AMD Announces 7nm Rome CPUs and MI60 GPUs
tomshardware.com
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What I'm waiting for is an AMD GPU that can compete with a top-tier NVidia offering. Vega is nice, but not really a contender on the mid to top end. The G series cpus with vega inside are great, but where is the 2080ti, or even 1080ti, killer? Even something a bit slower, but close, would be great.
Is it too much to ask of AMD to handle both? I am unsure, but I would love to see NVidia in a price and performance war at the same time Intel is. Competition makes the resulting products better. Do you think the 9th Gen Intel chips would be octocore without Ryzen?
I've heard that recently tensorflow-rocm can be installed using simple:
`pip install tensorflow-rocm`
Anyone did some Vega64/56/RX580 benchmarks with this? How fast is it in comparison to 1080Ti/2080Ti/Titan V? Can it do latest state-of-art models? Thanks!
> MIOpen[1] is a step in this direction but still causes the VEGA 64 + MIOpen to be 60% of the performance of a 1080 Ti + CuDNN based on benchmarks we've conducted internally at Lambda. Let that soak in for a second: the VEGA 64 (15TFLOPS theoretical peak) is 0.6x of a 1080 Ti (11.3TFLOPS theoretical peak). MIOpen is very far behind CuDNN.
Of course, crypto might have something to do with this. I see miners offloading GTX 1060-s and 1070-s so perhaps the second hand market might become more approachable?
For whatever reason, Nvidia hasn't stagnated the way Intel has. Nvidia has continued rapid progress in GPUs even though they have a dominant position (and a near monopoly in the datacenter).
Perhaps because they don't have as much of a lead as Intel used to? Intel was a monopoly, plain and simple, but AMD has always been a contender when it comes to GPUs.
Intel, however, ran into engineering issues with their process improvement, while having limited market-driven incentive to spend and innovate improvements to their efficiency (IPC) beyond a certain level (or to increase core count.) So their "tick-tock" cycle was broken.
TSMCs 7nm node will be the first legitimate tech advantage over Intel and if Intel does get their act in gear and manages to deploy their 10nm next year they will at least keep parity.
I am a huge AMD fan and will almost certainly be considering a Zen 2 build next year (though the fact I can disable Intel ME and can't remove AMD PSP will temper my interest) but thats more to support the underdog and get better value for money than getting the absolute best possible performance.
I would never have bet money that the tiny little CPU designed by Acorn Computers that ended up powering the Newton would be the first CPU to jump two nodes ahead of Intel in terms of process, but here we are.
ARM's doing great work and I hope they continue to push core counts to even more ridiculous levels.
it's surprising to see how badly they're scrambling to hit even 10nm, little lone 7nm
The feature size there is a bit misleading – "Intel 10nm" and "TSMC 7nm" are roughly equivalent, with IIRC the Intel 10nm process actually having a higher transistor density. The TSMC chips aren't really "two nodes ahead" – but it is likely that Intel will lose its process lead for maybe a year or so.
I get the impression that Intel overextended on their 10nm process, in that they were perhaps a bit more ambitious that other manufacturers and it came back to bite them when there were scaling problems. On the other hand, last I heard was that the scaling problems experienced with the 10nm node haven't held up Intel's 7nm node, which could well see them re-establish their process lead.
At the end of the day, it's great that the market is seeing some more competition, so hopefully we will all be able to enjoy the benefits from a variety of manufacturers soon!
I’m no micro-electronic expert but I wonder if we are hitting limits in clock speed scaling with regards to feature size - i.e. shrinking pass a certain feature size clock speeds actually have to drop for the chip to be stable.
Intel’s priority is clock speed first and foremost due to what they produce - desktop and server CPUs. A new process is pointless for them if they can’t get at least equal clock speeds out of it as their old process.
TSMC caters to mobile CPU and GPU production - those will never boost to 5Ghz like CPUs; the former for power efficiency reasons (and heat) and the later tends to go for more “cores” as it focuses on parallizable workloads.
