[HN Gopher] Intel enters a new era of chiplets ___________________________________________________________________ Intel enters a new era of chiplets Author : giuliomagnifico Score : 75 points Date : 2022-08-27 15:06 UTC (7 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.servethehome.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.servethehome.com) | pfoof wrote: | It has kind of FPGA vibes iiuc | nsteel wrote: | As of this comment, there are 53 occurrences of "apple" and 4 of | "chiplet" in the comments here (three from the same comment). | | And to comment on topic, this mix of processes, each optimised to | the task at hand and all on the same package sounds perfect for | Intel. But I wonder how accessible it is for regular TSMC | customers. We've had chiplet presentations, I don't recall | anything like this being offered, despite requiring extremely | high bandwidth for our application. | to11mtm wrote: | > But I wonder how accessible it is for regular TSMC customers. | | TSMC is part of the UCIe (Universal Chiplet Interconnect) | consortium, so I'd assume they have some capability. But the | other members are ARM, Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, and Samsung... so | I'm not sure if it's a matter of you have to be 'working in | that club' or if TSMC can provide help on custom solutions. | yaantc wrote: | AMD fabs at TSMC (and GloFo for the I/O die before, but this | has moved to TSMC too recently) and has been using chiplets. | TSMC does have 2.5 and 3D packaging for this. But it's still up | to the fabless client of TSMC to design the chip. In other | words, TSMC provides the enabling tools, but it's up to their | client to use them. For now it's for the big players. | nsteel wrote: | Indeed. And they've got designs using at least two different | processes (one for compute, another for IO) but the article | has examples using 4 or 5! I just can't see anyone else going | as far as that. | jeffreygoesto wrote: | What will sit on top of UCIe software wise? Any standards coming | up there? | carlycue wrote: | Apple Silicon will have the title of world's best designed | silicon for the foreseeable future. The only way for AMD and | Intel to be competitive is if they can match the | performance/watt, thin-ness, fan-less and battery life of the M2 | MacBook Air. Forget having all of these things at once. AMD and | Intel chips can't even function in fan-less enclosures! | Am4TIfIsER0ppos wrote: | Stick it in a desktop chassis, mount a heat sink, crank the | power to 100W, then it might be useful. | SteveNuts wrote: | Apple has the luxury of being able to design the chips and the | chassis together to dissipate heat. | | Intel and AMD chips go to OEMs | zaroth wrote: | And the operating system too, so they can fully leverage all | the special features on the chip to improve UX. | | Once you have critical mass being able to have enough | experienced engineers up and down the whole stack, and you've | figured out an organizational structure that allows them to | work together efficiently, I don't see how you can beat the | vertical integration in a world where the fabs Apple can use | are actually better than Intel's own fab. | zaroth wrote: | Correct me if I'm wrong, but a decade ago Intel would | probably have said their fab/process node was their moat? | | I know nothing about chip design, but like most things, I | feel like one exceptionally brilliant tech lead surrounded | by a group of say ~100 merely very smart collaborators can | make a world class ARM based processor-design. A mere | $100mm annually in hiring and overhead? | | The rest of Apple's advantage comes from being able to | actually hire the best, and being their own customer at | scale, which means being able to buy first place in line at | the fab with billions of dollars of cash. | | This is perhaps less true now that the chip has so many | specialized areas on the die? Like, does the neural engine | get allocated a certain mm^2 and certain number of bus | lanes, and then a fully separate team of 100 designs it? I | suspect the neural engine part of the chip is actually | super simple to design, it's the tight coupling with the OS | and getting apps to properly leverage it which is tricky. | fezfight wrote: | I dont care about thinness, or fan-less-ness or battery life, | assuming it's adequate. | | I care about openness and performance (watts are irrelevant if | reasonable like they are now). | | Your list, to me, sounds like marketing. Move the goal posts to | these arbitrary points, declare victory. | zaroth wrote: | That's not fair. Some people care about different things than | you do. I think op's description is more aligned with the | broader market, but that's just, like, my opinion. | yakkityyak wrote: | Those are the goal posts the majority of consumers value. | fezfight wrote: | Consumers believe what we tell them to believe. | yakkityyak wrote: | No, not really. | Tagbert wrote: | You think that openness and performance aren't marketing | points? You've just chosen your two favorites. | fezfight wrote: | Yes. Just like OP. But with more freedom. | pram wrote: | Surely you mean RISC-V