81–90 of 191 posts
I wish individual consumers could go out and buy these processors. Amazon really has little incentive to sell them - they are not primarily a chip manufacturing business, and anyways, why give away their hard-fought competitive advantage? - but damn, it would be cool to stick one of these in a workstation and watch it fly.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, and for 25-30 years, everyone’s been crowing about how they were doomed to fail because of x86 as a CISC design. Intel killed off most RISC competitors as Moore’s Law held in the 90 and they could just add more transistors to turn x86 into a facade. But that increase in transistors and doing whatever possible to keep x86 performant meant they were doomed to lose the power/performance war that came with mobile p…
All modern x86 CPUs are essentially “RISC” CPUs that translate x86 instructions into uOPS so they already do what you want to do. I’m not seeing why the higher level x86 instruction set needs to be jettisoned or killed off...
If Intel makes it out of the current soup with its dominance intact it will make for an interesting case study. Think they are facing the perfect storm on multiple fronts. a. The 10nm process fiasco b. Missing the chiplet concept c. ISA fragmentation - AVX512 which was supposed to be the next big thing was server CPU side only till recently and downclocks the entire chip when used making it extremely hard to reason a…
Well, and for 25-30 years, everyone’s been crowing about how they were doomed to fail because of x86 as a CISC design. Intel killed off most RISC competitors as Moore’s Law held in the 90 and they could just add more transistors to turn x86 into a facade. But that increase in transistors and doing whatever possible to keep x86 performant meant they were doomed to lose the power/performance war that came with mobile p…
Now we see that Amazon makes enough money and has enough volume to invest in server processors.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If anyone wants to see why little endian is better try implementing a sigint. Big endian makes everything backwards in terms of iteration order.
You are presenting argument in favor of little endian, yet you're provide enough information that is only useful for someone who already knows the answer.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Winning a benchmark isn’t winning. Winning sales is winning. Last I heard most sales still go to intel. But exciting times if this flips, competition is good for all
Winning a benchmark by a wide margin is pretty close if you have your foot in the door, which of course AMD does not. Their success here is going to be nonlinear depending on how long they stay in the lead.
This is an interesting twist in the processor wars, here is the #1 cloud company that is turning its profits in providing cloud services in to processor R&D to build new CPUs. This is a much more important announcement than the press is giving it credit for. I have argued in the past the Intel "lost" the smartphone CPU war because Apple decided not to wait for them to come up with some high margin processor compromis…
> I have argued in the past the Intel "lost" the smartphone CPU war because Apple decided not to wait for them to come up with some high margin processor compromise and instead to re-invest profits into the development of bespoke processors that gave their products an edge over their rivals. Others like Samsung followed suit with own processors for Android. Kind of a weird way to phrase it given that iPhone 1 through…
This is such an understatement. From Wikipedia: The company was founded in November 1990 as Advanced RISC Machines Ltd and structured as a joint venture between Acorn Computers, Apple Computer (now Apple Inc.) and VLSI Technology.
Apple is a cofounder of ARM.
If Intel makes it out of the current soup with its dominance intact it will make for an interesting case study. Think they are facing the perfect storm on multiple fronts. a. The 10nm process fiasco b. Missing the chiplet concept c. ISA fragmentation - AVX512 which was supposed to be the next big thing was server CPU side only till recently and downclocks the entire chip when used making it extremely hard to reason a…
This comment seems kinda slanted. AVX-512 debuted on Xeon because datacenter operators asked for it. It does not “downclock a whole chip”, it gates the core where it is active and there’s not even that penalty on the current generation parts. “10nm” is marketing fluff which has little or nothing to do with actual semiconductor construction. “Chiplet” is also marketing-speak for “wow this memory topology is hard to pr…
It deputed on workstation accelerator cards.
> It does not “downclock a whole chip”, it gates the core where it is active and there’s not even that penalty on the current generation parts.
It very much could thermally throttle more than the one core.
> “10nm” is marketing fluff which has little or nothing to do with actual semiconductor construction.
"10nm", even as a proper noun, is a very important component of Intel's woes right now. They aren't getting the yields they were expecting, a major competitor surpassed the for the first time ever (TSMC) and that's how AMD is killing them right now.
> “Chiplet” is also marketing-speak for “wow this memory topology is hard to program around “. Not sure they should feel too bad about missing that boat.
No, it's marketing-speak for "near EUV process nodes have terrible yields compared to previous nodes, and need smaller dies combined on a multi chip module to get anything worthwhile for an acceptable cost". Current EPYC chips are a single NUMA node again, but still chiplets. They are absolutely kicking themselves for not bucking the trend and going chiplet, because then they would have been competitive with TSMC for yield/area. Single chips is putting all your eggs in one basket, but splitting the dies means you throw away way less chips. (Another way out is FPGAs and GPUs that practically can bin off way more of the chip).
> And the bets they made didn’t pan out: FPGAs aren’t popular because the people sophisticated enough to use them are also smart enough to tape out ASICs.
FPGAs are very interesting in a post Moore's law world. Their ability to dynamically reconfigure makes them interesting in cases where ASICs don't make sense. High level logic can be treated like code from a continuous delivery perspective (like Alibaba does with their memcache like FPGAs sitting on RDMA fabric). Data can be encoded in combinatorial logic and treated like any other infrastructure deployments (like Azure does with their routing CAMesque logic in their SDN FPGAs). ASICs don't give you anywhere near that flexibility, even in a world where they're a commodity. Don't confuse their tooling immaturity for a lack of usefulness.
> IoT is not a thing.
It's very much a thing; once again just an extremely immature ecosystem. Once high end CPUs are commidities that can been shopped around from each of the fabs, IoT external customer designs will almost certainly be a very important revenue stream for Intel. A modern fab is nothing to sneeze at, basically only countries with $20B to spend will have one, so we'll be seeing one or two per continent. It won't make sense for anyone else in the US to compete. As for how that affects IoT, tiny nodes will be amazing for little smart dust chips once the capital investment of these end nodes has been paid off.
If Intel makes it out of the current soup with its dominance intact it will make for an interesting case study. Think they are facing the perfect storm on multiple fronts. a. The 10nm process fiasco b. Missing the chiplet concept c. ISA fragmentation - AVX512 which was supposed to be the next big thing was server CPU side only till recently and downclocks the entire chip when used making it extremely hard to reason a…
This comment seems kinda slanted. AVX-512 debuted on Xeon because datacenter operators asked for it. It does not “downclock a whole chip”, it gates the core where it is active and there’s not even that penalty on the current generation parts. “10nm” is marketing fluff which has little or nothing to do with actual semiconductor construction. “Chiplet” is also marketing-speak for “wow this memory topology is hard to pr…