It's more that making many very long conductors with very short insulators between them becomes problematic. But that was the case at any process size, but now we are pushing the limits as far as possible to try to make bigger chips.
Quite possibly they are, but to be fair ARM processors were the first to launch on 7nm.
Intel's largely "secret sauce" process has been their greatest asset. Now it looks like a huge liability.
The current generation i9 processors are all 14nm.
Yes, that's true but the per clock performance is close. They are only 5-10% behind in single threaded tasks without AVX (depending on the workload). The IPC increase is expected to be 10-15% (will of course depend on the workload). And their achilles heel, the AVX performance, will also improve with Zen 2 (256 bit instead of 128 bit etc.)
Due to 7nm the clocks (for consumer hardware like Ryzen and Threadripper) will probably also increase (not 5 to 5.2 ghz after overclocking like Intel, but up to 4.7 ghz overclocks could be possible seeing that 4.3 ghz is possible on the current node which is mobile optimized).
Depending on how much the clocks increase I believe they can close the gap. Maybe even pass Intel. The future certainly looks promising for AMD.
I wonder if they will revive their X APUs for the Server. In the past they had Opteron X APUs to increase the compute density of servers. Now with Zen and Vega this could be a nice combo in addition to discrete GPUs.
For example this system: https://i.imgur.com/yt5FasA.jpg?1
Imagine replacing these two 32 core Epyc CPUs made in 14nm with two 32 core Epyc APUs (Zen 2) made in 7nm, which would use the saved space due to 7nm for Compute Units, and you might get an additional 10-16 TFlops per System. Which is basically one additional GPU.
AMD's 7nm might get them close to on par with Intel's current 14++ nm chips, but it's not like AMD has really figured out how to make the entire CPU half the size.
It's been all over the town for months that TSMCs 7nm is estimated to be worse than Intels ambitious failure that is 10nm [0][1][2][3] but quite a bit better than Intel 14nm (with the exception of clocks), and that 7nm+ with EUV for cost savings (which TSCM already taped out last month) is estimated to be equal or even slightly better.
So I'm not really sure what to make of your comment?
> AMD's 7nm might get them close to on par with Intel's current 14++ nm chips, but it's not like AMD has really figured out how to make the entire CPU half the size.
No they didn't, but they don't claim that, do they? From what they say they decided on the IO die exactly because IO doesn't scale as much, and that decision allowed them to double the number of cores. Since 7nm is expected to be much more expensive than previous nodes this seems really clever from a money standpoint as well. The core only Zen 2 chiplets are expected to be around 70 mm² which is mobile SoC territory.
AMD is already close in IPC to Intel even though AMD uses a worse node (GloFos mobile optimized 14nm is more like Intel 22 then Intel 14nm) and wins in multithreaded workloads because their SMT implementation seems to scale better than Intels. They also seem to have better performance/watt when under load. I have not seen numbers for idle wattage for Xeons but Intels desktop CPUs are slightly (5 - 10 watt) better when idle.
So I'm looking forward to them having the better node for the first time ever.
[0] https://www.semiwiki.com/forum/content/7544-7nm-5nm-3nm-logi...
[1] https://www.semiwiki.com/forum/content/6713-14nm-16nm-10nm-7...
AMD's Zen architecture is leaps and bounds above Intel's offering, not only performance-wise but also where it matters the most: product design and production costs.
Nvidia doesn't fab their own chips and never had a process lead.
People underestimate just how huge a deal Intel's traditional lead in fabrication tech was. I've long argued that the real casualty of Intel's anticompetitive tactics in the early 2000s was AMD being forced to spin off GloFo. Far more than AMD's near term marketshare at the time, it lead to a situation where AMD couldn't really even fall back to their traditional position of competing on price at the low end of the market and played a direct hand in Intel's decade-plus domination of the market.