then. There's nothing free (like | freedom) about x86 or ARM. | fezfight wrote: | That's the dream! And stop calling my Shirley! | ChuckNorris89 wrote: | Can we please have ONE. SINGLE. SILICON DISCUSSION ON HN. stay | on the topic at hand without fanboys spamming _" hurr durr, my | M2 is da best, Intel suxxx, X86 is dead!!!111one"_, while not | bringing anything useful or relevant to the discussion? | | Seeing your comment at the top makes me not want to ever open | any silicon topic here again as I'm sure it will be full of | these kind of low effort comments vomiting marketing garble on | how AS is the best and everything else is doomed to failure, | while not bringing any useful info or arguments on-topic. | dheera wrote: | Exactly. I hate Apple with a passion. | | EDIT: F this downvoting, people seem to not get the obvious | fruit pun. | refulgentis wrote: | Cosign, and thank you: any CPU discussion past "Apple ARM | great" has been impossible to have since launch. | | List of places I tried taking conversation over that time, | but it was ignored or read as complaints about Apple. (see | Disclaimers in footer if you read these and think 'Wow, he | just wanted to talk about why Apple was bad') | | - M1 was the first processor on a particular node; so there | was a short term opportunity to do an apples to apples | comparison by taking down M1 numbers and waiting for upcoming | launches | | - it wasn't as trivial as "manufacturing on the improved | node" for AMD, but it was for Qualcomm | | - performance of ARM vs. X86 could be teased out by tracking | tuple of node x manufactor of chips and being patient; | projections and tracking of Qualcomm & AMD chips performance | | - the initial M1 was beaten by Tiger Lake in desktop & | sustained performance cases, which was two(!) nodes behind | | - performance and noise issues from Apple optimizing for | absolute fan silence always, leading to them only kicking on | at extremely high speeds far into the performance workload, | that had already been throttled | | == DISCLAIMERS == | | 1. I am a happy M2 MBP owner and think its the best chip. | | 2. My more nuanced view, summarized is that it is almost | restrained in that the hardware got bigger, somehow, and in | software there are growing pains as drivers adopt from iPhone | use case to mostly-plugged-in use case. To wit, throttling | seems optimized for ad copy around fan noise at low workloads | than the user. | | 3. If you feel these discussions were focused on denigrating | Apple, please recommend curious thoughts to have about chips | that aren't denigrating Apple | CoastalCoder wrote: | One benefit of threaded conversations is that you can ignore | one thread and still participate in the rest of the | discussion. | saiya-jin wrote: | This is US site. Apple is US company. The biggest company in | the world, source of so much pride. So tons and tons and tons | of fanboyism here is inevitable. I'd say most of it is damn | well earned. | | That said, fanboyism makes people blind and uncritical, and | (at least to me) its apparent company like Apple needs some | good old criticism, rather than blind worship. Otherwise they | will fall (if not fallen) into "we know whats best for you | and you have no say in it" like with cough cough "child porn" | filters or battery-gate. | | I truly honestly don't trust their "we are more secure" | marketing pitch, especially as non-US person. | | At the end, its just another corporation driven by huge army | of managers with main focus on salaries and bonuses. The idea | that they are somehow morally better than everybody else when | they keep hiring from companies like Facebook is pretty | dangerous and goes back to beginning of my post. | freeflight wrote: | _> I 'd say most of it is damn well earned._ | | Respect is earned, while fanboyism is rarely a good thing | as by definition it's something rather biased. | echelon wrote: | I think a suitable counter argument is that Apple has grown | too large and needs to be split into multiple smaller | companies to better aid competition. | | Between what they're doing to silicon, the outrageous App | Store behavior, and how they flaunt that they're a quazi- | government entity, I think this could find broad support in | Congress and the DOJ. | | Nobody can compete with Apple, and that's a bad thing for | everyone. | umanwizard wrote: | No comment on the other stuff, but the "silicon" part of | this argument boils down to "anyone who makes something way | better than the competition must be shut down because | that's unfair". | | We'd still be in the Stone Age if everybody had that | mentality | heavyset_go wrote: | Apple successfully monopolized the 5nm node by buying out | all of TSMC's manufacturing capability at that node size. | Characterizing it as "anyone who makes something way | better than the competition" is a strawman portrayal of | the underlying issue at hand. | umanwizard wrote: | Apple contributes billions of dollars to TSMC's R&D. The | node would not exist yet without Apple. | jeromegv wrote: | So Apple brought competitiveness to an industry that was | badly needing it and stalling in the most recent years.. | and your "solution" is that we should prevent them from | doing so? | smoldesu wrote: | It's a strawman. Apple has the capacity to do immense | good, but only because _they 're the single largest | company in the world!