This article nicely summaries how AMD pioneered the use of, and commercially exploited, present day chiplets ahead of Intel so as to very successfully get ahead of Intel...


Chiplets helped save AMD. They might also help save Moore’s law and head off an energy crisis
wrote:

... AMD came to the conclusion that it didn’t have the resources to replicate Intel’s wide range of server chip designs and compete head-to-head across all those categories. It would be too expensive and difficult for the much smaller rival. And if it copied Intel, nothing about the new line of server chips would stand out either.

“We had one bullet to shoot for chip design,” AMD SVP Samuel Naffziger said about the company’s plans at the time.

So engineers at AMD looked to the past. Instead of trying to pack a larger number of features onto a single big piece of silicon, known as a “die,” they opted to break up their flagship chip into four separate parts and stitch them together.

This approach is called “chiplets,” and it’s likely to become a dominant form of chip design in the coming years...

... AMD invented chiplets out of necessity, but by breaking up a chip into smaller pieces, it reduced the manufacturing costs by 40%. That had two consequences: First, it let AMD make a full suite of server chips where it could add and remove chiplets as necessary, to create several performance options and target different server chip price buckets. And, by moving to chiplets, AMD could reuse two of the server chiplets and design something less costly that worked for desktops too, the company’s most profitable segment at the time.

The plan helped save AMD...

... What AMD accomplished years ago is now on its way to become the industry norm. Intel’s plans include products with chiplets, and others in the industry are coalescing around a standard that will one day allow chipmakers to mix and match silicon from different vendors inside a single package.

The new chiplet-based designs are a nice-to-have at the moment, but they will quickly become a necessity...

I'll leave it to others to argue the history...

Happy crunchin'!
Martin

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See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

This article nicely summaries how AMD pioneered the use of, and commercially exploited, present day chiplets ahead of Intel so as to very successfully get ahead of Intel...

Building on work that has been done previously and giving it a new name doesn't make them the first to do it.
It just makes them the first to use the term.

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Grant
Darwin NT

no one is saying that what AMD did with Zen wasn't novel. It certainly was, especially as it pertains to the IO die.

but don't act like they invented the technology. they built on what Intel already did and used it in a different way and slapped a new name on it.

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Seti@Home classic workunits: 29,492 CPU time: 134,419 hours

After Intel says one of its 13th Gen CPUs will hit 6GHz out of the box they went and just leaked its 13th Gen processor specs.

Cheers.

Nvidia has some stiff competition ahead of it.

Intel’s RTX 3060 competitor is priced at just $289

Cheers.

Why would Nvidia care that Intel is competing with a previous gen product from 2 years ago? These kinds of clickbait headlines are just asinine. It’s like racing a parked car. Nvidia isn’t trying to compete with Intel here lol.

But I think it’s the $329 A770 that will compete more on par with the the 3060 anyway.

Kudos to the Intel team for sticking this out. But Nvidia’s drivers are way more mature and they have matured features that Intel hasn’t proven yet (media encoding, super sampling, and ray tracing). There will be growing pains for Intel at launch. Drivers will need to be fine tuned and I hope they make it a priority, especially on the Linux front. Realistically, Intel will likely be in the same camp as AMD for many generations to come, always competing with nvidia’s last gen stuff or competing on the low-mid range, and not the very top.

And on a more relevant note, BOINC projects are going to need to make some adjustments at least to their schedulers if they want to support these cards. Maybe even BOINC GPU detection itself.

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Seti@Home classic workunits: 29,492 CPU time: 134,419 hours

Intel Marketing says thus...

Intel's policies have made ECC so rare in the mass market...


Indeed... Why is ECC RAM needlessly and detrimentally so ridiculously rare?!!!


IT is what we allow it to be...
Martin

---

See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

Intel Marketing says thus...

Intel's policies have made ECC so rare in the mass market...


Indeed... Why is ECC RAM needlessly and detrimentally so ridiculously rare?!!!

Because someone decided that they need an excuse to make extra money / price gouge the average PC customer by what appears to be intentional tall tales.

Intel Marketing says thus...

Intel's policies have made ECC so rare in the mass market...


Indeed... Why is ECC RAM needlessly and detrimentally so ridiculously rare?!!!


IT is what we allow it to be...
Martin

Do you have ECC on any of your systems?

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Seti@Home classic workunits: 29,492 CPU time: 134,419 hours

Do you have ECC on any of your systems?

Yes.

Some, but not all despite all my AMD systems being ECC RAM capable for all of the CPU, motherboard/mainboard, and BIOS.

And despite the wish to go all out ECC. But...


