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Why would the default mode of operation for a 128-core datacenter chip be to have 120 idle cores? Obviously the default mode of operation is to run all cores,
by jholman 5y ago
Why would the default mode of operation for a 128-core datacenter chip be to have 120 idle cores?
Obviously the default mode of operation is to run all cores, or very nearly all cores, at full tilt all of the time. This chip is designed to be garbage at few-threaded workloads.
- em500 5y agoIndeed. For cloud vendors, a large part of the business model is to resell/oversell idle CPU time as much as they can ("vCPU"), taking advantage of the fact that small/individual clients are usually extremely over-provisioned CPU-wise.
- alkonaut 5y agoThat depends on the workload? For HPC it’s easy, for other loads like DBs or VMs it’s harder, especially with fewer nodes (e.g a single node running 32 VMs with dedicated cores will probably look a lot like a desktop workload with lots of idle cores). I suppose it’s going to be rare to see these in deployments with fewer than several dozen sockets, and workloads must be balanced (so e.g not using dedicated VM cores). That’s I suppose a simplification they can make by focusing only on “datacenter” while intel needs the same design to work from 1 socket to hundreds.