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128 cores at 30 watts isn't something I've seen anyone planning. What's more likely is 128 cores at 300-400+ watts, and scaling from there is most likely to inc

• booi 4y ago
  You’re definitely right. I meant 30W per cpu or less which usually means maybe 4-8 cpus per host or ~300W. I did mean to compare it to Graviton and will definitely look at the other contenders in this space.
  • tyrfing 4y ago
    Oh OK. Recent server CPUs (Ice Lake) are roughly 8-12W (maybe up to 15W, there are a lot of SKUs) as a baseline. AMD's latest Milan generation brings it down to 3.5W/core, with some closer to 5W; Intel's Sapphire Rapids only goes down to ~ 6W. After M1 and Graviton, there's a big rush for making denser server CPUs, pretty much bifurcating the market. Much more powerful than old Atom cores, but more power-efficient than regular ones, and targeted mostly at hyperscalers. AMD should have a dense variant of Zen 4 out next year, going up to 128 cores and reducing per-core power significantly. Intel will likely have a competitor out in 2024, and AMD might hit 256 cores then, although rumors of things that far out aren't very specific. On the ARM side of things, NVIDIA is launching CPUs like this next year. Qualcomm bought Nuvia, which was working on similar server CPUs, but probably switched focus to PCs. There are some other oddballs like Tenstorrent as well. One interesting part with pushing per-core power so low is that communication between cores starts to be a serious part of total power consumption.