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Not long ago at all, like just a few weeks ago right before zen3 was out in the wild! A double whammy for sure for Intel, tough times ahead indeed. Apologists c

Not long ago at all, like just a few weeks ago right before zen3 was out in the wild! A double whammy for sure for Intel, tough times ahead indeed. Apologists can hand wave AMD off by citing the huge lead in sales that Intel still enjoys, but that argument falls flat with Apple, a trillion dollar company. Maybe Intel will start to compete on price like AMD used to.

whizzter 6y ago
I think they announced a short while back that they're "looking at trying to outsource manufacturing of some high end parts", ie they've known that they were falling behind in too many areas due to their shrinkage problems so they're taking in help from the outside to not become irrelevant. M1 is running on "5nm", looking at specs Intel 10NM is 100Mtr/mm2 vs TSMC's Apple 5nm chips being 173Mtr/mm2 (So even if Intel nomenclature seems more conservative they still lag by a lot in manufacturing capacity)
- the_lucifer 6y ago
  Yes, even if Intel moves to 7nm, it's at ~202Mtr/mm2. Current TSMC 5nm is between Intel's 10 and 7nm density wise.
arvinsim 6y ago
As someone who owns both Mac and PC, I am excited on what Ryzen can offer on 5nm. If Apple has these gains, I am sure Ryzen will have great performance leaps too.
- mcintyre1994 6y ago
  I’m not massively familiar with CPU architectures, would you expect to see similar performance gains going to 5nm on x86 as you do on ARM?
  - hajile 6y ago
    Not strictly because of 5nm itself. 5nm will be Zen 4 which should bring 10-20% IPC uplift if AMD's current trend continues. TSMC's N5 5nm transistors are 85% smaller than their N7 transistors which should lower power consumption significantly though SRAM only shrinks a modest 35% (this especially affects desktop Ryzen with tons of cache compared to their laptop versions). AMD currently makes the Zen 2/3 IO die on Global Foundries 12nm for contractual reasons. When they finally shrink that to 7 or 5nm, the power savings should be significant. Zen 4 is expected to bring DDR5 support which will both drastically increase bandwidth and lower RAM power consumption. Likewise, it is expected to support PCIe 5 which doubles the bandwidth per lane to a little shy of 4GB/s. All of these things together could mean a decent improvement in IPC and total performance and a very big improvement in performance per watt. Meanwhile, I suspect we'll start seeing large "Infinity Cache" additions to their APUs that is shared between the CPU and GPU as the bus width of DDR just doesn't offer the bandwidth to keep larger GPUs from fighting the CPU for bandwidth. This should not only improve APU total performance, but fewer trips to RAM has a significant effect on power consumption (it costs more to move 2 bytes than to add them together).
  - sliken 6y ago
    Not really. AMD could make a 7nm version of the Apple core, but they instead build more cores. Much how AMD outmaneuvered intel with smaller chiplets (more flexible in design, higher volume, more tolerant of process errors, higher yield, etc). Apple has done similar with their design. It's better in obvious ways, larger caches, larger number of rename registers, more outstanding transactions, more memory channels, etc. Apple could make a core just as fast, maybe slightly less power efficient if it spent less on the neural cache, image processing, or GPU. Another big win is that apple runs the memory at 4500 MHz, standard, without overclocking. Even the Zen 3 often runs the ram at 3200 MHz, and standard support goes up to 3800 MHz or so. You can run it higher, but then you have to decouple the memory clock from the CPU clock, which reduces performance. The DDR4x also supports 2 channels, instead of 1. So you get as many memory channels as the AMD threadripper, which is an expensive, hot, and low volume chip.

whizzter 6y ago

I think they announced a short while back that they're "looking at trying to outsource manufacturing of some high end parts", ie they've known that they were falling behind in too many areas due to their shrinkage problems so they're taking in help from the outside to not become irrelevant. M1 is running on "5nm", looking at specs Intel 10NM is 100Mtr/mm2 vs TSMC's Apple 5nm chips being 173Mtr/mm2 (So even if Intel nomenclature seems more conservative they still lag by a lot in manufacturing capacity)

the_lucifer 6y ago
Yes, even if Intel moves to 7nm, it's at ~202Mtr/mm2. Current TSMC 5nm is between Intel's 10 and 7nm density wise.

arvinsim 6y ago

As someone who owns both Mac and PC, I am excited on what Ryzen can offer on 5nm. If Apple has these gains, I am sure Ryzen will have great performance leaps too.

mcintyre1994 6y ago
I’m not massively familiar with CPU architectures, would you expect to see similar performance gains going to 5nm on x86 as you do on ARM?
- hajile 6y ago
  Not strictly because of 5nm itself. 5nm will be Zen 4 which should bring 10-20% IPC uplift if AMD's current trend continues. TSMC's N5 5nm transistors are 85% smaller than their N7 transistors which should lower power consumption significantly though SRAM only shrinks a modest 35% (this especially affects desktop Ryzen with tons of cache compared to their laptop versions). AMD currently makes the Zen 2/3 IO die on Global Foundries 12nm for contractual reasons. When they finally shrink that to 7 or 5nm, the power savings should be significant. Zen 4 is expected to bring DDR5 support which will both drastically increase bandwidth and lower RAM power consumption. Likewise, it is expected to support PCIe 5 which doubles the bandwidth per lane to a little shy of 4GB/s. All of these things together could mean a decent improvement in IPC and total performance and a very big improvement in performance per watt. Meanwhile, I suspect we'll start seeing large "Infinity Cache" additions to their APUs that is shared between the CPU and GPU as the bus width of DDR just doesn't offer the bandwidth to keep larger GPUs from fighting the CPU for bandwidth. This should not only improve APU total performance, but fewer trips to RAM has a significant effect on power consumption (it costs more to move 2 bytes than to add them together).
- sliken 6y ago
  Not really. AMD could make a 7nm version of the Apple core, but they instead build more cores. Much how AMD outmaneuvered intel with smaller chiplets (more flexible in design, higher volume, more tolerant of process errors, higher yield, etc). Apple has done similar with their design. It's better in obvious ways, larger caches, larger number of rename registers, more outstanding transactions, more memory channels, etc. Apple could make a core just as fast, maybe slightly less power efficient if it spent less on the neural cache, image processing, or GPU. Another big win is that apple runs the memory at 4500 MHz, standard, without overclocking. Even the Zen 3 often runs the ram at 3200 MHz, and standard support goes up to 3800 MHz or so. You can run it higher, but then you have to decouple the memory clock from the CPU clock, which reduces performance. The DDR4x also supports 2 channels, instead of 1. So you get as many memory channels as the AMD threadripper, which is an expensive, hot, and low volume chip.