This reads mostly like a pretty PR-fed puff piece version of the announcements of the Cascade Lake MCM that HN discussed last week [1], and again the Anandtech

This reads mostly like a pretty PR-fed puff piece version of the announcements of the Cascade Lake MCM that HN discussed last week [1], and again the Anandtech piece [2] is more interesting as well as more skeptical. Granted it hasn't been out for deep 3rd party testing and inspection yet, but from what was announced after chewing on it a week I think this still feels like a desperate rapid response move from Intel being caught off guard rather then the result of a long planned strategy. It feels too much like they took what they could given yield and TDP and simply applied a ton of glue they already had until they kind of worked together in a single one-off product that could at least produce headline numbers more competitive to AMD. No EMIB, no range of products up and down the spectrum with smaller Xeon modules designed for combination, just this ginormous 300W one-off with UPI. In fact this article seems to have a bit of new info on that: >*"that leverages one of the three UltraPath Interconnect (UPI) links to hook the two physical chips together to create what essentially is a 48-core socket with 12 memory controllers" If that's correct and it's 3 UPI, then presumably it'd be the square config so unlike a normal 4P system each processor does not necessarily have a direct link to all others, they may have to go through multiple hops. It definitely would not be "essentially a 48-core" at all since it'd complicate memory access patterns significantly wouldn't it? If that's the layout the potential for benchmark cherry picking and specific optimization that isn't applicable to other workloads seems even higher then normal. AMD got a leap on Intel last with x86-64 because they didn't want to do that on the desktop, maybe MCM will turn out to be something a little like that (though less dramatic) as well given the realities of increasing difficulties in large single chip fabrication. It'd be interesting if internally Intel is rethinking that but this doesn't seem like "doubling down" so much as a first scramble. ---- 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18389373 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18389373 2: https://www.anandtech.com/show/13535/intel-goes-for-48cores-cascade-ap https://www.anandtech.com/show/13535/intel-goes-for-48cores-...