_ We should scrutinize concentration | of power heavily, and so far Apple has done nothing to | suggest their benevolence to the rest of the market. | They're blowing off Dutch regulators like it's a middle | school homework assignment, and refusing to loose their | asinine monopoly over software distribution on iPhone. | They're behaving childishly, and everyone knows they're | not a child. They're a company with hundreds of billions | of dollars, and they're demonstrating organizational | failure to address the demand of the market. On top of | that, they're largest revenue sources are rent-collection | and unibody aluminum computers made by political | prisoners in Chinese concentration camps. | | They need a slap, hard. | danaris wrote: | What, exactly, are they "doing to silicon"? | | They made a chip that's vastly better than anything out | there at a given power consumption level. They are not | attempting to use this advantage to corner the silicon | market; indeed, they are neither licensing the design, nor | selling the chips outside their own end-user hardware. | | How does any of that say "antitrust" to you? | echelon wrote: | Using their enormous lead on cellphones and their | incredible negotiation power and playing that into mobile | business computing and supply chain / process monopoly. | franga2000 wrote: | The same goes for Google. They have higher market share in | many categories and cover many more of them. Near-monopoly | on search, ads, online video, email, and at least half of | the smartphone OS market... | echelon wrote: | Each of the trillion dollar tech companies could be split | in half and still be trillion dollar tech companies. | | It would be a healthier ecosystem for startups and | competitors and make for faster total sector growth. | spaceman_2020 wrote: | The App store fees are pretty atrocious but I fail to see | how Apple Silicon is anything but a net positive for the | industry. | Flankk wrote: | Why are you so triggered that M2 is the best chip on the | market? I'm pretty sure that is relevant in a discussion | about the CPU market. AMD did a similar thing to Intel with | the Ryzen launch. Intel is currently stagnating. They need a | miracle at this point. | ChuckNorris89 wrote: | _> M2 is the best chip on the market_ | | There is no such thing as a "best chip on the market". Best | chip for what? You're confusing the word SoC/CPU with | "chip" which is a very generic word. | | The best "chip" is the one that best suits your individual | application or business needs, but there is no such thing | as a best chip on the market. That's why Apple is only a | tiny fraction of the computing market share and so many | other chip vendors are still in business, because every | application requires different chips. | | M2 doesn't solve every needs neither as a CPU (since you | can't buy it outside the Apple ecosystem), neither a a | generic "chip". Why can't you accept that? | derNeingeist wrote: | Not sure about others but I personally am not a big fan of | generalising _that_ much: I 'd prefer it if people would | ideally say that it was for example the "most power | efficient general purpose CPU/SoC" or at least something in | that regard, not just "the best". | | For example, have a look at https://openbenchmarking.org/vs | /Processor/AMD%20Ryzen%20Thre... (user benchmarks of M1 and | Threadripper). Compiling Linux on the 2990WX appears to be | about 4 times faster than on the M2. (There are lots of | other examples of one of the two CPUs being faster than the | other but compiling Linux is the most time-expensive task I | regularly do on my 2990WX. The energy usage in this task on | the 2990WX is almost certainly a lot higher of course; this | will be true for most tasks. However, the 2990WX is also 4 | years older of course, manufactured in a different node, | not very optimized for power saving and not operated in a | very power saving mode.) | jrockway wrote: | Why are you so excited? Did you design the M2? Do you | manufacture the M2? Did you fund the M2? If so, feel free | to be proud of it. You made a technological advance happen. | But if you just walked into a store and bought one, I | dunno, I think you're arriving pretty late in the evolution | to take a personal interest in its success. | vachina wrote: | Dont feed the troll. Dude's comment history is filled with | inconsistencies and an Apple shill. | cwizou wrote: | While I could agree with the general sentiment, I think it's | hard to understate how much of a role Apple played in the | background of all of this. | | But in any case, there's plenty of things to be said about | this article. About one year ago (random link with relevant | quotes : https://www.pcgamer.com/intels-3d-chip-tech-is- | perfect-so-it... ), Intel was mocking AMD for using a chiplet | approach, before announcing today that it was - clickbaity | title aside - going to change _everything_. | | The sad truth