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Comment by blip54321 | Hacker News Reader

Cores are basically free.

Interconnect is expensive.

Seriously. A Pentium IV was 40M transistors. A Ryzen V 2000 has around 5 billion transistors. It could fit 100 Pentium IV cores if desired.

That's not desired -- those transistors are better spent bumping up IPC a little bit -- but we can have a perfectly adequate processor at 1% of a modern CPU.

Pentium IV single-core performance is almost identical to a modern entry-level netbook processor:

https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Pentium-4-300GHz...

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>Pentium IV single-core performance is almost identical to a modern entry-level netbook processor:

>https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Pentium-4-300GHz...

No it isn't.

1. userbenchmark is a joke in the hardware community. just search for "userbenchmark bias". It's also banned from both /r/intel and /r/amd.

2. even they themselves admit that the "modern entry-level netbook processor" is 59% faster in single-threaded performance. The only making up for it is "Memory Latency", which I doubt can make up for a 59% gap in performance.

> Pentium IV single-core performance is almost identical to a modern entry-level netbook processor: https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Pentium-4-300GHz...

Almost identical? The wimpy netbook processor is 59% faster on a single core. Ignore that site's overall speed numbers, they make no sense.

But a fair comparison has to be to a desktop chip. Let's look at an i3-12300. It rates +597% on single core performance; seven times faster.

You'd be better off comparing to a pentium M. If you put 100 netburst cores on a single die, it would melt

[edit] or Maybe a Core-2 as that was 64-bit. E7500 with 3MB of cache was dual-core with 228M transistors, which puts you at 40 cores with 60MB of cache for 5B transistors.

I’d love to have a computer with a hundred little pentium cores to play around with — makes me wonder why nobody has made one yet (AFAICT).

Or one that doesn’t cost big dollars since the arm server chips seem to be going in this direction.

I mean, 256 x86 cores seems perfectly reasonable, right?

You could get a pair of used epyc 7601 and a motherboard for like $1200. Unlike a hundred little pentium cores, these 64 cores can run real workloads ~4x as fast as a modern desktop in the same price range.

Alternatively an old 4 node server could get you there even cheaper if you don’t care that they are separate computers in one chassis. I got a used C6100 with 24 cores across 8 CPU sockets for $600 6 years ago. You could probably get >100 cores for the same price today.

counting hyperthreading, that's 128 vcpus, yeah?

Huh I didn’t even think of that.

If threads count, the Xeon Phi 7210 64 core 256 thread would be even better at $125. Still x86

For the most part, because you'd be IO-bound, and you'd be limited by single-threaded speed.

A better architecture is to have the same, but as a co-processor for highly multithreaded tasks. That's basically a GPU. You get a few thousand cores on an NVidia 3060, in an architecture designed for this.

To the other comments in the thread:

- I'm mostly giving big-O / ballpark numbers.

- In terms of power, Pentium IV was 180 nm - 65 nm. A 7 nm process can be much more power-efficient.

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