To be fair, the culprit in the article is _less complex_ than branch prediction: "with random data, bits are flipped often, and bit flips in transistors inherently draw power" is less mental gymnastics than "with random data, the cpu fails to predict the future, causing redundant speculative execution"
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.
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.
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.
I can't tell from the blog, is this actually verified or is it theory and then numbers showing plausibility?
I could certainly come up with alternative theories about memory compression and prefetching if we were talking about texture reads.
I went in expecting to find 'branch prediction'[0] as the answer, but apparently things are even more complex nowadays.
[0] - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11227809/why-is-conditio...
To be fair, the culprit in the article is _less complex_ than branch prediction: "with random data, bits are flipped often, and bit flips in transistors inherently draw power" is less mental gymnastics than "with random data, the cpu fails to predict the future, causing redundant speculative execution"
Designing for predictable execution flow is one of the advantages of Tenstorrent hardware.
https://clehaxze.tw/gemlog/2025/04-21-programming-tensotrren...
https://clehaxze.tw/gemlog/2026/01-22-the-real-tenstorrent-t...
https://arxiv.org/html/2604.03279
People have been noticing the effects of this in local LLM inference. Power limiting seems to improve overall performance!
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.
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.
This is not observable from LLM inference.
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.