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AMD Threadripper Delidded, with a Multi-Core Surprise Under the Hood
- sbierwagen 9y agoThe youtube video has been made private?
- anoother 9y agoIt's been removed. Seems AMD retracted permission: https://youtu.be/JbffGyrkjMM https://youtu.be/JbffGyrkjMM Managed to see it before it was taken away. I wonder why AMD changed their mind on this... Could Threadripper and EPYC be cross-compatible after all?
- gsich 9y agoSomeone has an alternative link?
- crb002 9y agoMake one good die with low enough area to have good yield. Mass produce the fuck out of it. $$$
- dsr_ 9y agoThey are. Then they package 1, 2, or 4 of them. It looks to me like the entirety of Zen from $100 to $1000 CPUs is the same design, the same manufacturing process, the same chips, just bucketed according to speed test and failed cores and arranged into MCM packaging.
- simias 9y agoThere's basically no content in there, only speculation unless I missed something. The "surprise" is that there are four dies in the CPU, two of which appear to be unused (I'm not sure how they reached that conclusion, I can't see the video). It's not particularly surprising or novel though, and there can be many reasonable explanation about why they would do such a thing and the article doesn't reach a conclusion. Silicon is cheap, maybe those are non-functional dies just here for mechanical reasons.
- anoother 9y ago> two of which appear to be unused (I'm not sure how they reached that conclusion, I can't see the video). Have seen the video. Der8auer planned a test to ascertain this, but was unable. AMD later confirmed it to him.
- RichardHeart 9y agoThese are the coolest kind of nudes.
- fhood 9y agoCould someone please explain to me why you would use thermal paste over solder and vice versa?
- arielweisberg 9y agoWhat I have read is that with small dies solder will eventually start to fail. On larger dies it's less of an issue.
- dom0 9y agoSolder between IHS and die means that there is a through and through metal connection. This results in a low thermal resistance, allowing better boosts and overclocking and/or lower temperatures. (This is the best we can currently do with flip chips; in power electronics direct bonding to a metal substrate is used instead, which results in even lower thermal resistances, and thus higher power densities). However. Soldering these is quite difficult with smaller dice and thermal cycling can result in cracks which impacts reliability, because silicon, the solder and the IHS have different thermal expansion coefficients. There are multiple processing steps required and the solder used is of course special as well. (In fact, in the article you can see the gold plated areas on the nickel-plated IHS where the dice make contact). TIM (i.e. thermal paste) is very easy to apply and has a predictable lifespan pretty much regardless of die size. The thermal resistance is much worse, though.
- vbezhenar 9y agoI've heard a few complaints that after 1-2 years processors with thermal paste starts to get hot, like +10 +20 degrees on the same load. The only way to fix it is to disassemble processor (risking to damage it) and replace thermal paste with liquid metal. That's the main thing I don't like about new Intels and I'm not sure if I would buy them.
- velobro 9y agoI feel like I'm starting to notice this as well because my i5-4670k is idling around 40 °C on an H100i even after clearing out trapped dust
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- alexandercrohde 9y agoCould anybody who upvoted this please explain why they think this is newsworthy?
- alexandercrohde 9y agocould anybody who downvoted this please explain why?
- striking 9y ago> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- alexandercrohde 9y agoI wasn't implying it was against the community guidelines. What I was suggesting was that new hardware always comes out and it's always bigger/faster (and even 2x improvement isn't even historically that much). Are the people upvoting this because they think every single new piece of hardware is newsworthy, or that there's something special here (e.g. they feel intel has a monopoly and are invested in AMDs success), or are they shill accounts ?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- striking 9y agoI think you're reading into it too hard. It's just neat to find out that there's more than meets the eye here. > or are they shill accounts If you know something the mods don't, email them. But that's not a particularly nice thing to insinuate.
- true_religion 9y ago
- nolok 9y agoEvery piece of info about this and Intel's answers confirms how prepared AMD is for the entire line up, and how rushed Intel's answer is. I can understand them not wanting to let these new lines/prices be the norm too fast and lose money on margins, but I certainly did not expect them to be caught in what can only be total surprise and unpreparedness.
- mtgx 9y agoI believe it's called monopolist arrogance. Those who have it tend to be caught off-guard.
- wyldfire 9y agoAMD gave Intel a run for their money in the early naughts. Their chipset designs were inferior to Intel's but they had great CPUs. But then Intel took a page from HyperTransport (QPI) and AMD64 (IA64/x86_64) and released far superior parts with the Core and Xeon brands. If there was a monopoly over the last decade it was only because AMD wasn't producing a competitive offering. It was not because of marketplace abuses like Intel's been accused of in the past.
