Reader Mail for September Loose Ends

I've always seen AMD TFlop calcs as I've written. I never realized that you were mainly calculating the ALU and not the ROP.

Travis Gooding

No, ALU*2*clock. A CU has 64 ALUs, which is why using 64RoPs in the formula instead results in your getting a correct answer. Try using that for Nvidia 3090: 82*112*2*1395/1695 = 25.6/31.1 TFLOPs at base/boost clocks When in reality it has 82*128*2*1395/1695 = 29.2/35.6 TFLOPs at base/boost clocks Where 128 is used as there are 128 ALUs in each Ampere SM.

Jen-Hsun Huang

CU x RoPs x 2 x clocks. PS5 36cu x 64 x 2 x 2230 = 10.275 TF(10.3 rounded)

Travis Gooding

Travis, i think you're having a fundamental misunderstanding of what gets the FLOPs. RoPs don't give you flops. changing the amount of RoPs will not change the amount of FLOPs. And yes, they could put 128 RoPs on 40 CUs. What they really need to get performance is CUDA Cores. We'll license them for AMD to produce for Sony for, hm, $100 per console sold.

Jen-Hsun Huang

Hi Tom, What are you thoughts on Sonys potential route with the PS5(Pro) 1. They go with 40CU again, disable 3, use 1CU for Tempest and 36 CU with an increase in RoPs to 96. Current clocks @ 2240mhz could push it to ~15.5TF. *-A 10% increase to clock would net it 2464mhz/17TF. *-A 15% to 2576mhz/17.8TF. 2. They keep 64 RoPs but butterfly the console with an additional 20CU. 5 disabled for yields. *-54 CU @ 2240mhz pushing 15.48TF. *- +10% clocks - 2464mhz/17TF *- +15% clocks - 2576mhz/17.8TF 3. Sony does a hail mary, 96 ROPs, 54CU. *- 2240mhz/23.22TF *- 2464mhz/25.55TF *- 2576mhz/26.7TF Personally I think Sony increasing the amount of RoPs would be a better net investment in R&D. Maintain smaller SoCs, high yields, 5nm could increase clocks to help the pixel fill rate feed the additional RoPs and current console APIs would already be extremely optimized for 36CU. Also this is if they go with 96 RoPs. Tom, is 128 RoPs limited to high CU count GPUs or can even a 40CU design be outfitted with 128 RoPs?. If that's that's case then the potential of a Pro model JUST doubling RoPs would make it have a MASSIVE performance increase with very minor SoC changes. It would effectively Double the strength of the PS5 with nothing else changing in way of clocks. 2240mhz/20.64TF with 36CU 2240mhz/30.96TF with 54CU(one could wish)

Travis Gooding

Are you expecting anything from next week GTC?

Manuel A. Arroyo Perez

Any info on when M2 macs are coming?

Alexander

Is AMD finally going to release any RYZEN 3 processors, with Alder lakes launch?

otiv lcurtš

Hi Tom! What is currently going on at Nvidia right now? AMD has apperently cought up to them when it comes to GPU performance. And Intel might dump them in laptops soon for their own in-house GPUs. how well off are they, if in the coming years they start loosing the gaming GPU market share, and are just not present in laptops anymore?

otiv lcurtš

Would you consider answering engineering/automotive questions or do you prefer to only do gaming hardware questions?

Another one Tom. How has Nashville been treating you since the move? I love living in the area. TN is a great state.

I've been hearing reports, especially about AMD, that they hope to have supply/shortage issues fix or at least alleviated in 2022 for sure. What are your thoughts on this, do you think it's accurate or will shortages continue well into 2022 or 2023?

Do you think alder lake has what it takes to get ahead of Amds multi threaded workloads and do you think Intel's Big.little design will help with gaming performance?

Thoughts on Microsoft forcing vbs on windows 11 on non custom builds which will hurt gaming performance unless you built your own pc (rip laptops :(

Falto

If you were to predict the how much vram will Nvidia 4000 series have for each tier, could you guess what you think they'll do?

Falto

Is AMD really going to leave the 3060 Ti unchecked? I already know a few people who managed to get a reference 3060 Ti at MSRP recently, and at that price Nvidia does seem appealing. One of them really wanted to go with AMD this generation but he just had to act fast and snag the 3060 Ti at £369 ($500 USD) while possible. Actually, let me rephrase my question please: is AMD really going to leave so many performance tiers available for Intel to come and take the marketshare?

Eleriam

With the upcoming Alder Lake release so close, I've got to ask is there any more leaks coming up from you regarding this line-up, a more accurate pricing window, is it really releasing on the 4th, anything to satiate our thirst for such an exciting architecture.

If Intel’s GPUs are being pushed into Q2 next year, will it be better at that point just to wait for RDNA 3 and nvidia’s 4000 series? By that point I’ll have been waiting so long I almost imagine another few months will be bearable, to get something I know will be a good product vs the question mark that is Intel. I was looking forward to intel’s offering, but now I’m not sure. I currently have a Titan Pascal on indefinite loan as it wasn’t being used, so if intel only hits 3070-3070ti levels, I feel like a 4070 may offer a better upgrade in performance boost per dollar terms, and not too long after.

Alexander

Hey Tom! For future leaks is it possible for you could look into upcoming unannounced games for the Nintendo switch? Like for example there's a series called xenoblade that's been heavily wanted by fans but we still have yet to receive any tease from Nintendo And also just other games in general too maybe gta 6 or elder scrolls 6 lol

Falto