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AMD named their memory fabric "infinity fabric" for marketing reasons. So when they developed their memory attached cache solution (which lives in the memory fa
by phire 1y ago
AMD named their memory fabric "infinity fabric" for marketing reasons. So when they developed their memory attached cache solution (which lives in the memory fabric, unlike a traditional cache), the obvious marketing name is "infinity cache"
The main advantage of a memory attached cache is that it's cheaper than a regular cache, and can even be put on a seperate die, allowing you to have much more of it.
AMDs previous memory fabric from the early 2000s was called "Hyper Transport", which has a confusing overlap with Intel's Hyper Threading, but I think AMD actually bet intel to the name by a few years.
- typpilol 1y agoHow's latency vs a traditional?
- Tuna-Fish 1y agoIt has a higher latency than AMD's L2 caches, but similar compared to Nvidia's L2. [0] I think AMD might be ditching it for the next gen in exchange for growing the L2's, because the lower latency is beneficial to ray tracing. [0]: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!LHJo!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F925f51b0-7857-42d4-8980-eefdef474d8a_1600x897.png https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!LHJo!,f_auto,q_auto:...
- ColonelPhantom 1y agoNot sure if ditching infinity cache/L3 for a bigger L2 would make sense. It seems at least plausible to me that growing the L2 cache that much would make its latency worse, thus losing most of what has been gained. In the image you linked, Nvidia's L2 latency is like twice as high as AMD's! Keep in mind that the 'big' desktop chips have bigger caches too. The L2 on a 5080 and 'L3' on a 9070 XT are both 64 MB. Additionally, AMD has already been growing the L2, going to 8 MB on the 9070 XT vs. 4 MB on the 7800 XT and 6800 XT.
- Tuna-Fish 1y agoTo clarify, the idea that AMD is ditching IC is not mine, I find it puzzling too. Their marketing materials to OEMs have been leaked, and they no longer mention IC at all, instead proudly displaying (much higher) L2 amounts per GPU. This of course doesn't necessarily mean that they are definitely removing it, but it certainly hints at that.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- FuriouslyAdrift 1y agoInfinity Fabric is, in fact, the current superset of HyperTransport. HyperTransport is an IO architecture for chip to chip communication and has been used by pretty much everyone. It's also an open spec and has a consortium managing it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperTransport https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperTransport
- adrianmonk 1y agoConfusing, yes, but at least they didn't call it "HyperLink". Also, Ross Technology beat them both to "hyper" names with the hyperSPARC CPU.