I would argue that is nothing to do with Intel stagnation. Look at Intel's leadership and management. Look at Jensen Wong. The last time Intel had any energy at management level were Pat Gelsinger, and they pushed him out.
Intel is still king in high-end gaming performance, albeit not as much as Nvidia is ahead of AMD in GPUs.
And don’t try to argue how Intel’s $1700 18-core CPU is faster than AMD’s similarly priced 32-core CPU because Intel’s has slightly faster per-core performance. Such an argument would be absolutely absurd: the point of an 18-32 core CPU is NOT the single threaded performance :)
Don’t know about you but his builders actually benchmark the CPUs.
Dansgaming uses the 18 core i9 for his streaming box.
Not every application a person uses scales to high core counts, in such situations a CPU with good single thread performance (in addition to high core counts) would be beneficial.
Cache performance matter too. AMD’s CPUs have a split L3 cache. Some applications might not like that.
But do you know what really scales to high core counts? Running more than one application at a time.
Depends on how much memory bandwidth and how much CPU cache your applications are using.
Wouldn’t what to trash the L3 cache and worsen the situation with a saturated memory bus.
Not really if you consider the price per core. Normally designed games utilize all cores, and something like Ryzen 7 2700X provides a major benefit. Comparable Intel CPUs are a lot more expensive. Their only advantage is higher overclock frequency. But if you need to overclock your CPU to play something, that game is already poorly designed and is probably not using all cores properly.
No they don’t. Most games barely scale to use 4 cores - some struggle to use even 2.
Even games with tons of threads tend to have a one thread that is ultra heavy which become the limiting factor - i.e. you need single thread performance.
It’s moot regardless since Intel’s i9-9900K has 8 cores and 16 threads too.
It means they are poorly designed which is exactly my point. It's not really a measure of CPU quality, but rather the measure of those games quality. Normal games today use something like Vulkan to saturate the GPU and should not be CPU bound.
So if you need a single thread performance that requires overclocking, it's a poor engine design.
> It’s moot regardless since Intel’s i9-9900K has 8 cores and 16 threads too
And costs a lot a lot more. That's why I mentioned price per core above. I'd use such price difference to get a better GPU instead.
Multithreading hasn’t gotten any easier.
Even when games are forced to multithread like on consoles. Said games run on PCs with half the cores (admittedly at nearly twice the clock speed and higher IPC) outpace consoles with 2x the frame rates.
> And costs a lot a lot more. That's why I mentioned price per core above. I'd use such price difference to get a better GPU instead.
Of course, it’s the best on the market. Intel would be stupid not to charge a premium. It’s how such things are priced.
Basic software architecture is not handled in crunch time.
BUT there are people that want the absolute best available and have the money to afford it ... /shrug
> There are some games that are very poorly optimized, but I see them as edge cases which you can skip if it becomes an issue.
There are a lot of games that aren’t well threaded.
Well multithreaded games are primarily by rich AAA developers - and not even all of them do it; some just don’t have the programming talent for it and some have games that have ran for decades that are too old to multithread without rewriting the whole game.
PS: Sorry for late reply. Apparently people disagreed with me and I had negative Karma for a while. Which slows down posting?
I think that will slowly change over time though, especially for big-budget titles that want to scale with performance better. Architectures like Unity's Job System and the specs package in Rust[1] with a stronger emphasis on staged data processing can help with utilizing cores and cache.
For awhile in the early 2000's, AMD's CPUs were supposedly better than Intel's CPUs. There was a lot of doom and gloom predicted.
I briefly worked for Intel during this period. At an internal quarterly meeting, they shared some confidential information. It was very simple, and very damning to AMD. (In short, Intel very quickly came back on top for reasons that were very obvious to anyone paying attention.)
I'd love to be a fly on the wall at Intel right now. I wonder if they really are falling behind, or if they know some things that we don't?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Micro_Devices,_Inc._v....
While that may be true at the time, it doesn't negate the point that Intel knew internally, long before others, that technically superior solutions where coming.
And, of course, that's exactly what happened.
