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Despite past hubris, Intel has made big strides in reaching parity with AMD CPUs. Sierra Forest (launched this summer) offers 144 cores per chip, more than 2x w
by highfrequency 2y ago
Despite past hubris, Intel has made big strides in reaching parity with AMD CPUs. Sierra Forest (launched this summer) offers 144 cores per chip, more than 2x what Intel was offering last year and on par with AMD server CPUs for the first time in many years.
There is also a huge political headwind when it comes to onshoring leading edge semiconductor fabrication - no company will benefit from this more than Intel.
I’d expect more pain in the medium term - they certainly missed the AI boat - but I wouldn’t be surprised if Gelsinger succeeds in turning things around, and I’m rooting for them. Competition between AMD and Intel, and between TSMC and Intel - will be nothing but favorable for core count, $/core, and the continuation of Moore’s Law.
- isthatafact 2y agoAt first glance, the core counts appear competitive, but of course, comparing Intel "E cores" to "cores" is not at all fair. The comment made me curious about performance though. Here is an example of the 144 "E"core Sierra Forest matching performance of the 60 core Sapphire Rapids 8490H in the phoronix benchmark suite: https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-xeon-6700e-ampere-altra/6 https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-xeon-6700e-ampere-altr... Sierra Forest does better if perf/watt (or energy consumed per run) is the metric, but still loses to the 64 core Epyc Siena in those same benchmarks. I would guess there are some very efficiently parallel workloads where tons of "E" cores win in performance, but the current Intel CPUs do not seem to be competitive in my non-expert opinion.