is, both Intel and AMD are in the exact | situation. AMD went chiplet in order to make their | performance cores at TSMC, and their less critical cores | ("IO") at GloFo. | | And Intel will be doing the same thing tomorrow (again, | random link on the topic: | https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-ceo-visits-tsmc- | agai... ) by producing their performance cores at TSMC and | their less critical ones on their own processes. | | In both cases, this is just a question of using a very | limited resource (TSMC's best in class process) the more | effectively that you can (by throwing extra engineering at | making a chiplet design that works). | | And it's supremely relevant to the discussion to talk about | how Apple, by throwing capital at a company (TSMC) that was, | for the couple of decades I used to cover this, at best 2 | years behind the best in class, today where they are (far far | in front). | | We could definitely have a long discussion about the hubris | that led 2015 Intel where they are today (completely stuck | with a 7 year old "+ paint coatings" aging 14nm "performance" | process), or how Gelsinger is trying to make the best out of | the situation (I personally think he's immensely qualified | and Intel's best hope, though that may not be enough to bring | Intel back to where it was), but at the end of the day, Apple | threw a wrench in what seemed like an unshakable performance | lead from Intel by spewing a bit of money left and right | (they didn't only bet on TSMC early on, they threw money at | GF for example, and it wasn't that massive early on from my | understanding), and the silicon world hasn't been the same | since. | ChuckNorris89 wrote: | _> a role Apple played in the background of all of this_ | | All of what? This topic is about Intel chilpets, which many | of those will end up in datacenters where most Intel chips | go, and that's not where Apple sells chips for. | | Not every chip made and sold in the world revolves around | laptops, tablets, smartphones or the apple ecosystem. | | So can we please talk about Intel's chiplets impact on the | industry and less about Apple silicone which has nothing to | do with this? | cwizou wrote: | Maybe I wasn't clear or went too fast on some things, I'm | not a native speaker. | | This is all about semi manufacturing, and the position | that TSMC now has in the fab space, thanks to Apple (yes, | really, that's what I went on about in the previous | comment). No part of my comment referred to arm, | architectures, anything of the sort, just that Apple's | money, applied broadly at first in the semi manufacturing | space, then in a very very targeted way, took TSMC from | tier 2 manufaturer to the best in class. | | If you look back a few years, only x86 chips were having | volume at the bleeding edge of manufacturing process. | Gpus, Smartphone, everything else was one node back at | the very least. Apple threw money and orders with a | massive volume (iPhone + iPad is pretty close in units to | the x86 cpu market, above 300M roughly off the top of my | heard) at TSMC and that early + continous investment | helped them fast forward their processes while Intel is | still stalled in 2015. | | Apple is using TSMC today (the best bits), AMD is using | TSMC today (the second best bits) for the performance | part of their chiplets and so will Intel tomorrow for the | exact same reason. This is the relevant bit that I was | pointing at. | to11mtm wrote: | That's a fair assessment although perhaps not giving AMD | enough credit. | | IMO GloFo's spin-off worked out very poorly for AMD in the | short term, but long term it let them partially-leapfrog | Intel much as they had done 20 years prior with the K6/K7. | | There's two main things that IMO give the M1/M2 their | 'magic'; | | - Dram on die (helping their PPW, especially single | threaded PPW) - Tight integration between OS and CPU. | | This is, perhaps, where the x86 consortium has fallen into | a challenge in the face of tight integration; The majority | of that group would likely shriek at the idea of a DRAM on | CPU, "here you go that's all you get" idea. I saw it a lot | when I slung PC hardware; Folks who would insist on having | as much upgrade-ability as possible, but never actually | _bought_ the upgrades between PC purchases. Even still, RAM | is the main thing I personally find myself still upgrading | on either purchased or older PCs. | | That being said, It would be interesting to see if they try | doing DRAM chiplets for these; I'm sure some 'ideal state' | would be where DRAM chiplets + slotted RAM cause the | chiplets to be dedicated to integrated GPU resources, or | act as a form of L4 cache for one or more banks of DRAM. | tambourine_man wrote: | Then don't. There's a big internet out there. | | Apple Silicon is the most exiting thing to happen in the | field in decades. Apple handles platform transitions really | well so it may seem less of a tectonic shift than it actually | is. | | It's normal for people to be enthusiastic amongst such facts. | ChuckNorris89 wrote: | Then why not be enthusiastic about it on AS threads. This | thread is about Intel