But illegal business practices only have impact on economics. They don't change the fact that Intel had a technologically superior solution in the pipeline that would eventually trump AMD's offerings.
That would have resulted in Intel taking the economic crown anyway, irrespective of their illegal business practices.
That's patently false. As OP stated, the biggest impact of Intel's illegal business practices was getting rid of any competition for over a decade in spite of having a technically inferior and underperforming product line.
We already have the benefit of being able to look back.
Isn't it totally obvious today that Intel had non-Netburst successors to in the pipeline that were superior than anything AMD had to offer?
https://newsroom.intel.com/news-releases/raja-koduri-joins-i...
I can't find the other news articles. But a number of Radeon group employees have moved to Intel.
A lot of the tension I read was that the Vega team was ransacked. For console engagement chips i.e. Playstation 5 and the new Xbox. There was also speculation of disagreement between Raja and Lisa.
I'm also waiting for a higher end AMD gpu, but will probably grab a 5xx series in the future to tide me over.
So why doesn't AMD make one? Economies of scale. Nvidia could afford the huge price of design, testing and (relatively) low yield of an 800mm2 chip, as long as they have customers buying bulk of it. Nvidia is basically enjoying all the Deep Learning / Machine Learning Money buying to their CUDA ecosystem, they could afford to make such bet and they are selling it as fast as they could make them.
AMD doesn't have this luxury, and Lisa Su knew that well, that is why they could only compete in segment that makes sense. Until the day ROCm can compete directly with CUDA, and its demand are high enough before AMD could afford doing a monster die size chip. But AMD already has plan to use the same Chiplet strategy for GPU, and hopefully everything learned with EPYC will fully be used for these GPU.
1. CPU first, GPU next. as a break through in CPU side is easier than GPU side - just go with more cores with chiplet, since intel basically stopped innovation, while GPU side will be much tougher.
2. data center first, consumer/gamer second. Vega is not meant to compete with best Nvidia card, but it was designed to handle both data center/ML needs and gaming need, maybe the gaming version is just a space holder. The data center version will bring more profit and buy time for AMD to develop the software ecosystem -- CUDA is the moat of Nvidia, and AMD need time to overcome that.
So 7nm is used on data center version instead of a gaming card, which make perfectly sense for AMD.
> Do you think the 9th Gen Intel chips would be octocore without Ryzen?
Recently got a new work laptop, a 12” with a 4C/8T i5. I definitely wouldn’t have expected that without Ryzen on the market, which also is available in business laptops from Dell in a 4C/8T config.
AMD, please consider making your own premium notebook brand to teach your 3rd party manufacturers what your APUs are capable of!
Do you know the exact models?
But Rome architecture, unveiled yesterday uses 8-core dies, so there's hope.
edit I almost ordered one but went with a different model to choose the keyboard layout. So my point is that they do exist.
It'll obviously take time for high quality AMD-based laptops to become a normal thing, but with the CPU being en par and the GPU clearly being better than Intel's offering, it should really only be a matter of time.
OTOH maybe this Dell stuff isn’t on consumer market yet.
The A485 is better spec'ed with docking capability, ports, and an external battery.
Linux works on it with some tweaks, and in 4.20 full support is added.
Granted, it's harder to find, but I am hopeful that with Ryzen performing well, and their Vega GPU beating the crap out of Intel integrated and competing with Nvidia MX150, that we'll see more respect from laptop makers.
tl;dr Buy a thinkpad.
Hopefully as revenue in CPU's increases, some of that can then be invested in R&D on GPU's.
They are working on new GPU architecture to address it. It's something post Navi supposedly.
How does a company, who for decades has been 1-2 node processes ahead of the industry, suddenly gets 1-2 node processes behind everyone else.
There must be an amazing story behind this that no one seems to be digging into.
