Hacker News Reader

Comment by DiabloD3 | Hacker News Reader

What I want: 64 or more lanes of PCI-E 3.0, 4 or more channels of DDR3-1866 or DDR4-2133 or faster... combined into a chip with few but very fast cores.

My closest option? E5v3-1620 or 1630. It'd be nice if someone started producing non-x86 options for that.

View on HN

The interesting thing about ARMv8 is that if there's a niche of users with your problem, someone can go ahead and make a SoC. They don't have to ask permission from anyone, just pay the license fees. If you wanted an x86-based SoC, there's no way Intel would make it.

Discussions about ARM vs x86 tend to miss this point. They tend to get stuck on performance or software or process size, missing that the revolutionary thing is the licensing.

[To head off some replies: 64 bit ARMv8 has fast single-thread performance, unlike 32 bit ARMv7]

PowerPC is in the same situation, with 'OpenPOWER' (I think the Open must stand for "we're Open for business"?).

Of course, open instruction sets like RISC-V http://riscv.org/ require no license fee. At lowRISC we're aiming to build a complete open source SoC using RISC-V http://www.lowrisc.org/. I'll note that getting a license for an existing architecture and core implementation isn't as straight-forward as you say. You do need to negotiate and enter an agreement with ARM/MIPS/... (and ARM/Imagination/... need to decide it's worth their while going through that process).

If you wanted an x86-based SoC, there's no way Intel would make it.

Intel has made several x86 SoCs, and there's also a few others:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_x86_manufacturers

This one in particular is interesting since it contains most of a standard PC:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vortex86

However the current market for x86 SoCs is in industrial/embedded where performance is not a main concern, so these are not particularly fast.

I think they meant 'if you have a custom requirement Intel won't make it, you can only choose between predefined options' as opposed to ARM or others where people will build custom configurations of cores and modules for you.

There are a handful of x86 licensees out there.

It's not remotely the same as AMDs eco system of course, as they are competing in someone else's market. But perhaps it's comparable to making software for Apple or Microsoft's platforms.

(There is an incomplete list here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_x86_manufacturers )

Those are nice chips, yeah. Have you tried out any of the new DDR4 CPUs? I'm very curious as to how the combination of higher memory bandwidth and higher memory latency affects real-world applications. My first guess is that it turns out the same as DDR3-1866. Anyone benched it?

I have DDR3-2133 in my workstation now. The new DDR4-2133 won't be any faster.

But will it be slower for real-world applications? I've seen numbers indicating a ~ 10% worse memory latency. Don't know how that will be felt.

DDR4 in of itself will not perform slower in memory latency in any usefully measurable way. Memory latency in the real world is almost entirely governed by the pre-fetch engine in the CPU (which exists to hide the fact how slow system RAM is to begin with).

I would like to see a test between the Haswell E5v3s that support both DDR3 and DDR4 and see what the real world difference is on that specific implementation (which could not be generalized to other implementations of memory controllers by other vendors).

My girlfriend (your typical first time builder: grandmother, artist, refusing my help) selected the E5v3-1650 which really screams at 8 GHz and can be overclocked. The build came in under $2K. She did it all herself and it booted the first time.

> 8 GHz

Is that the overclocked speed? I could only find a maximum of 3.5 GHz in the specs...

He probably meant 3.8GHz, the standard turbo speed of that cpu (speed under high load if cpu is not overheating).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com