chiplet design, it ahs nothing to do | with AS so why pollute every silicone thread with this | offtopic. | yywwbbn wrote: | I keep wondering, did people always use the word 'silicon' | when talking about CPUs & SoCs? Somehow I never noticed it | before Apple released their 'Apple Silicon'. | heavyset_go wrote: | It's Apple marketing speak | kyriakos wrote: | Apple has very strong marketing, for example retina screens | is marketing term for high DPI screens. | mycocola wrote: | Just echoing what others are saying, no, we called them | Intel chips/CPUs. What I don't get is why people go along | with it. I personally prefer not being a miniature | speakerphone for the marketing department at Apple. | freeflight wrote: | In hardware circles I've seen CPUs/GPUs colloquially | being referred to as "silicon" for at least a decade. | | Which has very little to do with Apple PR, but everything | with how CPUs/GPUs are overwhelmingly made from silicon. | heavyset_go wrote: | This trends chart[1] suggests that "Apple silicon" is | very much a marketing term versus a colloquial term for | chips in general. | | [1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%2 | 05-y&ge... | programmer_dude wrote: | This line of reasoning is just dumb. Every single chip on | the mother board is made from Silicon. (There maybe some | gallium or germanium parts but those are insignificant | and irrelevant). | ohgodplsno wrote: | Hint: people posting on HN about how the M1/M2 are | revolutionary are definitely not part of any hardware | circles, and are using the marketing speak. | freeflight wrote: | The original thread comment asked if this was a thing | before "Apple Silicon", that's what I was referring to; | I've seen it before, and not just years before but over a | decade before, possibly even two decades. | | As such it's not something Apple PR invented, but rather | hijacked. | exmadscientist wrote: | It used to be slang, though. Something you'd use to punch | up the first paragraph of an article, not the way people | actually talked. For some reason calling it "Apple | Silicon" _really_ grates on me, too. But such are the | whims of megacorps. | n7pdx wrote: | LOL. Anyone who works in chip design would know much | M1/M2 changed the hardware game. It is actually the | dabbler enthusiast talking about how power/perf isn't | important because his LED-laden shitbox has a wall plug | (muh absolute performance) that doesn't grasp how utterly | irrelevant DIY builders are in the market. Just look at | the relative sales of servers, laptops and desktop and | see what we care about. | | Not a single second of thought is ever spent by the | architects/designers on optimizing "absolute | performance". We only care about perf/area and perf/watt. | It is the marketing teams that try to hype up gamer | performance. Overclocking/high voltage performance | requires the engineering knowledge of a freshman intern: | go raise the voltage/freq, run the test program, make a | SKU. | | Source: worked on CPU/GPU arch/design for 20 years, | including at Intel. | kemotep wrote: | I mean they called the Bay Area, Silicon Valley because of | the computer companies in the 70's. | cercatrova wrote: | Yes, because those chips are made from silicon. | heavyset_go wrote: | I'd save this judgment call for when there's node parity | between Apple's chips, x86 and even other ARM manufacturers. | The fact is that Apple's chips are on smaller nodes than the | rest of the competition, because they bought up all of | manufacturing on those nodes from TSMC. Performance per watt, | power draw, thermals, etc are all functions of node size. | urthor wrote: | The sensible answer. | senttoschool wrote: | Apple Silicon is magnitudes more efficient. It cannot be | explained by node size alone. TSMC 5nm is 15%-25% higher | performance or 30% lower power compared to TSMC 7nm. | | Also, Apple's 7nm chips outperformed AMD/Intel 7nm chips. | pulse7 wrote: | Compare AMD Ryzen 7 5800U [1] with Apple M2 8 Core [2] and | you will see that Apple Silicon is not "magnitudes more | efficient", but ca. 30% faster in single-thread, but at the | same time 30% slower in multi-thread and with 25% higher | TDP... This is not "magnitudes more efficient"... | | [1] https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Ryzen+7+58 | 00U&i... | | [2] https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Apple+M2+8+Cor | e+350... | senttoschool wrote: | Passmark is a terrible benchmark. Stick to SPEC or | Geekbench5. | | This Reddit post summarizes the efficiency and speed | advantages of the M1: https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/c | omments/nii37s/comment/gz... | [deleted] | whalesalad wrote: | microservies for silicon | Animats wrote: | The article notes some advantages of being able to use different | processes for different wafers, but there's not much more on | that. It might be helpful if you wanted different fabs for memory | and compute, or for flash type memory. Anyone know what they're | getting at here? | | There are situations when you really need that, but they mostly | involve imagers. The Advanced Scientific Concepts flash LIDAR had | a