First there are 'node wars' where what it means to be a "10nm" process or a "7nm" process has become rather murky. This is because transistors themselves don't work well at these sizes and you start getting novel structures which make it hard to compare things. Back when all transistors were flat rectangles it was easier but now they all have some amount of a verticalness to them (FinFets) and there are various patents around this stuff and so nobody talks about 'transistor' size any more they talk about 'feature' size. But what is a feature? Is it a polysilicon line? (equivalent to a trace width on a printed circuit board) Or is it the smallest thing you can render with your lithography process?
But all of that explains when you step back, what has happened to Intel. It used to be that what Intel was doing in there fabs other fabs would take 2 - 3 years to do, and they were big differences, like copper, or finfets, or smaller feature sizes. But as time goes on, the features get harder and harder to develop so when you're two years behind the difference appears smaller and smaller.
What is more the cost of trying something that doesn't work out is more and more expensive and time delaying. And costs are huge here.
That introduces part three of the puzzle, as fabs have been closed while companies switch to using TSMC we have gone from having a dozen semi-conductor companies spending their R&D budgets on their own process improvements in competition with Intel, to those dozens of companies sending their R&D dollars to TSMC who then in aggregate can spend more on R&D than Intel does while still being profitable enough.
So the bottom line is that the market has settled out and there are just few giant foundries (Global, TSMC, Intel, Samsung, Etc.) and one of them doesn't make a business out of others use of their equipment (Intel). Worst, the biggest consumer of silicon has become phones and Intel isn't a serious player.
Intel is under siege and I think they know it (they certainly act like they know it).
And it was mostly about the standard "experience curve", i.e. the fact that larger volumes being manufactured generally lead to better results ?
From an organizational dynamics point of view it really shows the value of process as a means of preserving institutional integrity and durability, but we're humans and communities change. So companies change, some employees leave, some new ones show up, and the mix may not be as effective as the previous mix in getting stuff done.
I really admire Dan Warmenhoven's management philosophy which was very low politics. People serve their ambition in one of two ways, by lifting up the community around them or by pushing everyone but themselves down. The latter type destroy companies and senior management's role is to be the antibody that detects and then removes the offending folks.
So you need to build a healthy community of employees who are working toward lifting the company further. The people who do that, and the community itself, however move on eventually, and the special quality of the group can erode over time.
Is there a book about it ?
But why did they have such a role is still an interesting question.
Let's just assume they are both equal in absolute terms. By Late 2019, Intel would have barely launched 10nm and possibly shipping in 30 - 50M quantity ( And I think even that is an optimistic number ). TSMC wold have shipped more than 300M 7nm across their entire 7nm generation.
And TSMC has 5nm ready in 2020. I don't think Intel will have their EUV 7nm ready even in 2021.
Combined with the fact there is exactly only ONE, one EUV equipment maker on the market, ASML. And they have limited capacity in producing these ASML machine. As far as I am aware all of the 2018 and 2019 capacity are already locked to Samsung and TSMC.
Whatever metrics are used, they are stuck on it for way longer than they should.
For an analogy, a GHz is a GHz everywhere but that doesn’t mean a 3GHz CPU is always faster than a 2GHz CPU.
For example, a typical metal pitch on the low metal layers is 40nm, meaning you get one wire every 40nm, or 25 wires in parallel in a 1um channel.
What Intel is calling 10nm does indeed appear to be close to the others' 7nm. Then again, Intel is seriously behind on 10nm, so the bottom line remains the same: they seem to have essentially lost their process advantage.
How about a number that actually relates to the performance and can be measured?
When the foundry sends you a design kit which contains all their design rules and tooling around a process, then this process has some codename that appears everywhere (think filenames, names of library elements, and so on). This codename tends to be something like GF14 (for GlobalFoundries' 14nm) or N7 (for TSMC's 7nm) plus cryptic suffixes for different revisions of the foundry process.
So the 14/12/10/7nm terms are actually part of the design engineers' everyday work flow. They just also filtered through to marketing for whatever reason.
