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Performance per dollar is getting faster and cheaper

211 pointsby latchkeyyesterday at 9:49 PM62 commentsview on HN

Comments

minrawsyesterday at 11:18 PM

Can you folks add performance per watt as a metric to these comparisons, I honestly want to understand where AMD fits in the stack in terms of actual performance to dollars. I have had talks with companies wanting to build data centers outside of US and find it hard to source anything Nvidia in sufficient capacity and scale.

If AMD is competitive performance per watt and roughly reliable in terms of software support which is what most folks outside of US prioritize above all else, since outside of China and US electricity tends to at a relative premium.

Maybe if they make smaller data centers viable at the right price, AMD could be part of the stack outside of US where ever Nvidia is more limited in supply. Though I have genuinely no idea what sourcing an AMD GPU looks like.

I have never seen a company use AMD outside of wafer and a couple others mostly in US.

Genuinely intriguing or maybe not really (could be this stuff is common knowledge) and I am just stuck in my Nvidia bubble here.

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hassaanrtoday at 3:50 AM

While cool, quantization to FP4 is practically never lossless in actual use. A lot of providers are advertising high TPS on Kimi and GLM, but the models are functionally lobotomized and no longer close to frontier quality. Would love to see this not be true.

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nxtfaritoday at 2:51 AM

I think we should make it illegal to not specify the quantization in the headline for these types of posts.

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p1esktoday at 1:02 AM

There’s noticeable accuracy degradation when they switched from fp8 to mxfp4

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Schiendelmantoday at 12:52 AM

I'm not surprised to see competition with Blackwell. Rubin is 5x faster than Blackwell at inference - Blackwell is the last generation Nvidia didn't optimize specifically for inference.

If I'm missing something, please let me know!

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oDotyesterday at 11:18 PM

Do these providers have 80+% gross margins or is something eating into them? Maybe utilization?

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AussieWog93yesterday at 11:50 PM

The 2600 tok/s is an "aggregate", not the actual throughput.

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alienbabytoday at 1:56 AM

I'm interested if anyone knows how much legwork the assumed 60% cache hit, plus running a quantised model is doing? Esp. compared to what the headline half implies is a full fat GLM5.2

killingtime74today at 2:28 AM

No word on what this actually means as a consumer. What's the price. Is it lower than NVIDIA serving?

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beffjezostoday at 3:42 AM

This is very interesting and yet not at the same time. This looks to be optimized for single-stream LLM traffic which is not viable to serve in a production setting. It's only interesting to hobbyists that want to run the model locally.

It's genuinely neat that AI can find the right optimization pathways in an AMD inference server to unlock this but at the same token (pun-intended) this is a classic case of benchmark hacking that doesn't stand up to real-world application.

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yieldcrvyesterday at 11:33 PM

Agentic coding drivers for different architectures is a massive unlock for the world

So much compute is under utilized waiting for a savant or company to prioritize an architecture, and now all the other engineers can tackle this at any time if they get inspired on the right prompts

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villgaxtoday at 4:51 AM

They fail to mention non speculative numbers & whether baseline was nvfp4 as well. So much for erosion against an older gen

zuzululutoday at 6:00 AM

yeah but we are still far far away from being able to run the frontier model equivalents locally without significant quantization

even having something like opus 4.8 locally would completely change the landscape