Gemini seems to be fairly good at keeping the custom instructions in mind. In mine I've told it to not assume my ideas are good and provide critique where appropriate. And I find it does that fairly well.
Same. This works fine for Claude in my experience. My user prompt is fairly large and encourages certain behaviours I want to see, which involves being critical and considering the strengths and weaknesses of ideas before drawing conclusions. As someone else mentioned, there does seem to be a phenomenon where saying DO NOT DO X causes a sort of attention bias on X which can lead to X occurring despite the clear instructions. I've never empirically tested that, I've just noticed better results over the years when telling it what paths to stick to rather than specific things not do to.
That happens with humans too :) It's why positive feedback that draws attention to the behavior you want to encourage often works better. "Attention" is lower level and more fundamental than reasoning by syllogism.
I will admit that I was very pleasantly surprised by gemini lately. I was away from my PC and tried it on a whim for a semi-random consumer question that led into smaller rabbit hole. It seemed helpful enough and focused on what I tried to get while still pushing back when my 'solutions' seemed out of whack.
> So if one is desperate enough to ask random strangers online about a relationship
I'd me more inclined to ask random strangers on the internet than close friends...
That said, when me and my SO had a difficult time we went to a professional. For us it helped a lot. Though as the counselor said, we were one of the few couples which came early enough. Usually she saw couples well past the point of no return.
So yeah, if you don't ask in time, you will probably be breaking up anyway.
What stands out most about Table 3 is that the US military is approximately a month, or less, away from running out of ATACMS/PrSM ground-attack missiles and THAAD interceptors. Israel is in an even more precarious spot, with its Arrow interceptor missiles likely to be completely expended by the end of March.
If that's anywhere close to accurate it seems quite dire.
As the article stresses, it might take many years to replenish the spent munitions.
> AI has been a field encompassing things far more basic than this for longer than most commenters have been alive.
When I was 13, having just started programming, I picked up a book from a "junk bin" at a book store on Artificial Intelligence. It must have been from the mid-80s if not older.
It had an entire chapter on syllogism[1] and how to implement a program to spit them out based on user input. As I recall it basically amounted to some string exteaction assuming user followed a template and string concatenation to generate the result. I distinctly recall not being impressed about such a trivial thing being part of a book on AI.
Makes sense. RAM pricing surely has lead to a fall of AM5 high-end CPU purchases, might as well try to get some extra cash from those who still buy. Bin the remaining now non-X3D chips as something else.
Probably fun for those who already bought DDR5 memory... still kicking myself for not just pulling the trigger on that 128GB dual stick kit I looked at for $600 back in September. Now it's listed at $4k...
Meanwhile I hope my AM4 will chug along a few more years.
If you don't need 128GB, there are quality 64GB kits for under $700 on Newegg right now, which is cheaper than this CPU.
If someone needs to build something now and can wait to upgrade RAM in a year or two, 32GB kits are in the $370 range.
I don't like this RAM price spike either, but in the context of building a high-end system with a 16-core flagship CPU like this and probably an expensive GPU, it's still reasonable to build a system. If you must have 128GB of RAM it can be done with bundles like the one I linked above but I'd recommend waiting at least 6 months if you can. There are signs that prices are falling now that panic-buying has started to trail off.
128GB of RAM should not cost $4K even in this market.
In January I upgraded my desktop, 9950X3D £600, 64GB DDR5-6000 £600, MSI MAG Tomahawk X870E £300, Samsung 990 Pro 4TB £350, Asus Prime 9070XT £580. I spent a another £250 on PSU and cooler and reused my case (Phanteks Evolv Enthoo TG, beautiful case but horrible cooling. Will cut some holes in it and if it doesnt work out look for something with more airflow).
The RAM price was already inflated at that time, and the same kit is now £800, but in October or earlier last year I'd have saved possibly the cost of the CPU/GPU on the whole thing, but now it's be about the cost of a CPU/GPU more expensive.
On a side note for anyone not aware, 9950X3D isn't the best choice for pure gaming, 9850X3D is cheaper and marginally better, also I went with 2 sticks of RAM kit, 4 sticks is much harder to run at the advertised speed (6000) which is actually an overclock.
Im a dev and a linux user/gamer hence my choice of CPU/GPU.
Very similar config, but I bought a second pair of ram. Running 4 sticks at 3600.
Also, the LAN port of the motherboard stopped working after a week, so I had to buy an Ethernet card
Due to the high prices of DRAM and SSDs they now are the greatest fractions of the total price of a computer.
In January I was forced to upgrade an ancient Intel NUC, by replacing it with an Arrow Lake H based ASUS NUC. The complete system with 32 GB DRAM and 3 TB SSDs has cost EUR 1200, including VAT sales tax.
Got it running with 4800MT/s and literally 30 minute boot times in an AM5 machine. The 30 minute boot time could be worked around by enabling the (off-by-default) memory context restore option in BIOS, but it really made me think something was broken and it wasn't until I found other people talking about 30 minute boot times that I stopped debugging and just let it sit for an eternity.
