Nvidia's "Grace" Arm CPU holds its own against x86 for HPC

That's super interesting, can you by any chance point to a paper or article with benchmarking results?

No one has verified ECC setup with AMD desktop parts. e.g. see this thread[1]. People said ASrock supports ECC in all the forums, but even their support denied it. While ECC memory would work with most motherboards, no one has any info if ECC is working on them.

[1]: https://forum.level1techs.com/t/ecc-capable-verified-motherb...

You should better wish that the DRAM manufacturers make memories with appropriate widths.

In-band ECC is a horrible workaround, which has a real hardware cost much higher than traditional ECC, in additional die area, increased energy consumption and much lower performance.

Intel has published some information about their in-band ECC controller, while NVIDIA, as usual, is much more secretive.

The performance of in-band ECC would be unacceptable without the addition of a special rather big cache memory and a great increase in complexity in the memory controller, which is required to implement clever caching algorithms. No matter how clever is the caching algorithm, there will still be workloads where the performance will be much lower than with standard ECC.

The memory doesn't have ECC, the controller does.

You lose data space for syndrome bits. This is not, in practice, different from fixing data space and adding chips for syndrome bits, but it reflects differently in specs.

Right the arm stuff is probably in the "it runs" camp. Largely because its SVE, which is barely available, and the code written to utilize it has largely probably been tuned for the a64fx, or maybe the gravaton v1's.

Both of which have considerably different memory and vector size/issue characteristics. So three different SVE variations now, and the previous two show significant uplift when given custom tuning (ex: see gcc -mtune=neoverse-512tvb, vs the custom a64fx compiler benchmarks). Arm put a bunch of effort into creating an instruction set that is microarch agnostic, but then its not exactly worked the first couple tries. Maybe that will be fixed with V2 and all SVE cores going forward.

They already awarded the contract. The question users will be asking is "how much faster is the new computer compared to the one we've been using?" These are the answers.

In ger you can get double digit orders for MSRP...

> I find it interesting that you think Apple products are more expensive because of the branding, I'm willing to pay more because they work much better than other competing systems and also if you subtract the much higher resale value they are actually the same value as other products.

You're assuming that resale value matters for most people, when it probably doesn't (many will use hardware until it's dead, or will pass it on to siblings, which renders the resale value moot).

And I fundamentally disagree that Apple products work better, and especially enough to merit the price difference. A fun case is RAM/disk upgrades. You really cannot say that Apple's premiums on 16GB and more RAM have anything to d with their hardware/software being better (and again, it really isn't).

If you're curious why I think Apple hardware/software isn't better, in no particular order:

* hardware is pretty good, but with limited options (I want a matte screen ffs, the reflections of glossy screens kill my eyes over a few hours) and brutal premiums for trivial things like not having only 8GB of RAM available.

* UX is actually pretty bad. As someone who grew up on Windows, has used various Linux distros with GNOME or KDE extensively, macOS is a nightmare for a few reasons:

  *  same as with hardware, very limited options. Want to not follow Apple's special way of doing things? You cannot without installing a bunch of extra software, which is sometimes paid (I mean things that any other OS has had for years, like key remapping, or window management). Do you want to have a different scroll direction between the touchpad and the mouse wheel? Well, there are two settings in the two different menus, one for mouse and one for touchpad, but they toggle each other... This is horrendous UX even Microsoft wouldn't do.

  * there are massive amounts of hidden tricks, which are sometimes useful, sometimes not, but you cannot (usually) disable them. I do not care for Apple Music and have never used it, yet it will always pop up if macOS considers I don't have anything else to play when I tap the play button on my keyboard. I do not care for Apple Notes, but it will always pop up if I click at the bottom right on my screen by mistake. Discovery of those tricks is also hard

  * The OSes absolutely sucks in providing any sort of feedback to the user. "Something went wrong", now go fuck yourself. I've had that with screen mirroring to iPad, installing apps on an iPad, a USB device misbehaving on macOS, Apple TV+ app on iPad failing to download stuff offline... there's no information whatsoever to help you understand what is happening and how you can fix it. 

  

So no, I don't think Apple products really work that well, or are worth the massive premiums they ask for them. There is a decent ecosystem, but it locks you in it, so IMO most people are paying for the brand and due because that's all they know (hammer, nail, etc.)