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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.
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Zen is (according to AMD, so I guess it is optimistic) is supposed to bring 40% improvement in instructions per clock. That would put it around Sandy Bridge level. They would have to pull off 100% improvement to be competitive at high levels once again.
Quite wrong about AMD CPUs getting progressively worse.
Intel has outpaced AMD their process technology is more sdvanced allowing them to do magical things like significantly increase performance AND reduce power at the same time...
This also has something to do with Intel's past blocking of AMD products when the K7 Thunderbird was kicking ass. Year later cash strapped AMD agreed to settle the matter to the tune of $2 billion. I'm sure if they had a bit more time and money they could have gotten more.
Now, unsurprisingly Intel's advantage is only this much and not more, most likely because Intel needs AMD to exist. It's a great way to compare and handy not to be declared a monopoly.
So AMD has been improving, albeit at a slower pace than Intel. They can still compete but need to change the approach to fight where they can shine and profit rather than everywhere Intel goes.
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
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.
CMOS technology, is static meaning that there is no current flow through a gate when it is on or off. Current only flows while the transistor is transitioning states. P = I x V and as I (current) increases, so does power. All 'digital' circuits are actually analog and you can show that I is proportional to frequency squared. Instead of having a power (^) increase in energy use, you have a linear relation.
AMD best hope this CPU has some actual guts to it for performance / power efficiency.
Perhaps cores-schmores is one way to approach this? Lots of small cores with relatively slow clocks, as higher clocks tend to worsen power efficiency. I'm not discounting Intel's success with single-core performance per se, but I sometimes feel it's aimed at speeding up legacy applications, while those with modern OSes and code are happy with the cheaper multicore offerings from AMD.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
AMD long ago gave up competing on raw CPU performance with Intel. They compete on price and integration. They have better on-board GPUs than Intel, and they cost less. The XBOne and PS4 both use AMD CPUs and GPUs.
The question is if these markets are enough.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
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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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You are more optimistic than AMD's marketing department? That's some impressive optimism.
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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