People have been noticing the effects of this in local LLM inference. Power limiting seems to improve overall performance!

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Aurornis 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This is not observable from LLM inference, where you would not encounter uniform matrices.

Power limiting does not improve performance but it does improve efficiency. You might be able to get 90% of the performance for only 70% of the power usage, for example. It does not make the card go faster though.

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Lerc 5 hours ago | parent [-]

When thermal throttling occurs you can perform faster by running slower.

This is precicely because of the efficiency. The lower efficiency of the higher speed triggers a much lower performance sooner.

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Aurornis 5 hours ago | parent [-]

> When thermal throttling occurs you can perform faster by running slower.

This is not true unless the throttling algorithm is so broken that it's oscillating between extremes.

The parts have a curve of clock speed versus voltage. More clock speed means higher performance. That goes further up the voltage curve, meaning more power.

Throttling just moves the card further down the voltage to clock speed curve. It reduces clock speed, reducing performance.

The cards don't "perform faster by running slower". If you run the card slower, it performs slower.

	▲	Lerc an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		>This is not true unless the throttling algorithm is so broken that it's oscillating between extremes. That algorithm is doing exactly the task I described. If it could temporarily run faster but in a way that would cause occilation, that literally means it can run faster but it is choosing not to to preserve overall performance.
	▲	PcChip 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		with a lower power cap set, it runs cooler, which sometimes allows the GPU to reach higher boost speeds. This is a real effect on gaming GPUs - however I have no idea if it applies to datacenter GPUs

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gchamonlive 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

In general, constraints require optimizations and rearchitectures. I'd also expect the ram shortage for instance to have a big impact on the software industry as a whole, specially in games. They will need to make do with what people have, a ps5/pro or similar in PC power.

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aNoob7000 7 hours ago | parent [-]

I actually think it is a good thing to introduce constraints to AI and the overall tech industry. Hopefully everyone will have to look at improving performance without having to add RAM or increase CPU/GPU performance.

	▲	gchamonlive 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		As long as these constraints are for everyone and not just for thee and not for me, and become an instrument for big tech to keep consumers dependent on their infra.