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Whlst the TSMC factor has done wonders for AMD now that TSMC overtook Intel. One advantage Intel has still is costs/control of their node and would be very int
by Zenst 6y ago
Whlst the TSMC factor has done wonders for AMD now that TSMC overtook Intel. One advantage Intel has still is costs/control of their node and would be very interesting to see production costs compared as might be that Intel has more margin in production they can shave. Though they have stumbled keeping up with node progress and that has clearly been a cornerstone in the hurt they are getting in the market and AMD have capitalised upon that like champs.
Will Intel bring out a new architecture that will rise above all this as they did with the Core2Duo (actually typing this upon one of those cores), well - they need to.
But for me the shift on CPU's does seem to be large and faster cache access and latency. Say Intel released the same chips but added a very large SRAM layer - that for some applications would swing things for sure, not cheap but again - Intel controls and runs their own fabs, and whilst AMD could equally just do that, would the costs in them doing that with TSMC be just as comparable? There is money to be made in fabricating or TSMC would not be doing so well financially of all this. But that is a cost/income that Intel are tapped into with their own fabs.
However it pans, competition has been good for the desktop x86 folks and so glad AMD back in the game and going strong.
- Covzire 6y agoIntel could also optimize their high end enthusiast dies by removing iGPUs, since virtually nobody uses or wants them.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Godel_unicode 6y agoAnd then they could call them kf, and release them last year! https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/190887/intel-core-i9-9900kf-processor-16m-cache-up-to-5-00-ghz.html https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/190887/...
- kasabali 6y agoAFAIK it still has igpu, just non-functional and wasting space
- Zenst 6y agoNot as clear-cut on wasting space. Maybe those chips had a defective GPU area and why disabled - would be good to get clarity upon that. The other aspect is that they will act as a heat spreader at the die level, so whilst not best use of space - given all the factors - not something could easily dismiss and better a waste of space than a waste of a chip who's only crime was to have a non-functioning GPU upon it.
- kasabali 6y agoThat's not the point. iGPU takes most of the die space. Parents point is it'd be a better end product for enthusiasts had they opt to not put it there in the first place.
- jeffbee 6y agoIntel's high-end desktop series, the Cascade Lake Xeon W, already lacks graphics.
- sroussey 6y agoOne AMD advantage is that it’s manufacturing basically a single part, not the large options of Intel. One part binned and combined into chiplet designs. 8 core to 64 core, its all the same part (1, 2, 4, or 8 of them). There is likely cost savings to this strategy as well. I imagine they will do that on the GPU side as well at some point.
- selectodude 6y agoAMD's yields are going to be better too since it's not a monolithic core.
- doikor 6y agoAlso gives them a lot of flexibility with binning which should give them excellent yields. The ones that don't have full 8 (well enough) working cores just use them for 5600X (6 core) or 5900X (12 cores) if there is 6 or 7 good cores. The fully working chiplets you can bin for 5800X or 5950X (or for threadripper/Epyc for the very best ones)
- maximilianburke 6y agoAdditionally the I/O die on the Ryzen chiplets also gets reused as the X570 chipset, also I believe based on binning.
- bcrl 6y agoBonus: AMD satisfies their contract with Global Foundries by including one I/O die manufactured by GF with every CPU sold.
- fomine3 6y agoIntel also uses chip with defected cores for lower core SKUs.
- doikor 6y agoYes but Intel can't take 2 (or 4 or 8 or whatever number you want) of defective parts and sell it as a high end part. AMD can make a 5900X or a Threadripper/Epyc out of 6 core chiplets "defective". As Intel chips are one big monolithic designs they can't make a 6 core consumer desktop CPU out of a broken 24 or 28 core Xenon chip.
- kllrnohj 6y ago> Say Intel released the same chips but added a very large SRAM layer - that for some applications would swing things for sure, not cheap but again Which they did for Broadwell but then immediately abandoned it. Anandtech recently did a retrospective on it: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16195/a-broadwell-retrospective-review-in-2020-is-edram-still-worth-it https://www.anandtech.com/show/16195/a-broadwell-retrospecti... (although at the time of writing this Anandtech's site is dead so pop that into your cached lookup of choice)
- mastax 6y agoThat's talking about eDRAM which has different trade-offs due to increased latency vs L3.
- bcrl 6y agoIntel did perform internal studies on the effect of 3d stacking on CPU layouts. For things like caches the reduction in delay caused by adding another layer is significant. AMD had to increase latency of the L3 cache in Zen 3 by 7 cycles as a trade-off for the increased size. If they were able to stack SRAM with another layer of transistors placed vertically, that latency penalty could be reduced.
- sroussey 6y agoZen4 might bring on-chiplet SRAM cache using a cheaper node
- andy_ppp 6y agoIs that just a rumour or are ITK?
- wmf 6y agoI'm not sure what you're trying to say here. Zen2/3 already have 32MB L3 SRAM on each chiplet. And we know TSMC 5nm is more expensive than 7nm.
- sroussey 6y agoI mean on the IO die, not the processor one (or maybe a new one). 256MB L4 Infinity Cache for all the CPUs in the package. It doesn’t need to be on 5nm or 7nm. It can be on 14nm. But still on package. (I should have said on package, not on-chiplet, too late to edit)
- temac 6y agoCan you really do an enormous SRAM on a bigger node without it occupying a huge surface? Would 14nm be cheap enough for that to be interesting? If so, why not also use it for other big structures?
- rbanffy 6y agoIBM does that on mainframes with DRAM as L4. A cluster of four sockets has almost a gigabyte of memory in a separate chip with analogous function as AMD's IO die (and that attaches to the memory modules). Of course, these are enormous and ridiculously expensive dies.
- bcrl 6y agoBut eDRAM uses less power than SRAM. A large SRAM on an older process would have a substantial power penalty.