AMD unveils ‘personal super computer’ for new era of computing (if you have €100,000+)
euronews
AMD unveils ‘personal super computer’ for new era of computing
The American chipmaker launched what they have described as a ‘personal supercomputer’ in Berlin on Friday, designed and made for a “completely new era of computing” driven by AI.
The Threadripper Halo is an ultra-high-performance workstation equipped with up to two terabytes of system memory, up to 576 gigabytes of high bandwidth memory (HBM3E), along with 96 cores of Threadripper Pro, two MI350P data centre accelerators, all supported by liquid cooling.
That’s really stretching personal!
yeah lol it does seem to have the same form factor as a standard desktop PC though:
https://www.youtube.com/live/XT7fGf28hJ0?t=2196
That video is the keynote from a couple of days ago by AMD’s Senior Vice President at the Berlin tech event Internationale Funkausstellung, which the article is based on.
I dug it up because I wanted to know more about this line from the article: “The AMD executive gave a brief demonstration of its potential at the event by generating an entire 3D world and flight simulator from a single prompt.”
That was kind of disappointing, all he does is bring out a couple of laptops, one running something that looks like a 3D game and the other a helicopter sim, and which he claims is an “entire 3D world” created locally on the laptop from a single prompt. He only holds them up for a few seconds before they’re gone. TBH I suspect they’re short AI video clips rather than interactive games - jump to 23:00 if you want to see it, but it’s honestly not worth it. (These are not made with the Threadripper Halo though, these are allegedly created on a new HP eBook, with some kind of AMD AI on board, with 192 Gb of unified memory)
This is a symptom of a regression in the democratization of general purpose computing. An extreme case for sure.
Machines are getting increasingly expensive, and the number of person who can affort a computer decreases. Reversing decades of progress in computer availability, thanks to AI and techbros.
Will be interesting to see how much the price will drop after the bubble pops.