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Is this going to create an opportunity for AMD to catch up? Would be great for CPUs to no longer be a one horse race even if only on the desktop.

SG- 11y ago
No, they're so far behind in the CPU race.
reitzensteinm 11y ago
It seems like we're significantly into diminishing returns with single core IPC, so AMD should largely catch up over the next decade (assuming the status quo doesn't change). In this metric, a chip 90% as fast as state of the art might be 1/10 the cost to develop by then. Or even less. But even if Intel isn't seeing much progress in terms of single core performance, they're beating the crap out of AMD in terms of performance per watt, and by extension, absolute performance of the high end multi core parts. Taking a look at the absolute insanity that are the 18 core Haswell-EP parts, and comparing them to the 8 module Piledriver parts, and the die size of each (i.e. the cost to make them), the gap is widening, not shrinking. I think everyone here has known for a while that the free lunch is over with respect to writing single core programs and speeding up their execution on future hardware. That's going to take a while to filter down to building programs that take advantage of large amounts of parallelism, but it's going to happen. And when it does, consumer CPUs are going to look more like server parts. With the programs of today, you'd rather a 4.0ghz quad core. But with the programs of tomorrow, a 2.0ghz 32 core will run circles around it. Amdahl's law is ever present, but we are very, very far from reaching the limits of what is possible. If it gave a proportional speedup for everyday computing, I believe Intel would already have an 8 core mainstream part, and maybe even higher. Right now they can heavily price discriminate against the few that care about the bump to 6-8 slower cores.

SG- 11y ago

No, they're so far behind in the CPU race.

reitzensteinm 11y ago

It seems like we're significantly into diminishing returns with single core IPC, so AMD should largely catch up over the next decade (assuming the status quo doesn't change). In this metric, a chip 90% as fast as state of the art might be 1/10 the cost to develop by then. Or even less. But even if Intel isn't seeing much progress in terms of single core performance, they're beating the crap out of AMD in terms of performance per watt, and by extension, absolute performance of the high end multi core parts. Taking a look at the absolute insanity that are the 18 core Haswell-EP parts, and comparing them to the 8 module Piledriver parts, and the die size of each (i.e. the cost to make them), the gap is widening, not shrinking. I think everyone here has known for a while that the free lunch is over with respect to writing single core programs and speeding up their execution on future hardware. That's going to take a while to filter down to building programs that take advantage of large amounts of parallelism, but it's going to happen. And when it does, consumer CPUs are going to look more like server parts. With the programs of today, you'd rather a 4.0ghz quad core. But with the programs of tomorrow, a 2.0ghz 32 core will run circles around it. Amdahl's law is ever present, but we are very, very far from reaching the limits of what is possible. If it gave a proportional speedup for everyday computing, I believe Intel would already have an 8 core mainstream part, and maybe even higher. Right now they can heavily price discriminate against the few that care about the bump to 6-8 slower cores.