Re:AMD's Zen 3 CPUs Are Susceptible to Spectre-Like Vulnerab...
by xiphias2 on Sunday April 04, 2021 @03:40PM
(#26692219)
I made a mistake of buying an expensive gamer laptop (Razer) with a strong Intel CPU and NVIDIA 2070 RTX GPU, and I just didn't like it. Sure, I could do machine learning on the laptop, but I gave up so much flexibility in my life, as the battery usually died in a few hours even when I was just web browsing.
Right now I just bought an M1 MacbookPro machine, and I love it (especially the great screen that I can use in the bright sun, and the instant on that finally feels like a phone/tablet), although I prefer the 14/15 inch form factor (maybe an AMD Zen 2 laptop would have been a great choice as well, I'm not sure).
Right now, I'm typing text into an HTML textarea element. Most of my laptop's power is going to the LCD backlight, I would guess. Dunno, though. Maybe some tab in the background is sucking up 100% CPU not doing anything, in which case, power consumption is the same. In one scenario, that tab is sucking up less compute.
If you're sitting in a cafe, using your laptop to train machine learning algorithms, you might lose 30% battery time, but you're probably doing something wrong.
And I would gladly pay 30% more on my AWS bills for more reliable machines. It depends on what you're doing, but for what I'm doing, server costs are a rounding error in our budget. Most money goes to people.
But I don't think I'd pay 30% more in AWS bills since a lot of what they do is IO-bound and not CPU-bound.
I think the tougher calculation would be on GPUs. At least for what I do, on the rest of the computer, it's a no-brainer.