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Comment by mrlonglong

3 days ago

256 cores on a die. Stunning.

Intel's Clearwater Forest could be shipping even sooner, 288 cores. https://chipsandcheese.com/p/intels-clearwater-forest-e-core...

It's a smaller denser core but still incredibly incredibly promising and so so neat.

  • Someone needs to try running Crysis on that bad boy using the D3D WARP software rasterizer. No GPU, just an army of CPU cores trying their best. For science.

    • This has already been tried :)

      iirc, in the 2016 a quadcore intel cpu ran the original crysis at ~15fps

  • I wonder what Ampere (mentioned in that article) is going to do. At this rate they’ll need to release a 1000 cpu chip just to be noticeably “different.”

    • At some point won't the bandwidth requirements exceed the number of pins you can fit within the available package area? Presumably you'll end up back at a low maximum memory high bandwidth GPU design.

      I wonder how many of these you could cram into 1U? And what the maximum next gen kW/U figure looks like.

    • Unfortunately Ampere has fallen pretty far behind AMD. I don't see much point to their recent CPUs.

  • "E-cores" are not the same

    • The 32 core / die AMD products are almost certainly Zen 6c, which is the same "idea" as Intel E-Cores albeit way less crappy.

      https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/amd-zen-6-epyc-ve...

      EDIT: actually, now that I think about it some more, my characterization of Zen-C cores as the same "idea" as Intel E-cores was pretty unfair too; they do serve the same market idea but the implementation is so much less silly that it's a bit daft to compare them. Intel E-Cores have different IPC, different tuning characteristics, and different feature support (ie, they are usually a different uarch) which makes them really annoying to deal with. Zen C cores are usually the same cores with less cache and sometimes fewer or narrower ports depending on the specific configuration.

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That's going to run Cities Skylines 2 ~~really really well~~ as well as it can be run.