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The best silicon process for DRAM is significantly different than for CPU logic. So it's not practical to combine them on one die -- you'd have to compromise th
by tlb 4y ago
The best silicon process for DRAM is significantly different than for CPU logic. So it's not practical to combine them on one die -- you'd have to compromise the speed or density of one or the other.
But the chiplet approach works, and nVidia and Apple are both shipping it. I dunno what's going on at Intel. Hopefully they'll pull themselves together.
- rbanffy 4y agoTheir new Xeons have HBM in the package. It's even possible to build a workable workstation without any DRAM slots with those (provided you can get rid of 300W of heat but, for a workstation, using all cores at full speed should be a relatively rare occurrence).
- Retr0id 4y ago> for a workstation, using all cores at full speed should be a relatively rare occurrence Huh? Sustained all-core load is why I have a workstation in the first place, it's for anything that would be annoying to run on my laptop. I'm sure different people have different workloads, but I don't think I'm an outlier here.
- rbanffy 4y ago> Huh? Sustained all-core load is why I have a workstation in the first place At least mine spends most of the time waiting for my keystrokes. It does do background tasks, of course, and some heavy lifting sometimes (when I have to wait for them instead of the other way around) but it doesn't spend the day doing the heavy lifting because that'd make the machine much less responsive (and much noisier). OTOH, if I had a 56-core 112-thread monster, it'd probably be perfectly fine to do the heavy lifting AND the interactive work at the same time. Worse case scenario would need to set core affinity so that the heavy lifting doesn't step over the cores running my GUI.
- rasz 4y agoApple is not shipping any chiplet designs. Its ordinary POP ram and a ton of marketing.