two-chip stack, with the light detectors made with InGaAs | technology. The counters and timers were ordinary CMOS. This also | shows up in some IR sensors. | to11mtm wrote: | > The article notes some advantages of being able to use | different processes for different wafers, but there's not much | more on that. It might be helpful if you wanted different fabs | for memory and compute, or for flash type memory. Anyone know | what they're getting at here? | | Well, one advantage is that it can be a cost/efficiency savings | on a few levels. | | For example, in the case of Zen2/3, the main CPU chiplet is at | 7nm, but the I/O die is at 12nm. If I had to guess, generally | speaking it is useful in cases where parts of the final module | would benefit from higher transistor density versus others; | Memory controller tech generally gets fewer updates than the | CPU/APU itself, so it allows faster design cycles; you already | know the existing I/O controller works, one less portion to re- | qualify. | cm2187 wrote: | My understanding is that one of the key benefits is that if you | have an imperfection on a wafer, you lose one small chiplet | instead of losing a big monolithic CPU. So for equivalent | imperfections you get a better yield. | atq2119 wrote: | Different functions scale differently. With the latest | processes, logic scales best, while analog scales worse: SRAM | (which is internally pretty analog) still scales decently, but | less than logic; and I/O scales very little at all (think of it | this way: the size of transistors that drive outputs is pretty | much determined by the current you need to drive, and the | current is determined by e.g. the PCIe spec, which is itself | subject to the physical constraints of relatively long wires). | | As a consequence, if your design has CPU dies and I/O dies, | using a smaller process only for the CPU dies is likely to be a | good trade-off. | yaantc wrote: | Memories have their specialized processes indeed, but there are | other reasons to specialize. | | New nodes are fine for logic, but it takes time for analog IPs | to move to new nodes (and some may not). So what AMD did, using | an advanced node for compute/logic and a less advanced one for | I/Os should be typical. You can also see this in broadband | cellular modems, where the baseband part is on an advanced node | and the RF on an older one. | | When you look at processes offering, you often have variants | optimized either for peak performance (frequency) or maximum | efficiency. The peak performance would be the natural choice | for (big) CPUs, and an efficiency node better suited for a GPU | or any massively parallel accelerator where efficiency is more | relevant than peak frequency (on this, I think Intel planned to | use TSMC for their HPC GPU, could be related: they can focus on | high perf for their CPUs). | citizenpaul wrote: | Something about this gives me the under the skin creepy feel of | piles of "locked" resources sitting on peoples desk going to | complete waste. | | Like when they used to sell mainframes with excess processor | capacity then you would pay to unlock the processor that was | already there if you need it. If not it was simply manufactured | to sit unused in a mainframe its entire life, then be thrown in | the trash. | | I didn't specifically see anything that said this in the article | but there is a TON to digest in there though mdular hardware | always has that built to waste vibe. Even if they claim the | opposite. | artificialLimbs wrote: | >> Like when they used to sell mainframes with excess processor | capacity then you would pay to unlock the processor that was | already there if you need it. | | IBM still does this. | crazygringo wrote: | It's not "going to complete waste" any more than if you | download the MS Office suite and let the installer sit on your | computer without installing it because you don't have a license | key. Which... nobody cares. | | You're licensing the processor capacity. You're not paying for | the actual piece of silicon, you're paying your fair share of | the R&D and fab investment that went into it. You want to use | more, you pay more. The same as software. | | The amount of silicon in the chip is, what, a small fraction of | the amount of silicon in a single grain of sand? A whole | processor is tens of grams of material total. The cardboard | boxes a standalone chip comes in probably weigh more. I | wouldn't get worried about "waste" here. | to11mtm wrote: | IIRC they have something like that but different in the works, | 'Software Defined Silicon' (SDSi) is what it's called. | bombcar wrote: | It can actually result in less waste (1 line, no flying techs | around to upgrade, etc) depending on how you account for | upgrade shipping, etc. | | People seem fine with software unlocks for software but often | confuse the price of hardware with the cost to manufacture the | same. | bee_rider wrote: | I'd assume the opposite actually. | | Chips always have to be binned. But previously a chip would | have to be binned down to it's worst component I guess -- if | they had a chip with great CPUs but the GPUs were a little | wonky, and