101–110 of 115 posts
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No, the 56C/112T Intel Xeon Platinum 9282 is a BGA part, it's not socketed. You can buy this niche product only as part of a server with liquid cooling. And the successors to Cascade Lake seem to switch to the LGA4189 socket to support 8 memory channels (Cooper Lake and Ice Lake), so I wouldn't expect any upgrades on LGA3647.
You are right about the socket - ark.intel.com doesn't mention the socket for the two top-end parts. All others use the previous one. The good news is that the next generation Mac Pro will have a ton of extra memory bandwidth.
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There's probably bit of hardware lot it with Intel chips. Since they control the hardware, Apple probably has invested quite a bit into hardware specific optimizations that won't readily port to AMD chipsets. Also, AMD is only recently been a performance front runner - they might not hold on to that for long. In the short term it doesn't make sense to jump ship. For for general computation/ecosystems or for generatio…
Intel hasn't manufacturered bespoke chips for some years now, which is why all, but one, mainstream consoles have been AMD.
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At this point, I think it's a lot more likely for Apple to switch to using their own chips, at least at the low end.
Given the JavaScript performance of the shipping units intended for mobile use, which is eclipsing the best of Intel's offerings, it might be possible that the A14 or A15 iteration actually surpasses Intel's chips at x86-64 code as well when run through a Rosetta-like compatibility layer. What if the high-end chip was ARM? It's not just about raw speed, it's about how much performance you can squeeze out of a particu…
Extremely unlikely, if only because x86-64's memory model is much stronger than ARM's. Emulating that on ARM would be a performance disaster.
Apple could have the internals of A14 or A15 have x86's memory model, but that's non-trivial changes and may have too much impact on their ARM performance to justify it. Seems far more likely we'd just see a Macbook that's just straight ARM with x86 code just not supported at all.
> What if the high-end chip was ARM? It's not just about raw speed, it's about how much performance you can squeeze out of a particular thermal envelope, or compute per watt. If ARM offers 2x the performance per watt, doesn't matter what Intel's chips do with hypothetically unlimited power.
For workstations it's almost entirely about raw speed. The power cost is a rounding error compared to the salary of the person using it that's now spending more time waiting on things and less time getting work done.
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I think they're pointing out that many of the bottlenecks that make computers feel slow can't be fixed by throwing more cores at them—multithreading can be tricky
You could have 128 cores, 4TB of memory, multiple top-end NVMe drives and Windows will still lock up when accessing an offline network share. Good job Microsoft.
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Since they control the hardware, Apple probably has invested quite a bit into hardware specific optimizations that won't readily port to AMD chipsets. It's in Apple's history to be able to move on from hardware. It's also in their history to make the wrong choices, necessitating the move.
money is they’ll move in next 5 years to at least partial move to their own ARM chips, they already have to a degree.
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> "only" 32 cores But it might be 4-way SMP, so 128 threads...
I've seen multiple 4-way SMP rumors in comments in the last few weeks. Was there something hinted at, or a "leak" implying this might happen? I did a brief search but didn't find anything.
What's stopping them from creating 1000 core cpus?
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Intel hasn't manufacturered bespoke chips for some years now, which is why all, but one, mainstream consoles have been AMD.
Funnily enough the only "bespoke" Intel chip in recent times was Intel's own i7-8705G & i7-8809G used in the Hades Canyon NUC that replaced Intel's HD graphics with an AMD Vega M.