4 ms·
1 FPU for 8 cores is wild, but then again they were selling webservers. Still, iirc FPU's were silicon heavy back in those days and it'd be interesting to know
by whizzter 8d ago
1 FPU for 8 cores is wild, but then again they were selling webservers.
Still, iirc FPU's were silicon heavy back in those days and it'd be interesting to know how far ahead the foundries Sun and Fujitsu were, maybe it was simply a factor of being too far behind in the foundry race that left Sun with few options.
Intel's E-Cores still are functionally complete for most parts though (excl Avx512?)? Todays limits seems to be memory bandwidth and power and I guess many of the 144 core customers are in it for virtualization and servers?
- sam1714 8d agoMy understanding is the lots of small cores are for applications where you have lots of simple, independent tasks that tend to be IO-bound: web and other front-end servers, databases, transaction processing. SMT is optimal here because you can execute other threads while waiting for IO. I haven't been closely following it, but the Intel E-cores are definitely less wide and have less execution units. The FPU/Vector hardware is 128-bits wide instead of 256. If you ask it to do 256-bit SIMD, the front-end breaks it into 2 operations.