11–20 of 175 posts
> Apparently we now think 64 cores is ‘lower core count’. What a world we live in. 64 cores is a high-end gaming rig. Civilization VII won't run smoothly on less than 16.
> Apparently we now think 64 cores is ‘lower core count’. What a world we live in. 64 cores is a high-end gaming rig. Civilization VII won't run smoothly on less than 16.
Civ 6 really doesn't utilize cores as much as one would think. I mean it'll spread the load across a lot of threads, sure, but it never seems to actually... use them much? E.g. I just ran the Gathering Storm expansion AI benchmark (late game map completely full of civs and units - basically worst case for CPU requirements and best case for eating up the multicore performance) on a 7950X 16 core CPU and it rarely peak…
As a rule I wouldn't be surprised if 90% of the stuff Civ 6 is doing can't be parallelized at all, but then for that remaining 10% you get a 16x speedup with 16 cores. And they're underutilized on average but there are bursts where you get a measurable speedup from having 16 cores, and that speedup is strictly linear with the number of cores. 6 cores means that remaining 10% will be less than half as fast vs. having 16 cores. And this is consistent with observing 30% CPU usage I think.
The part with only 16 cores but 512MB L3 cache ... that must be for some specific workload.
Does anyone know if modern AMD chips allow mapping the L3 cache and using it as TCM instead of cache? I know older non-X86 processors supported this (and often booted into that mode so that the memory controllers could be brought up), but not sure if it's possible today. If so, that would sure make for some interesting embedded use cases for a large DRAM-less system...
> Apparently we now think 64 cores is ‘lower core count’. What a world we live in. 64 cores is a high-end gaming rig. Civilization VII won't run smoothly on less than 16.
I can't help but think that this sounds more like a failure to optimize at the software level rather than a reasonable hardware limitation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does anyone know if modern AMD chips allow mapping the L3 cache and using it as TCM instead of cache? I know older non-X86 processors supported this (and often booted into that mode so that the memory controllers could be brought up), but not sure if it's possible today. If so, that would sure make for some interesting embedded use cases for a large DRAM-less system...
The coreboot docs claim that modern AMD parts no longer support cache-as-RAM. https://doc.coreboot.org/soc/amd/family17h.html
Using it as TCM ram seems super useful.
Although you would need to fight/request it from the OS, so technically I see why they might ditch it.
ChipsAndCheese is one of the few new tech publications that really knows what they are talking about, especially with these deep dive benchmarks. With the loss of Anandtech, TechReport, HardCOP and other old technical sites, I'm glad to see a new publisher who can keep up with the older style stuff.
Here I am running a 12 year old Dell PowerEdge with dual Xeons.. I wonder when the first gen Epyc servers will be cheap fodder on eBay.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Civ 6 really doesn't utilize cores as much as one would think. I mean it'll spread the load across a lot of threads, sure, but it never seems to actually... use them much? E.g. I just ran the Gathering Storm expansion AI benchmark (late game map completely full of civs and units - basically worst case for CPU requirements and best case for eating up the multicore performance) on a 7950X 16 core CPU and it rarely peak…
> 16 core CPU and it rarely peaked over 30% utilization, often averaging ~25%. 30% utilization means a 6 core part (barring frequency/cache differences) should be able to eat that at 80% load. As a rule I wouldn't be surprised if 90% of the stuff Civ 6 is doing can't be parallelized at all, but then for that remaining 10% you get a 16x speedup with 16 cores. And they're underutilized on average but there are bursts w…
> Apparently we now think 64 cores is ‘lower core count’. What a world we live in. 64 cores is a high-end gaming rig. Civilization VII won't run smoothly on less than 16.