5 ms·
How significantly less, I wonder? For my workloads it’d be an overall win to have more cores at that speed. The more the better; I’d cap out at maybe a a hundr
by Filligree 5y ago
How significantly less, I wonder?
For my workloads it’d be an overall win to have more cores at that speed. The more the better; I’d cap out at maybe a a hundred or so.
Obviously Firestorm is better, but a hundred-core desktop CPU at present seems… unlikely.
- maccard 5y agoAMD [0] would like a word. it's 64 cores but 128 with hyperthreading. [0] https://www.amd.com/en/products/cpu/amd-ryzen-threadripper-3990x https://www.amd.com/en/products/cpu/amd-ryzen-threadripper-3...
- Filligree 5y agoSo, not a hundred-core processor yet. I can’t use hyperthreading. It does give a 60% speed boost, but it’s also disabled in production so…
- em500 5y agoEyballing die shots, Firestorm is about 4 times the size of Icestorm, so if you have perfectly parallelizable workloads, you stand to gain if Firestorm is less than 4 times as fast per core. (This ignores L2 cache and maybe some other supporting transistors which makes things much more complicated.) In the simple benchmarks, the speed differences range roughly from 2x to 5x. It looks like the current configuration (4 Firestorm + 4 Icestorm) is pretty well balanced: equisized alternatives (5 Firestorm + 0 Icestorm, or 3 Firestorm + 8 Icestorm) can be faster for specific workloads, but probably not across the board. The Apple CPU team really knows what they're doing (but that has been abundantly clear for many years now).