I could imagine that at some point in the future, foundries will switch to a year-based versioning similar to what happened with a lot of software. So you'll have a GF2027 process and so on. That's pure speculation on my part though, and inertia is definitely a thing.
In reality, size of various features in a CPU differ widely. Intel 10nm could have a transistor gate pitch of 50nm, while TSMC 7nm could have a pitch of 60nm. All the meaningful parts you care about, like size of the transistor components and interconnects, are _not_ small, and it every company designs their own tweaks on these building blocks for reliability/manufacturability/performance/power/etc.
SRAM bitcell, High-Density (HD)
A Intel 14nm: 0.064 µm²
B Intel 10nm: 0.0312 µm²
C TSMC 7nm: 0.027 µm²
https://semiaccurate.com/2018/06/29/intels-firing-of-ceo-bri...
1.https://betanews.com/2005/07/13/suit-intel-sabotaged-compile...
2.https://www.techspot.com/article/1722-misleading-core-i9-990...
Now AMD is (rightfully?) pulling ahead.
Moving ahead gets much harder the more you advance, so it may even be that Intel still has a 20 month lead from AMD, but since it is so much harder to move, the same lead becomes a small difference.
Its easy to point to the big player and say they lost their lead, but the fine details about who made decisions to land them there is the story we want told.
Although 7nm/10nm have mostly become marketing terms, is this something directly comparable between fabs/companies?
Does anyone have a comparison for Intel? Best I can find is this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count (and if that's accurate and up to date, it looks as though AMD will be well ahead).
Public gets hung up with all kinds of marketing terms (7nm, 7nm+, 10nm, 10nm+, 10nm++, etc). What does 7nm+ even mean!? It is purely a marketing term and large datacenter customers know this. They run their workloads on test samples and make a decision to go with Intel or AMD.
Furthermore, there is also the aspect of maintainability, servicing and infrastructure inertia that is priced into Intel's server chips. Apple-to-Apple chip comparison (sorry for the pun, not intended) from Intel & AMD would not be priced the same since Intel knows that there is a giant amount of switching inertia for a customer to switch to AMD Epyc. Furthermore, datacenter customers want predictability and proven performance. In this case, Intel again wins with its history and you betchya its modeled in the pricing.
So, this is all business as usual. HN loves beating on Intel but their numbers in quarterly reports depict a different story.
Let me repeat: No sane customer gives a shit about 7nm or 10nm. My comments are only applicable to datacenter customers. Desktop/Client chips are a whole another enchilada where marketing plays a bigger role (have you seen the ridiculous packaging from AMD & Intel? This is to please the RGB Gamer crowd).
The plus means a generation of optimization on how to use roughly the same lithography tech, which can give you a big difference when they're so hard to use.
CPUs won't necessarily evolve toward smaller feature sizes - it's just what we've seen so far.
[1] https://hexus.net/tech/news/cpu/119699-intel-10nm-density-27...
Possible example (not at all out of character for intel): why are so many people parroting that 10nm technical superiority junk without supplying sources?
Basically it seems like Intel kind of over-extended on their 10nm process by trying to introduce a bunch of new techniques, and they had trouble scaling this to volume production. But I think it's generally accepted that the Intel 10nm process and other manufacturers' 7nm processes were broadly equivalent, and it seems unfair to accuse people of being shills for thinking so!
Here is one source, again: https://www.semiwiki.com/forum/attachments/content/attachmen...
https://www.semiwiki.com/forum/content/7544-7nm-5nm-3nm-logi...
but they can fit more on their chips at their process they call 10nm than the others can fit on their chips that they call 7nm.
So it is correct to say that assigning a single size to a node is misleading. There are many dimensions you can measure.
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/269270-intels-first-10...
AMD used 128-bit and simulated 256-bit by doing 2 passes. This reduced peak power consumption and allowed them to keep clock consistently high. That matters because while your AVX is going slowly, your non-AVX is also going slowly. There was simply no way x86 could do vectors that wide on 14nm without throttling.
