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Is it just me, or is the SoC tile way larger than anyone expected? From TFA: > A SoC tile contains most of the functionality found in the system agent in curr
by myself248 4y ago
Is it just me, or is the SoC tile way larger than anyone expected? From TFA:
> A SoC tile contains most of the functionality found in the system agent in current Intel client CPUs.
Given that this tile utterly dwarfs the CPU cores themselves, what all is going on in there? Why is it so enormous? How much of it do we understand?
- wmf 4y agoThe uncore has been growing every generation so this is not new. I've wondered why it's so large myself. Intel has the audio DSP, ISP, GNA, and now VPU that mostly aren't used so maybe they account for the bloat.
- _kbh_ 4y agoI'm not a semiconductor engineer so I could be totally off here but. My guess is that for AMD and likely Intel the reason the IO die is so large is because of all the PHY's on it (DDR, USB, etc) which would give a minimum size of the IO die for chiplets. Which if true explains why you wouldn't care as much about the process node for the IO chiplet as it has a minimum physical size anyway.
- Dunedan 4y agoI don't if Intel is doing the same, but AMD's chiplet-based Zen 2 and Zen 3 processors use a less dense manufacturing process (12nm) for their IO-die than for their CPU-die (7nm), which results in the IO-die being comparable large.
- rowanG077 4y agoiGPU, video de/encoder, USB4, I'm not surprised it's larger.
- ac29 4y agoThe GPU is on its own tile