It's so bad. I don't get why they sell AM5 motherboards with 4 RAM slots.
At least that system has been running well for like two years. But had I known that the situation is so much more dire than with DDR4, I would've just gotten the same amount of RAM in two sticks rather than four.
You need to enable MCR (which trains the memory once and caches the result for (iirc) 30 days) otherwise yeah, booting is horribly slow, even the 64GB I have can take several minutes but with MCR it boots basically instantly.
Memory training seems to be getting faster with each bios update. In 2024 when I upgraded to AM5, 64GB memory training took like 15 minutes. Now the same setup takes about a minute when it needs to retrain, then near instant with MCR (Windows 11 takes significantly longer to load than the POST process).
I’m in the same situation! My machine will take 2-5 minute to post every few reboots, it seems random. The messed up part is the marketing material says this things can handle 256gb of ram or whatever absurd number, f me for thinking then 128gb should be no problem. Honestly this whole thing has soured me on AMD. Yea they have bigger numbers than intel but at what cost, stability?
It's the RAM. It needs to "trained" which takes some time but for for some reason these boards seem to randomly forget their training, requiring it to happen again.
I've never had memory training be forgotten with my AM4 nor LPDDR5-based laptops and NUCs. Is this a new thing with AM5 or something? Or just a certain brand of BIOSes?
DDR5 is much, much more fickle than DDR4 and earlier standards. I think it's primarily due to pushing clock speeds (6000 MT/s would be insanely fast for DDR4, but kinda slow for DDR5).
Memory training has always been a thing: during boot, your PC runs tests to work out what slight changes between signals and stuff it needs to adapt to the specific requirements of your particular hardware. With DDR4 and earlier, that was really fast because the timings were so relatively loose. With DDR5, it can be really slow because the timings are so tight.
I’m running 128gb on a 9550x now with 4x32gb sticks and it’s terrible. It’s unstsable, post time is about 2 minutes (not exaggerating)and I’m stuck at a lower speed.
I’m considering just taking 2 of the sticks out and working with 64gb and increasing my swap partition. The nvme drive is fast at least.
This is my first time off intel and I have to say I don’t understand the hype.
> It’s unstsable, post time is about 2 minutes (not exaggerating)
The long POST times must mean it's retraining the memory each time, which is not normal. Just in case you haven'ttried it yet, I'd start by reseating them, I've had weird issues with marginally seated RAM before.
Also you definitely have to go much slower with 4 sticks compared to two, so lower speed as much as you can. If that doesn't help, I'd verify them in pairs.
If they work in pairs but not in quad at the slowest speed, something is surely wrong.
Once you get them working in quad, you can start bumping up the speed, might need voltage boost as well.
No such bundle deals where I am. Absolute cheapest DDR5 128GB kit around is 2 sticks of 5600 64GB for $2k.
Cheapest 64GB kit is $930.
The kit I was oh-so-close to buying was two 6400 64GB sticks.
Not gonna buy now, not that desperate. I have a spare AM4 board, DDR4 memory and heck even CPU, I'll ride this one out. Likely skip AM5 entirely if something doesn't drastically change.
> Absolute cheapest DDR5 128GB kit around is 2 sticks of 5600 64GB for $2k.
That's not far from the bundle deal above, once you subtract the $700 CPU.
If you really need 128GB the 5600 kit is fine. Having 208MB of total cache on the CPU means the real world difference between a 5600 kit and a slightly faster kit is negligible in most use cases.
If you don't need to upgrade then clearly don't force an upgrade right now. I just wanted to comment that $4K for 128GB of RAM is a very bad price right now, even with the current situation.
> a slightly faster kit is negligible in most use cases
Does that “most use cases” caveat really apply to someone buying 128G of RAM? If I’m buying that much, it means I’m actually going to put it through its paces, unless it’s just there for huge reserved guest VM overhead.
The 208MB of total cache on the CPU we’re discussing does a good job of reducing sensitivity to RAM speed differences on this platform.
If you’re trying to run LLMs off of the CPU instead of the GPU then the RAM speed dictates a lot. It’s going to be slow mo matter what, though. Dual channel DDR5 just isn’t enough to run large LLMs that start to fill 128GB of RAM and the difference between 5600 and 6400 isn’t going to make it usable.
If you’re just running a lot of VMs or doing a lot of mixed tasks that keep a lot of RAM occupied then you’d probably have a hard time measuring a difference between 5600 and 6400 if you tried with one of these X3D CPUs with a lot of cache.
This is a frequent topic of discussion for gamers because some people obsess over optimizing their RAM speed and timings and pay large premiums for RAM with CAS latency of 28 instead of 36. Then they see benchmarks showing 1-2% differences in games or even most productivity apps and realize they would have been better spending that extra money on the next faster GPU or CPU or other part.
I really want a x3d because a game I play is heavily single threaded, I have the income and the financial stability but I can't in any good conscious upgrade to am5 with the ram prices. It's insane
AMD had an upgrade path with the 5700x3d, assuming you’re on AM4.
