3 ms·

Dating back to the turn of the century, I can still recall the pleasure of building my 1st of many SMP desktops/workstations with an Abit VP6 to game on and wor

by lob_it 4y ago

Dating back to the turn of the century, I can still recall the pleasure of building my 1st of many SMP desktops/workstations with an Abit VP6 to game on and work on at home. In 2022, I would almost expect to see mobo designers and chip manufacturers start rolling out deca-socket designs for compute and automotive use, giving users (okay.. Just the nerds and geeks) the option of mixing-and-matching chips to accomodate custom configurations (and unthought of use cases). The CPU wall almost reminds me of automotive where the engines may be hitting cooling/fuel system limits of the current technologies, but still has plenty of optimizations available for unsprung weight, torsional rigidity, coefficient of drag and so on. It may not address the power efficiency angles, but for many users, having 10 sockets to add optimized compute chips (main cpus, AI accelerators, graphics enhancement chips and a number of other feature-enhanced chips) keeps the R&D money flowing until the industry gets over this next hurdle (they always do). The author states that the expense of pushing moores law, etc is becoming cost prohibitive, so take a break and rock some modern PCB designs.

davidgay 4y ago
> In 2022, I would almost expect to see mobo designers and chip manufacturers start rolling out deca-socket designs for compute and automotive use It's called the PCIe bus. And before you say "but it doesn't meet my needs / it's latency is too high / it's bandwidth is too low", come up with some ideas on how to do that better rather than just say "add sockets".
- lob_it 4y ago
  I rocked a Commodore 128.. Don't F with me :p Power is nothing without spittle (I'm sure at least one person said it) I'm not familiar with the lingo, but I was thinking of multilayer sockets, with a higher bandwidth loop/ring for the primary sockets with the PCIe coming off the CPUs in a traditional fashion. Perhaps I read about that with the opterons ages ago.
  - davidgay 4y ago
    86=lda a (which I still remember), is all I have to say.
    - lob_it 4y ago
      Not familiar with that. I did a few quick searches on the quad cpu itaniums to no avail, but vaugely recall faster ring buses for sockets (though perhaps just faster for the era). I can't say that i still have floppies for Leisure suit larry, but i can say 8-bit boom chacka mouw mouw did exist too.
  - xhcxjkhchxjk 4y ago
    bebox, what the macs could have been if jobs wasn't so hellbent on getting back to apple, had a CPU port. it was pretty much a north bridge socket/plug to the cpu from outside of the case. haven't seen anything close to that. also the design of the pseudo realtime os would be killer on today's multicores. not to mention the bekernel c api instead of the osx side-step-patents-above-all-else-api of their bastard bsd. glad my livelihood doesn't depend on osx/ios client side applications
    - lob_it 4y ago
      I'm silly enough to think having a 12u rack in the mancave is better than a keg setup. https://ltsp.org/ https://ltsp.org/ http://www.porteus.org/ http://www.porteus.org/ I've done a few personal projects with LTSP and think PXE booting is the bee's knees for some uses (obviously not as portable as a laptop running porteus). Booting remotely was not a priority, but OS exploration has always been exciting. With more devices (laptops, SBC's, etc) getting HDMI-In ports, running a compute stick, sbc/PI or other devices externally is also a cool feature. I like KVM's, so if they integrate a K/M protocol to HDMI-In port at somepoint, its back to plug and play designs, instead of RDP, SSH, etc for the external devices. Though on this post, cramming a SOC with the kitchen sink on it, it seems like they could simplify that dilema with a deca-socket design, reserving the PCIe bus for traditional expansion. Even expanding memory channels per socket negates some of the penalties for performance under some conditions (bottlenecks can be moved easily and/or will still exist without the complexity of jamming everything on one CPU die.) That is cool though!
- DeathArrow 4y ago
  But still, many server mobos have more than one socket.
  - lob_it 4y ago
    Right. Evolution is still cool. Expanding beyond CPU sockets sounds like a reasonable expectation, instead of cramming everything on one die.

by lob_it 4y ago

davidgay 4y ago

> In 2022, I would almost expect to see mobo designers and chip manufacturers start rolling out deca-socket designs for compute and automotive use It's called the PCIe bus. And before you say "but it doesn't meet my needs / it's latency is too high / it's bandwidth is too low", come up with some ideas on how to do that better rather than just say "add sockets".

lob_it 4y ago
I rocked a Commodore 128.. Don't F with me :p Power is nothing without spittle (I'm sure at least one person said it) I'm not familiar with the lingo, but I was thinking of multilayer sockets, with a higher bandwidth loop/ring for the primary sockets with the PCIe coming off the CPUs in a traditional fashion. Perhaps I read about that with the opterons ages ago.
- davidgay 4y ago
  86=lda a (which I still remember), is all I have to say.
  - lob_it 4y ago
    Not familiar with that. I did a few quick searches on the quad cpu itaniums to no avail, but vaugely recall faster ring buses for sockets (though perhaps just faster for the era). I can't say that i still have floppies for Leisure suit larry, but i can say 8-bit boom chacka mouw mouw did exist too.
- xhcxjkhchxjk 4y ago
  bebox, what the macs could have been if jobs wasn't so hellbent on getting back to apple, had a CPU port. it was pretty much a north bridge socket/plug to the cpu from outside of the case. haven't seen anything close to that. also the design of the pseudo realtime os would be killer on today's multicores. not to mention the bekernel c api instead of the osx side-step-patents-above-all-else-api of their bastard bsd. glad my livelihood doesn't depend on osx/ios client side applications
  - lob_it 4y ago
    I'm silly enough to think having a 12u rack in the mancave is better than a keg setup. https://ltsp.org/ https://ltsp.org/ http://www.porteus.org/ http://www.porteus.org/ I've done a few personal projects with LTSP and think PXE booting is the bee's knees for some uses (obviously not as portable as a laptop running porteus). Booting remotely was not a priority, but OS exploration has always been exciting. With more devices (laptops, SBC's, etc) getting HDMI-In ports, running a compute stick, sbc/PI or other devices externally is also a cool feature. I like KVM's, so if they integrate a K/M protocol to HDMI-In port at somepoint, its back to plug and play designs, instead of RDP, SSH, etc for the external devices. Though on this post, cramming a SOC with the kitchen sink on it, it seems like they could simplify that dilema with a deca-socket design, reserving the PCIe bus for traditional expansion. Even expanding memory channels per socket negates some of the penalties for performance under some conditions (bottlenecks can be moved easily and/or will still exist without the complexity of jamming everything on one CPU die.) That is cool though!
DeathArrow 4y ago
But still, many server mobos have more than one socket.
- lob_it 4y ago
  Right. Evolution is still cool. Expanding beyond CPU sockets sounds like a reasonable expectation, instead of cramming everything on one die.