Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AMD’s Rome is indeed a monster

semiaccurate.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 104 posts

Re: AMD’s Rome is indeed a monster

#11

Post by dman »

tapoxi wrote: post #2

Every time I see SemiAccurate I remember their love for AMD and their constant, unending hate for Nvidia: https://semiaccurate.com/2009/10/01/nvidia-fakes-fermi-board... I don't have any dog in this fight, SA is just a terrible news source.

It might feel one sided, but I think SemiAccurate is one of the few places remaining doing old fashioned journalism (ie pursuing sources and gathering information from the real world). Most other tech news websites have devolved into wrapping up marketing materials from tech companies into "reviews".

Re: AMD’s Rome is indeed a monster

#12

Post by pellucide »

tapoxi wrote: post #2

Every time I see SemiAccurate I remember their love for AMD and their constant, unending hate for Nvidia: https://semiaccurate.com/2009/10/01/nvidia-fakes-fermi-board... I don't have any dog in this fight, SA is just a terrible news source.

It is semi-accurate after all.

Re: AMD’s Rome is indeed a monster

#13

Post by overcast »

wmf wrote: post #4
tapoxi wrote: post #2

Every time I see SemiAccurate I remember their love for AMD and their constant, unending hate for Nvidia: https://semiaccurate.com/2009/10/01/nvidia-fakes-fermi-board... I don't have any dog in this fight, SA is just a terrible news source.

They don't like Intel or Nvidia, but their facts tend to be mostly accurate. I wouldn't listen to any of their financial or market-share predictions since the market has remarkable inertia that disconnects it from technical factors.

Accurate facts, the best kind of facts.

Re: AMD’s Rome is indeed a monster

#15

Post by sizeofchar »

sixothree wrote: post #10
tapoxi wrote: post #2

Every time I see SemiAccurate I remember their love for AMD and their constant, unending hate for Nvidia: https://semiaccurate.com/2009/10/01/nvidia-fakes-fermi-board... I don't have any dog in this fight, SA is just a terrible news source.

The article has a lot of boasting about their exclusive scoop. That and their annoyingly watermarked images.

They started using watermarks this way when their news were plagiarized some 5 years ago by even big sites such as WCCFTech, Tom’s and others. It is ugly but understandable, they are independent, don’t live on ads, aren’t invited for most events and barely receive pre-release hardware for reviews.

Re: AMD’s Rome is indeed a monster

#16

Post by saltcured »

ericd wrote: post #9
extrapickles wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For higher power parts, heat dissipation is the primary reason. Most of the high end CPUs are purely heat limited in terms of performance. A TDP of 90W is about the limit for CPUs using cheap cooling techniques, and adding ram would lower that by 10-30W.

If you interleaved the memory with the processing, wouldn’t it decrease the heat density, though, which afaik is the limiting factor? You can get rid of quite a lot more heat than that if it’s not in too small an area to conduct away quickly.

The semiconductor processing for high-end DRAM is not the same as for high-end CPU logic or cache SRAM, so it is not cost-effective to put both on the same chip. This was a recurring obstable to past processing-in-memory R&D projects.

To mix the two for thermal reasons would lead to some crazy multi-chip modules as in the "chiplet" approach reported recently. However, I suspect you would need far too many chiplets and too many bonds to really give you this thermal benefit rather than just having individual chiplets which are still hot spots with problematic cooling.

Re: AMD’s Rome is indeed a monster

#17

Post by tmd83 »

ericd wrote: post #9
extrapickles wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For higher power parts, heat dissipation is the primary reason. Most of the high end CPUs are purely heat limited in terms of performance. A TDP of 90W is about the limit for CPUs using cheap cooling techniques, and adding ram would lower that by 10-30W.

If you interleaved the memory with the processing, wouldn’t it decrease the heat density, though, which afaik is the limiting factor? You can get rid of quite a lot more heat than that if it’s not in too small an area to conduct away quickly.

I don't think that's feasible either. If you put memory in between chip element that means you now have to route around that adding to wastage. It also means the distance between the elements would increase slowing things down. At the speed that chips are running the physical distance matters (from what I recall).

Re: AMD’s Rome is indeed a monster

#18

Post by ChuckMcM »

Looking forward to these chips but always have concerns for AMDs ability to execute consistently. Opteron, the original 'Sledgehammer' series was way ahead of Intel because Intel just couldn't bring themselves to put 64 bit features into their Pentium line, and AMD squirreled away that advantage by not following up, and having other issues with later spins of the Opterons.

That said, this really does look like a pretty awesome chip for data centers. I would love a dual socket mother board that had 512G of RAM 1TB of Optane memory as additional "RAM", then 16TB of NVME SSD storage, and 32 SAS/SATA channels for an effective 360TB of rotating disk (dual parity RAID 6, 30 active drives, 2 parity drives). And then make a cluster of 48 of those monsters.

Ah the places we would go and the things we would do with such a system.

Re: AMD’s Rome is indeed a monster

#19

Post by wmf »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #18

Looking forward to these chips but always have concerns for AMDs ability to execute consistently. Opteron, the original 'Sledgehammer' series was way ahead of Intel because Intel just couldn't bring themselves to put 64 bit features into their Pentium line, and AMD squirreled away that advantage by not following up, and having other issues with later spins of the Opterons. That said, this really does look like a pret…

At this point Intel isn't executing consistently either, so any customer who treats their processor vendor as "strategic" is going to pay the price.

Re: AMD’s Rome is indeed a monster

#20

Post by twtw »

nv-vn wrote: post #6
tapoxi wrote: post #2

Every time I see SemiAccurate I remember their love for AMD and their constant, unending hate for Nvidia: https://semiaccurate.com/2009/10/01/nvidia-fakes-fermi-board... I don't have any dog in this fight, SA is just a terrible news source.

But they were right in that case... I know it's a biased source but I've seen a lot of accurate info there in the past

> But they were right in that case...

How do you know?

Post reply on HN