- zbobet2012 9y agoWell that and paying/forcing vendors not to place AMD chips in laptops. A practice Intel lost a lawsuit for and owes AMD billions that are still unpaid.
- poizan42 9y agoYes, so according to PC World these extra "chips" are actually just spacers for mechanical stability: http://www.pcworld.com/article/3211409/computers/why-ryzen-threadripper-has-two-mysterious-chips.amp.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/3211409/computers/why-ryzen-t...
- bitmapbrother 9y agoI was watching a couple of Intel CPU delidding video's and I was surprised by how they were getting drops of up to 20 degrees in CPU temperature by simply removing the cheap thermal paste Intel put on the die and replacing it with quality thermal paste.
- valarauca1 9y agoIts hilarious too because this is such a minor part of the CPU manufacturing process. Especially for the _enthusiast_ market. Then you consider this is their answer to AMD's new chips, cutting corners...
- BoorishBears 9y agoThey usually replace the thermal paste with solder, solder has a different set of challenges.
- seanp2k2 9y agoIntel could still use better TIM, or even the fancy liquid metal stuff. The fact that you can gain massive thermal benefits just from swapping it out with something better than the stuff they're using on a $1000+ CPU is pretty terrible. Even from a business perspective, a big temp drop is pretty marketable, especially for laptops where I'm sure they're doing the same thing. It's like buying a Ferrari and having it come with Arizonan tires which are glued on.
- pantalaimon 9y agolaptop CPUs usually don't have a heat spreader though, but I agree with your point.
- ethbro 9y agoIf Intel could get by without the enthusiast market, I feel like they would in a heartbeat. They've been overclocking hostile for almost two decades now (to varying degrees at varying times), seemingly make no efforts towards cross-generation socket compatibility, and are now using PCIe I/O connectivity as a club to drive buyers to higher-margin chips. Aside from the K chips and the unlocked Pentiums, I'm hard-pressed to think of anything Intel has intentionally done to cater to the enthusiast market in recent memory. And even K-chips are a token gesture in response to a problem they created.
- bitmapbrother 9y agoThat "surprise" is very reminiscent of their old X3 line of CPU's where they disabled 1 core for "yield" reasons. But, if you had the right motherboard you could unlock that 4th core and turn it into an X4.
- onli 9y agoOnly in the beginning though. Later on they changed how X3s were produced and unlocking the 4th core became regularly impossible, either because there was no 4th core or because it really was broken. I had one of those later models... Buy early if you want to profit from this, if that turns out to be possible.
- flyinghamster 9y agoEven some of their early X2s were unlockable. I'm posting this from a system with a Phenom II 550 X2 Black, running with two extra cores enabled. It has been rock-solid from the beginning, as long as I don't try to overclock it. Temperatures stay within limits as well, even with the stock cooler. When compiling a large J2EE project in NetBeans, it is slightly faster than my FX 6100, with both systems running solid-state drives.
- matt_wulfeck 9y agoSo there's 2 "unused" cores on the die. Does anyone know if it's usually possible to "unlock" the additional cores? Is it a physical disabling or something like microcode?
- Crontab 9y agoThe last time I built my own PC, it was a Pentium 4 that used RD-Ram, and I put it in a case I bought from PC Power and Cooling - so a long time ago. I mention this because all these AMD threads are making me get the itch. And it might be a good idea to support some competition with Intel. Can anyone point me to a good information resource for these new chips?
- onli 9y agoHave a look at the Gamersnexus reviews if you are interested in general Ryzen/Zen information. They do not cover only gaming, and made a good impression on me. The pendants on anandtech could be helpful as well. For threadripper I would wait a bit till the release articles roll out. That release will be covered extensively. But what is expected is "just" a bigger Ryzen processor with more cores and maybe some latency issues, tbd. http://www.gamersnexus.net/hwreviews/2822-amd-ryzen-r7-1800x-review-premiere-blender-fps-benchmarks http://www.gamersnexus.net/hwreviews/2822-amd-ryzen-r7-1800x... http://www.gamersnexus.net/hwreviews/2875-amd-r5-1600x-1500x-review-fading-i5-argument http://www.gamersnexus.net/hwreviews/2875-amd-r5-1600x-1500x... http://www.gamersnexus.net/hwreviews/3002-amd-r3-1200-review-line-between-fine-and-exciting/page-4 http://www.gamersnexus.net/hwreviews/3002-amd-r3-1200-review...