Remix.run Logo
jazzyjackson 4 days ago

Huh, I didn't realize these were just released, I came across it looking for a GPU that had AV1 hardware encoding and been putting a shopping cart together for a mini-ITX xeon server for all my ffmpeg shenanigans.

I like to Buy American when I can but it's hard to find out which fabs various CPUs and GPUs are made in. I read Kingston does some RAM here and Crucial some SSDs. Maybe the silicon is fabbed here but everything I found is "assembled in Taiwan", which made me feel like I should get my dream machine sooner rather than later

dangus 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

I have the answer for you, Intel's GPU chips are on TSMC's process. They are not made in Intel-owned fabs.

There really is no such thing as "buying American" in the computer hardware industry unless you are talking about the designs rather than the assembly. There are also critical parts of the lithography process that depend on US technology, which is why the US is able to enforce certain sanctions (and due to some alliances with other countries that own the other parts of the process).

Personally I think people get way too worked up about being protectionist when it comes to global trade. We all want to buy our own country's products over others but we definitely wouldn't like it if other countries stopped buying our exported products.

When Apple sells an iPhone in China (and they sure buy a lot of them), Apple is making most of the money in that transaction by a large margin, and in turn so are you since your 401k is probably full of Apple stock, and so are the 60+% of Americans who invest in the stock market. A typical iPhone user will give Apple more money in profit from services than the profit from the sale of the actual device. The value is really not in the hardware assembly.

In the case of electronics products like this, almost the entire value add is in the design of the chip and the software that is running on it, which represents all the high-wage work, and a whole lot of that labor in the US.

US citizens really shouldn't envy a job where people are sitting at an electronics bench doing repetitive assembly work for 12 hours a day in a factory wishing we had more of those jobs in our country. They should instead be focused on making high level education more available/affordable so that they stay on top of the economic food chain, where most/all of its citizens are doing high-value work rather than causing education to be expensive and beg foreign manufacturers to open satellite factories to employ our uneducated masses.

I think the current wave of populist protectionist ideology is essentially blaming the wrong causes of declining affordability and increasing inequality for the working class. Essentially, people think that bringing the manufacturing jobs back and reversing globalism will right the ship on income inequality, but the reality is that the reason that equality was so good for Americans m in the mid-century was because the wealthy were taxed heavily, European manufacturing was decimated in WW2, and labor was in high demand.

The above of course is all my opinion on the situation, and a rather long tangent.

jazzyjackson 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Thanks for that perspective. I am just in a place of puzzling why none of this says Made in USA on it. I can get socks and tshirts woven in north carolina which is nice, and furniture made in illinois. That's all a resurgence of 'arts & craft' I suppose, valuing a product made in small batches by someone passionate about quality instead of just getting whatever is lowest cost. Suppose there's not much in the way of artisan silicon yet :)

EDIT: I did think of, what is the closest thing to artisan silicon and thought of the POWER9 CPUs and found out those are made in USA Talos II is also manufactured in the US with the IBM POWER9 processors being fabbed in New York while the Raptor motherboard is manufactured in Texas along with where their systems are assembled.

https://www.phoronix.com/review/power9-threadripper-core9

dangus 4 days ago | parent [-]

I would go even further than that and point out that the US still makes plenty of cheap or just "normal" priced, non-artisan items! You'll actually have a hard time finding grocery store Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) made outside of the US and Canada - things like dish soap, laundry detergent, paper products, shampoo, and a whole lot of food.

I randomly thought of paint companies as another example, with Sherwin-Williams and PPG having US plants.

The US is still the #2 manufacturer in the world, it's just a little less obvious in a lot of consumer-visible categories.

mschuster91 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

the thing with iPhone production is not about producing iPhones per se, it's about providing a large volume customer for the supply chain below it - basic stuff like SMD resistors, capacitors, ICs, metal shields, frames, god knows what else - because you need that available domestically for weapons manufacturing, should China ever think of snacking Taiwan. But a potential military market in 10 years is not even close to "worth it" for any private investors or even the government to build out a domestic supply chain for that stuff.

dangus 16 hours ago | parent [-]

> But a potential military market in 10 years is not even close to "worth it" for any private investors or even the government to build out a domestic supply chain for that stuff.

I’m pretty sure the US already has military market has been doing exactly this for decades. The military budget is over twice the size of Apple’s revenue.

The CHIPS act is essentially doing the same kind of thing that helped Taiwan get so good at semiconductors in the first place. Whether it’s been as effective remains to be seen.

bane 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You may want to check that your Xeon may already support hardware encoding of AV1 in the iGPU. I saved a bundle building a media server when I realized the iGPU was more than sufficient (and more efficient) than chucking a GPU in the case.

I have a service that runs continuously and reencodes any videos I have into h265 and the iGPU barely even notices it.

jazzyjackson 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Looks like Core Ultra is the only chip with integrated Arc GPU with AV1 encode. The Xeon series I was looking at, the 1700 socket so the e2400s, definitely don't have iGPU. (The fact that the motherboard I'm looking at only has VGA is probably a clue xD)

I'll have to consider pros and cons with Ultra chips, thanks for the tip.

jeffbee 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

What recent Xeon has the iGPU? Didn't they stop including them ~5 years ago?

Havoc 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

If you don't need it for AI shenanigans then you're better off with the smaller arcs for under a 100...they can do av1 too

jauntywundrkind 4 days ago | parent [-]

I don't know how big the impact really is, but Intel is pretty far behind on encoder quality mostly. Oh wait, on most codecs they are pretty far behind, but av1 they seem pretty competitive? Neat.

Apologies for the video link. But a recent pretty in depth comparison: https://youtu.be/kkf7q4L5xl8