Comment on Intel's CPUs Are Failing, ft. Wendell of Level1 Techs

bruhduh@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

• sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  The overhead of additional instructions isn’t the issue, they often translate those instructions into a smaller set of actual operations. It’s not like they have a special circuit for every instruction, a lot of instructions translate to a pipeline of multiple, modular circuits.

  The actual silicon will look more like ARM despite having a very large difference in instruction set sizes.

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  • bruhduh@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Then why AMD is more efficient then intel and arm nowadays?

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    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      That depends on what you mean, but here are a few reasonable explanations:

      • Intel’s chips are still on their Intel 7 process (similar to TSMC’s 7nm process), whereas AMD is using TSMC’s 4nm process, so AMD’s CPUs are 2 nodes ahead; smaller process generally means more transistors in the same area, as well as lower power usage per clock
      • AMD’s chiplet architecture makes it easier for them to move the CPU bits to a smaller arch, and the IO bits can stay on a cheaper arch (e.g. AMD uses 4nm for the cores, 6nm for the IO die); this increases yields and dramatically reduces costs, so AMD can invest more in architectural improvements
      • ARM prioritizes battery life over performance, so performance per watt won’t be great at the high end, but it’ll probably win at the low end; they also don’t make their own chips (just designs), so comparing process nodes is meaningless
      • AMD focuses on different aspects of computing than either Intel or ARM, so perhaps they’ve just done a better job optimizing for what you care about

      Anyway, that’s my take.

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      • TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        And for AMD’s 3D v-cache chips, there’s an enormous energy benefit, as taking stuff from the (much larger) cache is far more energy efficient than constantly going back and forwards to RAM.

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      • bruhduh@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Thank you for detailed explanation

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      • sauce@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Correction, meteor lake’s (Intel 14th gen) CPU tile is on the Intel 4 process (though admittedly that’s a 7nm euv process). And they’ve also moved to a chiplet design. (CPU, GPU and IO are on 3 different processes)

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• Dyf_Tfh@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  This isn’t true anymore, Intel dropped AVX512 since they moved to Big+Small cores design while AMD actually implemented it with Zen 4.

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  • Holzkohlen@feddit.de ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Does AMD just keep winning or what? I just don’t want CPU’s with a 500 Watt tdp.

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• Nighed@sffa.community ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Both intel and AMD are running the same instruction set though are they not? (Cross licensing x86/x64)

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  • bruhduh@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Look up gcc x86 options, intel have twice as big instruction set, and with expansion of instructions of arm, risc architecture ain’t saving it from overheating now because of aforementioned, now bloated instruction set

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