With the 7nm shift, AMD can use the reduced size to increase to native 256 at full speed (and they may do 512 in 2 parts). I expect Intel to do the same when they get replace their 10nm process with something that works. It'll probably be a couple more shrinks though, before 512 can be run at full-speed.
At 7.4 TFlops of double-precision, it is smack in the middle between the PCIe version of the V100 at 7.0 and the NVLink version at 7.8.
Memory bandwidth for the MI60 is a bit better at 1000GB/s, compared to the Tesla V100's 900GB/s.
However, AMD's problems are usually not the actual hardware, but the software around it. NVIDIA has done amazing work with CUDA and the surrounding frameworks, while AMD has not really. They really need to catch up on software that makes writing code for their GPUs more trivial.
For my purposes (large builds and rendering), I think RAM prices are holding back AMD here. To feed that many cores, you want really big RAM sticks. The CPUs have become a comparatively small cost compared to the RAM these days.
Admittedly these were AUD rather than USD. So maybe halve that for the USD cost.
When we complain about how expensive memory and compute, a slightly longer term view shows it's still pretty good value!
On that note I'm really interested to see if a dedicated I/O chiplet will help with the memory frequency scaling issues with see with the IMC on Zen/Zen+. I'm not sure what made the integrated controller on Zen so finicky compared to Intel's IMC, but this move will at the very least allow AMD to bin memory controllers if they want to or maybe work around some issues with their design.
This is pretty challenging at 32 cores! I know these chips ship with big l3 cache but l3 cache isn't so fast either.
I would guess this is due to other vendors starting to surpass Intel and wanting to highlight their process lead.
The other interesting thing is that they said the memory access would be more uniform kind of like NUMA independent given that the controller is no longer part of the individual chip but a common element. Which definitely makes good performance easier with such a beast of cheap but does it do so at the cost of the lowest possible latency as in when in Zen-1 the memory access was from a channel in the same CPU. I would hope that a massive single piece of IO chip would allow them to design the thing better but does anyone know or care to guess?
There was a longstanding rumor that the IO chip was going to have ~512mb of l4 cache. Considering it wasn't announced I'm thinking that turned out to not be true but from a pure performance perspective that is probably more useful than a couple more memory channels (though likely more complicated).
- Zen 1 (8 cores) with IO is 213 mm².
- the Zen 2 core only chiplets are estimated to be around 70 mm².
- if we assume IO scales as well as the rest (which it doesn't) Zen 1 would be ~106 mm² on 7nm.
- let's just say the difference between Zen 2 core only chiplets and the imaginary Zen 1 on 7nm is the size of the IO per Zeppelin die => ~36 mm²
- now double the area again because the IO die is on 14nm => 72 mm²
- now quadruple the size because we have 8 memory channels and 128 PCIe 4.0 lanes => 288 mm²
Going by my flawed layman estimation this would mean we still have a budget of ~100 mm² for additional functionality. Either PCIe 4.0 takes much more space than PCIe 3.0, they have some secret sauce in there, or maybe just a large L4 cache.
If they use EDRAM instead of SRAM like Intel did with some of their Broadwell and Skylake CPUs they could probably fit quite a bit cache in this area. Intel used 128 MB EDRAM fabbed on a 22nm node which required 84mm ² [2]
[0] https://twitter.com/IanCutress/status/1059924863014653958
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/9uscqu/epyc_and_epyc_2...
[2] https://www.anandtech.com/show/6993/intel-iris-pro-5200-grap...
This is TSMC vs Intel. TSMC basically make the 7nm chip for Apple and AMD.
It looks like this company HQ at Taiwan provided the bragging right for Apple and AMD…
IMO Intel is lagging on both fronts, AMD is catching Intel a bit, ARM is steamrolling year/year perf increases compared to x86, and Apple remains +25% ahead of every other ARM chip.
Dr. Lisa Su is so inspiring when she speaks - very clear, sure of her product and confident. Hopefully I get there one day!