they didn't have an appropriate processor line for | that combo, they'd have to bin the whole thing down to low- | tier. Now they can instead match up the good CPUs and the good | CPUs. | | Plus they'll be able to satisfy some of their lust for SKUs by | mixing and matching tiles, rather than making a bazillion | slightly bins. | Animats wrote: | > lust for SKUs | | That's so Intel. All 37 variants of the Intel Core i9 CPU: | [1] | | [1] https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/details/ | pro... | toast0 wrote: | Core i9 isn't a useful thing to complain about SKUs for. | There's probably been thousands of Pentium products at this | point. | | What you want to look at is how many SKUs for an | architecture, like say Alder Lake for Desktop[1]. Do we | really need 5 to 7 SKUs at 16, 12, 6, or 4 cores, but only | 2 SKUs at 10 cores, and 4 SKUs at 2 cores? | | [1] https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/co | denam... | bee_rider wrote: | 2 cores seems like a niche product at this point, | actually 4 SKUs for that is more than I'd expect. | | Only 2 SKUs at 10 cores seems a little weird, I wonder if | they are 12 core parts with some cores disabled or | something like that. | | Edit: Note it is just the i5 [...]K's from Q4 '21 that | have 10 cores. It isn't that surprising that the early | enthusiast parts are a little weird, right? | sidewndr46 wrote: | My understanding is that binning is mostly about core count | and core operating frequency. | | Intel has a hard-on for segmenting their product lines. To | the point they "launch" new products like the i9, which is | just what an i7 used to be. They also deliberately cripple | products, like selling SKUs with VT-x disabled. Not to | mention them keeping ECC memory out of the entire desktop | market for basically all of history. | nwah1 wrote: | >Intel also has a packaging line that spans 2D technologies as | well as 3D technologies like its Foveros line. | | Very cool | mugivarra69 wrote: | Lisa Su and by extention, AMD, has been ahead of anything out | there. If intel can pull this off, i will be happy to have | competition back in market. | midislack wrote: | Pentium Pro used "chiplets." Ironically Intel mocked AMD recently | for it. | urthor wrote: | What's old is new again. | | Had a chat with an old timer whl was doing horizontally scaling | compute with thr IBM A400. | | 25 years later it's the starry eyed wonder of the 2010s. | alexklarjr wrote: | Now their CPU lifespan will be same as modern videocards - 3-5 | years, same as new ryzen chips. This will surely drive new | products adoption and profits. | eyegor wrote: | Are you implying that the silicon somehow has a shorter | lifetime due to the presence of an interposer layer? Or is this | a way of saying you think cpus are going to become more | powerful at a faster rate? | aidenn0 wrote: | I remember when some of the old Slot-1 P3 cpus had off-die, but | on-board cache (The Katmai did, the Coppermine did not). | to11mtm wrote: | Yeah... | | Back in the day, as another comment mentioned, the PPro had a | 'chiplet' style configuration where The CPU and Cache were on | the same chip but separate dies. The problem with this was the | CPU and Cache had to be bonded to the chip first, then tested, | and if either was bad, game over. Additionally, at the time die | size was at more of a premium, in the case of a PPro, 256Kb of | cache was close-ish to 2/3 the size of the CPU die. [0] | | The P2, Katmai P3, and the Athlon 'Classic' (Pluto/Orion) used | offboard cache; This was far better from a yield standpoint | (I'm assuming the cache chips could either be tested before | install, or were easier to rework) but limited their speed. | | It's crazy to think that the Katmai P3 itself had around 9.5 | Million Transistors, but the 512Kb of cache was another 25 | Million on it's own! | | [0] - | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_Pro#/media/File:Pentiu... | throw0101a wrote: | > _I remember when some of the old Slot-1 P3 cpus had off-die, | but on-board cache_ | | I remember when you had to buy an extra processor to get | floating point. | | * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X87 | | At one point there were video game(s) with 'extra' | functionality that was only available with this hardware | 'upgrade': | | * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_3.0 | | (Get off my lawn.) | aidenn0 wrote: | You're probably not that much older than me, the first PC I | used was a Z80 based system (it came standard with a floppy | drive though) | Flankk wrote: | bee_rider wrote: | Hopefully Intel will be able to sustain their business by | competing in the tiny non-macOS niche I guess. | zekica wrote: | How will the gap widen? 