Just reading now that they went out of production half a year ago which is a shame. I was very impressed being able to upgrade with the same motherboard 6 years down the line.
I'm the mythical customer who went from a 1700X in a B350 motherboard near launch day to a 5800X3D in the same board (after a dozen BIOS updates). Felt amazing. Like the old 486DX2 days.
Same! Kept checking back for bios updates and even years later they kept announcing more support! Truly crazy.
Other than the speed it’s a very good reason to go with amd, the upgrade scope is massive, on am5 you can go from a 6 core and soon all the way to a 24 core with the new zen6
I was waiting too, but the one game I play often that requires FPS performance decided to ruin their game with poor development direction. Now, I'm planning to buy for local llm hosting.
Here's hoping to more developments like TurboQuant to improve LLM memory efficiency.
I can't imagine it's looking good in the consumer space, but server space seems to be lit[1]:
Su said that typically, the first quarter (Q1) is slower due to seasonal patterns, but AMD has seen its data center business expand from Q4 into Q1, demonstrating ongoing strength across both CPUs and GPUs. This growth underscores the company’s ability to capitalize on rising demand for AI compute and enterprise workloads, even during traditionally quieter periods.
“We are going into a big inflection year here in 2026. The CPU business is absolutely on fire.”
PCPartPicker are also publishing charts showing the astronomic rise in DDR5 prices over time: https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/. Those charts don't cover any kits with 64 GB sticks, but they're a good demonstration of the general scale.
> Probably fun for those who already bought DDR5 memory
Nah, those of us who already bought DDR5 memory also already bought decent CPUs. Dropping another $1k for these incremental gains would be silly. It'd make a lot more sense if DDR5 had been around longer so that people had the option to make generational upgrades to this CPU but DDR5 on AMD has only been around for Zen4 and Zen5.
I'm looking at building a new system, and was waiting to see what happens with this chip and Intel's Arc Pro B70 card. I can't find ECC UDIMMs of 64GB per-stick to make 128GB, but I can put together two solo UDIMMs of 32GB or 48GB for $800 and $1000 per stick respectively.
I really want to see what enabling the L3 cache options in the BIOS do from a NUMA standpoint. I have some projects I want to work on where being able to even just simulate NUMA subdivisions would be highly useful.
The not so good side is that getting a RVA23 development board this year with an usable size of RAM (for e.g. compiling and linking large code bases) is not going to be cheap.
>Meanwhile I hope my AM4 will chug along a few more years.
I am fine with my 2 year old 128GB DDR4 for now. I will just upgrade the 14700K to 14900KS CPU and wait 2 more years.
Judging by the benchmarks newer CPUs aren't much better for multithreading workloads than 14900KS anyway, so it doesn't make a lot of sense to upgrade to newer CPUs, DDR5 and a new mobo.
After randomly breaking the AM4 CPU and motherboard in my 4 year old PC last year and seeing that at the time I'd spent almost a new PC to get new parts and rebuild it. Less if I wanted to do a complete rebuild myself but I'm over building PCs. I've done that for years.
It was an expensive mistake as I bought a few options to experiment including a NUC and an M4 Mac Mini but eventually bought a 9800X3D 5070Ti PC for <$2 and for no reason in particular I bought a 64GB DDR5-6000 kit for $200 in August or so. I checked recently and that kit is pushing $1000. I also bought a 4080 laptop and bought a 64GB kit and an extra SSD for it too last year.
That's pretty lucky given what's happened since. I don't claim any kind of foresight about what would happen.
I do kind of want to take the parts I have and build another AM4 PC. The 5900XT is not a bad option with 16 cores for ~$300 but my DDR4 RAM is almost useless because the best deals now are for combos of CPU + motherboard + RAM at steep discounts.
You can get some good deals on prebuilts still. Not as good as 6+ months ago but still not bad. Costco has a 5080 PC for $2300. There's no way I'm going overboard and building a 128GB+ PC right now.
I've seen multiple RAM spikes. We had one at the height of the crypto hysteria IIRC but this is significantly worse and is also impacting SSDs. I kinda wish I'd bought 1-2 4TB+ SSDs last year but oh well.
We're really waiting for the AI bubble to pop. Part of me think sthat'll be in the next year but it could stay irrational substantially longer than that.
The C30 64GB kits are nearly impossible to buy now, so, well done. Got one in September '23 for ~$380 AUD, on the rare occasions it's available today it's been over $1600 AUD.
I upgraded my UPS to a sine interactive unit to minimise the risk of it dying to bad power while the market is so crazy...
> the developer will push back on the bug author and say "I can't reproduce this, can you verify it with the latest version?" without actually doing anything.
We do this. Because frankly, very often the bug has been reported by others and has been fixed, we just can't connect the dots in our ticketing system.
That's of course less than ideal, but given that a lot of tickets we get are often very poorly described it's hard. It's one aspect I have genuine hope AI can help us with.
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