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Linux Kernel Patch Hints At At 32-Core Support For AMD Zen Chips
New submitter Iamthecheese points to an article which says that a patch published on the Linux Kernel Mailing List indicates that AMD's forthcoming Zen processors will have as many as 32 cores per socket, but notes that while the article's headline says "Confirms," "the article text doesn't bear that out." Still, he writes,
There are hints of such from last year. A leaked patch for the 14 nanometer AMD Zeppelin (Family 17h, Model 00h) reveals support for up to 32 cores. Another blog says pretty much the same thing. We recently discussed an announced 4+8 core AMD chip, but nothing like this.
Linux already supports 32 cores very well, (Or 1024...) Still, driver support is needed for the details of adressing (up to) 32 cores on that particular architecture. Hence the patch. AMD may or may not turn out a 32-core chip in the near future - but at least their architecture supports that number of cores. Which is a bit interesting. If it turns out too hard to make, expect chips with 12-20 cores and gradually more as production quality ramps up.
The Thunderbird was nice, but it was more of a price/performance winner than overall performance. A 1GHz Thunderbird ran stable at 1.3GHz and was similar performance to a 2GHz Pentium 4 at a fraction of the cost (particularly as the P4 required RAMBUS DRAM, so you could stick twice as much DDR in Athlon for the same money). It wasn't until the Opteron that AMD really started winning on performance. The integrated DRAM controller was a big win and being first to 64 bits (which, on x86, means more GPRs, sane floating point ISA, and PC-relative addressing) gave them a huge advantage. Unfortunately, they haven't really been competitive since the Core 2, except in market segments where Intel intentionally cripples their offerings (e.g. no more than 2 SATA ports on the Atom Mini-ITX boards to avoid competition with the i3 boards, making AMD the only viable option).
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Intel's upcoming chips top out at 44 threads:
SKU Name Cores/Threads Base Clock Boost Clock L3 Cache (LLC) TDP
Intel Xeon E5-2699 V4 22/44 2.2 GHz ~3.6 GHz 55 MB 145 W
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