8 instruction parallel decoder will | give Apple single core performance per watt, but other than | that I don't see what Apple does differently. M1 Pro 10 core is | their best performance-per-watt, and Ryzen 6800U is just 6% | behind [0]. | | Apple will be ahead, but the gap will not widen. | | [0] https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD- | Ryzen-7-6800U-Efficiency-R... | ohgodplsno wrote: | Apple zealots have this hilariously weird obsession with | performance per watt. Do not expect them to look at any | actual data. | to11mtm wrote: | Wellllll... | | Ryzen is only 6% behind for multi-core PPW, but The M1 | appears to still have a huge advantage in single-core PPW. | | I have a half dozen thoughts on this, but the foremost is; | | Apple keeping memory on chip, is likely providing a huge | memory latency advantage, (1) as well as some power benefits. | It would not surprise me if this is a large part of (if not | the majority) of the advantage here outside of the bigger | decoder. | | Think about a single threaded vs multithreaded benchmark; In | the case of ST, there's only one thread the prefetcher can | deal with, that one thread is going to be waiting for data. | In the case of MT, there's a much greater likelyhood that | you'll have multiple threads making memory requests, and the | latency can be amortized by having the threads do other work | (i.e. Thread 1 can start working on data it got back while | thread 2's request is already in-flight from controller to | DRAM.) | | This is one of those moments I miss David Kanter | (RealWorldTech, [0]) doing CPU arch breakdowns. | | (1) - Back in the day, one of the 'better' things you could | do for a SDRAM P3/Athlon/Duron system, especially if you were | replacing all modules for an upgrade anyway, was to hunt for | CL2 memory. | | [0] - https://www.realworldtech.com/cpu/ | zekica wrote: | Exactly - they have on package RAM with 100GB/s and low | latency | kcb wrote: | > Apple keeping memory on chip, is likely providing a huge | memory latency advantage | | How? It's the same LPDDR5 everyone else is using and it's | on package not on "chip". The trace length has a negligible | impact on latency. | danaris wrote: | I've never been clear on how much Intel _couldn 't_ make cooler | chips, and how much they just can't admit to themselves that it | _matters_ (and thus didn 't try very hard). | n7pdx wrote: | They know it matters, they just don't have the competence to | do it since they promoted a bunch of toadies and charlatans | into their technical leadership, and also outsourced a ton of | technical work to "low cost geo" so managers can brag about | cutting costs. | yakkityyak wrote: | Having worked there under BK and Bobby it is very clear why. | They didn't invest anything into engineering. Even today | their comp is peanuts compared to any other company in the | tech industry. | jamiek88 wrote: | Bbbbbbut benchmarking.........market survey......advanced | analytics......some HR goober said that we are | 'competitive'. | stavros wrote: | Why didn't AMD? Is the M2 that much better than Ryzen, for | example? | kcb wrote: | It's not. 5nm Ryzen will finally give us the more apples to | apples comparison. Unfortunately we're probably a ways out | from 5nm Ryzen mobile chips. | stavros wrote: | Hmm, how did Apple get to 5nm first? Does the fact its | ARM have anything to do with it? | fooker wrote: | They bought out TSMC fab capacity by biddng significantly | over AMD. | cercatrova wrote: | They pay TSMC loads of money to have the first chips for | each process node. They were first to 5nm, they'll be | first to 3nm next year too. This is because they sell | whole products rather than chips like Intel and AMD, so | Apple's profit margins are astronomical compared to them, | and so they can afford to pay TSMC so much. | stavros wrote: | Oh I didn't know that, thanks. So it's more that they | bought out all of TSMC's product, rather than that they | came up with an innovative new process. | cercatrova wrote: | Well, they also have some of the best silicon engineers | in the Valley, and the world. It's not just TSMC, they | only build what is designed. | urthor wrote: | Intel was in this situation before. | | They dug themselves out with the Core 2 Duo. | | There remains a nonzero chance Intel digs themselves out of the | hole again. | | I'm strongly considering their stock. | tambourine_man wrote: | They were never in trouble on the manufacturing part. In | fact, they've been the best at it for 40 years. | | I think it's way easier to dig yourself out of a whole by | picking up a previous architecture and updating it (ditching | the Pentium 4 and using the 3 as the basis for the Core | architecture) than it is by regaining manufacturing lead, | especially when there's only one company that's able to do it | these days. Lots of companies are able to make compelling | architectures with different instruction sets. Actual chip | making, however, is TSCM. | | How Intel lost their lead is probably the greatest business | case to be studied in our industry's recent history. | pyrolistical wrote: | Only took 5 years https://www.pcgamer.com/intel-slide-criticizes- | amd-for-using... | washadjeffmad wrote: | Has Intel ever released a benchmark or marketing comparison | that wasn't the filtering equivalent of spelling and grammar | mistakes in spam emails? If you notice it for what it is, | you're not their target demographic. | | Their whole sour grapes culture is just bizarre to me. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-08-27 23:00 UTC)