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In the beginning, a sea of discrete components made up a system. Investment in fab technology caused process nodes to shrink very 18 months so these discrete co

In the beginning, a sea of discrete components made up a system. Investment in fab technology caused process nodes to shrink very 18 months so these discrete components gave way to the System-On-Chip where the board of chips was replaced by a single chip. Now physics is harder to overcome, the cost of development at the bleeding edge of technology is higher than ever, and the continued desire for larger and larger systems caused the SoC to break apart again. It’ll be interesting to see if this is what the future looks like for silicon-based chips, or if this is a temporary shortcut.

dragontamer 8y ago
I'm not sure if SoC is breaking apart actually. I think chipbuilders are figuring out that its more efficient to combine some dies together at the package level. Consider that EPYC is basically a miniturized multi-socket design. Infinity Fabric is really AMD's new protocol built on top of HyperTransport (multi-socket protocol from the past). Before, AMD used to support 8-sockets. But today, AMD stitches 4-chips together and only supports 2-sockets. From a software perspective (ie: NUMA), EPYC x2 sockets looks like an 8-socket chip of old. In effect, AMD has miniturized the 4x-socket setup in the form of EPYC. And it has also miniturized the 2x socket setup in the form of Threadripper. ---------------------- These Threadripper / EPYC chips have the same downsides as all old 2x, 4x, and 8x NUMA designs of the past. High latency and poor communications between cores. The thing is: the modern environment is a highly virtualized, highly independent set of systems. Running 8x NUMA efficiently today is as simple as spinning up 8x VMs, one for each NUMA node. IIRC, people are finding that Intel's 28-core design is far more effective in say... unified Database performance. Intel's design has a true L3 cache which can be used by all 28-cores, while AMD's L3 cache is split between each die. 4x 8MB caches cannot function as a singular cache in a large-scale database application. But there's enough situations (ie: VMs, multitasking, render farms) where AMD's NUMA + Infinity Fabric is good enough. And with prices anywhere from 1/4th to 1/2 the cost of Intel, AMD's chips these days are certainly worth considering.
st26 8y ago
What is old is new again. We'll probably go in this direction for a decade or three, breaking things up. Then we'll go the other way again, integrating everything into one chip again.

dragontamer 8y ago

I'm not sure if SoC is breaking apart actually. I think chipbuilders are figuring out that its more efficient to combine some dies together at the package level. Consider that EPYC is basically a miniturized multi-socket design. Infinity Fabric is really AMD's new protocol built on top of HyperTransport (multi-socket protocol from the past). Before, AMD used to support 8-sockets. But today, AMD stitches 4-chips together and only supports 2-sockets. From a software perspective (ie: NUMA), EPYC x2 sockets looks like an 8-socket chip of old. In effect, AMD has miniturized the 4x-socket setup in the form of EPYC. And it has also miniturized the 2x socket setup in the form of Threadripper. ---------------------- These Threadripper / EPYC chips have the same downsides as all old 2x, 4x, and 8x NUMA designs of the past. High latency and poor communications between cores. The thing is: the modern environment is a highly virtualized, highly independent set of systems. Running 8x NUMA efficiently today is as simple as spinning up 8x VMs, one for each NUMA node. IIRC, people are finding that Intel's 28-core design is far more effective in say... unified Database performance. Intel's design has a true L3 cache which can be used by all 28-cores, while AMD's L3 cache is split between each die. 4x 8MB caches cannot function as a singular cache in a large-scale database application. But there's enough situations (ie: VMs, multitasking, render farms) where AMD's NUMA + Infinity Fabric is good enough. And with prices anywhere from 1/4th to 1/2 the cost of Intel, AMD's chips these days are certainly worth considering.

st26 8y ago

What is old is new again. We'll probably go in this direction for a decade or three, breaking things up. Then we'll go the other way again, integrating everything into one chip again.