaying their female employees and then having to find £700 million upfront to pay the second part of the settlement.

£100 million on an Oracle migration that was budgeted at £19 million and didn't work is a drop in the bucket compared to that.

You don't have to. But releasing a marginal improvement annually still means that people replacing their 2018 smartphone with a 2024 smartphone get a nicer experience than the people who replaced their 2015 smartphone with a 2021 smartphone, and so on; as long as any chip company proceeds to the next ARM core, their competitors will be obliged either to do the same or to lower their prices. You can still get a brand new Samsung phone with eight A55 cores.

The chips have been out with live hyperscale customers for a year, end-users willing to sign NDAs have had access to them in some of the clouds for three months, they have gone through twelve separate steppings, Intel has taken a half-billion-dollar charge on unshippable product (and is currently rearranging itself internally so that the processor group doesn't get to run new steppings through the fab at its own convenience); I think it is fair to call them battle-hardened now.

I bought a new USB CD/DVD drive last Christmas, because I wanted to rip my Christmas CDs and my Mac Mini M1, whilst wonderful in almost all ways, lacks an optical drive. For as long as media is distributed on shiny discs, people will want to watch the shiny discs on computers ...

Re: Batteries not included

And Artemis was a particularly bad setup for cubesats, because they were installed in July 2021 and then there was no access to them, even for battery recharging, until the launch sixteen months later. 80% functionality rate for things stuck in a drawer for sixteen months is not bad ...

It's a perfectly normal high-quality overpriced beige coat from the front (https://us.burberry.com/monogram-motif-waterloo-trench-coat-p80647751) but with a really surprisingly ugly white creeper-face design in the small of the back.

I was thinking Burberry might be charging that much for a Burberry-check in-game skin, which would have been a bit more than averagely silly at the height of the NFT nonsense and absolutely ridiculous now.

Re: For those unfamiliar with Qualcomm lawyers..

In particular, Qualcomm are accusing Arm of wanting to move to a per-device licensing model *like Qualcomm's*.

The 'no Arm extra IP blocks without an Arm CPU' part doesn't seem completely unreasonable, though I think Intel did do an x86-with-Mali SoC at one point - if Arm are willing to miss out on Mali revenue because they are worried about RISCV+Mali SoCs that's up to them, The claim that they might be moving to 'no non-Arm IP blocks on a chip with an Arm CPU' is obviously complete nonsense since Arm don't make memory or PCIe controllers.

If the purpose of email is mostly to organise meetings, then being able to send emails which are instantly accepted or rejected into a calendar, and where the 'pick a time slot where the recipients are all free' is a function of the mail client is incredibly useful.

Re: Girding of Loins

They've already done it - Amazon has warehouses full of its c7g Arm-based units, Apple sells Arm processors by the million.

Or is the only interpretation of "taking on Intel head-on" that you'd accept one in which Arm itself sells physical objects in the retail market to plug into sockets on motherboards, which they've been absolutely clear for twenty years they're never going to do.

Re: Software as service once again

KVM? Xen? AWS is Xen, Azure is HyperV, Google Cloud is KVM ...

Re: Mixer services

They're really not, because keeping cryptocurrency transactions private is not a legitimate goal.

The weird lend-real-money-against-cryptocurrency industry already regards 'coins that have gone through a mixer' as unacceptable collateral; I would expect that in the medium term it will not be possible to sell for real money coins that have ever passed through a mixer.

Re: A Kludge

The whole point of hyper threading is that it works well on code which *hasn't* been thoroughly optimised. If you've got two vector instructions lined up for each tick, hyper threading can't get you anything; if your thread is waiting two hundred ticks for the L3 cache to divulge the next operand, having another thread running until it too needs to wait for the L3 cache is extremely helpful.

I am very sad at the way that people are using fairly hypothetical security arguments to disable the features that make processors actually good at computing: I am willing to do my banking on my phone if that means my actual computers can crunch numbers at a higher percentage of its peak speed.

Re: Lira?

I was, accidentally, there for the changeover; all the banks and ATMs were closed for a couple of days, which was somewhat irritating since I'd turned up without any cash because Romanian lei are hard to come by.

Particularly irritating was that, when the ATMs reopened, they were still dispensing the old notes!

Re: It is a long way away from the sun

It's about 45AU from the Sun, so sunlight is two thousand times fainter than on Earth - but that's still about a hundred times brighter than full-moonlight, and with a camera on a good tripod you can take pretty good photos in full moonlight.

Re: Reboot

What do you mean 'requiring'? It suggests you might want to reboot, but my Ubuntu nodes have mostly been up for two or three months.

Re: Headphone socket

Apple seem to have had real difficulty manufacturing the 7+, so if you wanted to walk out of the shop with a large Apple phone you got a 6S+; and it seems that most people who want an expensive new phone want a large one.

Re: That's hilarious

Complain publicly to @fitbit on Twitter, with photos, and they'll likely send you a new one for free.

I'm on my third.

Re: What went wrong?

The USA does this to an extent - if you hold the shares for less than a year, you pay income tax on the profits, whilst if you hold them for longer you pay a lower capital-gains-tax rate.

Re: twinax cable

No, actually Cat8, twisted pair rather than twinax (40GBASE-T). Not sure what black magic they're using in the transceivers. The cable needs to be shielded and tested up to 2GHz, but it is a twisted-pair cable.

A competing manufacturer of annoying squishy expensive pavements says '5W continuous', so I think that particular problem is just a matter of a badly-written press release.

The problem is that a 5W generator produces £5.70 of electricity a year at retail price, and it seems wildly unlikely that the maintenance of the annoying squishy pavement, let alone the interest on a loan to cover the install price, is of that order of magnitude.

Re: The problem with es-16-xg is not just the SFP+ cables

This is a comment guaranteed to not fill you with delight, but: have you tried the cable in more than one port on your switch? I have some cables that work only in ports 6 and 8 (and, accordingly, a bag of fibre transceivers winging its way to me from fs.com)

Re: ARM is not very popular as desktop

Since Conroe I have expected PCs to last forever. Builds have grown big enough that it's nice on a software-development workstation to have 2GB per thread and ideal to have 4GB per thread, but that's been possible since Haswell.

A problem is that memory controller IP, which is very black magic and comes from a very small number of suppliers, charges a big premium for each extra address line; so it would be a significant extra expense to make a phone or set-top-box SoC which happens to be able to support 16GB, and therefore you're not going to be able to make a nice 16GB devboard around a ubiquitous SoC.

Re: Let's step back for a second

So you have to stop offering really crappy free WiFi. Where's the issue? If your free WiFi is not making your coffee shop a fiver a day in custom, why are you bothering? When almost everyone in the coffee shop will be accessing your wifi using a mobile device which can happily switch to 3G, providing a service worse than 3G is a waste of time.

Re: It's already all wrong....

And Gaia watches them move and measures how far they've moved, so two million of the stars are annotated with velocities already and about a hundred million will be by the end of the mission.

The researchers did do the obvious experiment to see whether any velocities were changing over time, because that would be an exciting result, but didn't find any convincing examples - it turned out simply to be an excellent way to find one category of mistakes matching up stars in the fifteen-year-old Tycho catalogue.

Re: Machine Operating System

I think that's a Master, configured to use DFS rather than ADFS at boot

Re: About 20 pounds too much.

Or think of it as a collection of bits all arriving at the same time and selected so that you didn't have to go and order another PSU and wait two further days for it to turn up, plus a £15 donation to the Raspberry Pi foundation.