There are games at play...

Happy crunchin'...
Martin

---

See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

Intel is back with WHAT?!...


Intel offers desktop chip that can hit 6GHz if everything goes right, you can keep it cool, stars align, pigs fly
wrote:

Intel delivered on its promise of a 6GHz Raptor Lake chip this week with the launch of its Core i9 13900KS.

The Silicon Valley chip giant has teased the part since mid-2022, when it claimed the chip would run at 6GHz on default (stick) settings and reach 8GHz when overclocked — albeit only with the help of exotic coolants like liquid nitrogen.

Beyond the higher clock speeds there's not much new to talk about here. The 13900KS boasts the same eight performance cores and 16 efficiency cores in a big-little arrangement just like the previously announced 13900K...

... Intel's docs report a maximum turbo power of 253W — the same TDP as the 13900K — however, several outlets are reporting that the chip can actually pull as much as 320W under load...

... At $699 the CPU isn't cheap, but it's $40 less expensive than last year's 12th-gen KS SKU and priced to match AMD's flagship 7950X. In a comparison, AMD's part has a 300MHz frequency deficit, though it does technically have twice the performance cores. As we've noted in the past, frequency is only one measure of performance and instructions per clock (IPC) and thermal headroom can often play a more important role in real-world performance...

Years late and 36 cores short of AMD, who are Intel’s 4th-gen Xeons even for?
wrote:

Here's what $17,000 of silicon gets you...

Warm over to those?...

Happy hot crunchin' folks!
Martin

---

See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

Intel is back with WHAT?!...

After too long a teaser, we have:


Linus Tech Tips - Intel’s New CPUs...


Hot stuff?

At what fearful cost? (And who pays??)

... Special bits for crunching AI...

And DRM baked into the CPUs themselves so that only Intel Marketing can turn you on...

What strange business is this?...


Enjoy?
Martin

DRM: Digital Restrictions Marketing

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See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

I remember a Linus Torvalds freaking out in a discussion a few years ago, resolutely opposing calling a bug a "bug" because the cause was nowhere in the Linux kernel, but in the Intel CPU's memory protection during speculative code execution. He said angrily that we should probably get over x86/x86_64 and look for the future in a clean ARM64 architecture. So additional bits for AI and "baked in" DRM. Fine. What about similar weaknesses like SPECTRE and MELTDOWN? Can they be ruled out with such a complex instruction set as Intel's with an (almost) infinite number of extensions added within four decades? The future will show.

Intel Touts Three Future Generations of PC Processors to Take On Apple.

Intel held a coming-out party Tuesday for its Meteor Lake, the processor that will go on sale Dec. 14. But if you're trying to decide whether to stick with Intel-powered Windows laptops or move to Apple's efficient, powerful new MacBooks, pay attention to the three other processors in the works.

At Intel's Innovation conference, Chief Executive Pat Gelsinger touted a sequence of new processors due to arrive in 2024 and 2025. First are Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake. Then, in 2025, comes Panther Lake, whose design is "well underway," Gelsinger said, confirming a rumored code name.

In an effort to show the products aren't vaporware, Gelsinger demonstrated a prototype Lunar Lake computer, an ungainly blue box marked "Lab CSF" and featuring technical controls like "clear cache" and "virtual battery" you won't see on your average PC. And he held up a wafer built with Intel 18A, the manufacturing process the company hopes will restore the chipmaking leadership it lost to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) and Samsung.......

Cheers.

Intel Touts Three Future Generations of PC Processors to Take On Apple.

"You can definitely tell there is a vibe again that Intel is an engineering-led company again," [...] "That's the image they need to portray after years being run by accountants."

Off topic... but that maybe also the ultimate solution for Boeing's series of mishaps.

Same old thing, same old ways?...


Downfall fallout: Intel knew AVX chips were insecure and did nothing, lawsuit claims
wrote:

Billions of data-leaking processors sold despite warnings and patch just made them slower, punters complain...

... claim the x86 goliath failed to act when informed five years ago about faulty chip instructions that allowed the recent Downfall vulnerability, and during that period sold billions of insecure chips...

... Intel Core processors (6th to 11th generation) are affected by the Downfall flaw (CVE-2022-40982), which was publicly disclosed on August 8 this year.

The complaint says that in the summer of 2018, when Intel was dealing with Spectre and Meltdown, the manufacturer received two separate vulnerability reports from third-party researchers that warned that the microprocessor titan's Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX) instruction set ... was vulnerable to the same class of side-channel attack...

... The argument goes that the x86 goliath knew there was at least one speculative-execution side-channel hole in AVX while it was addressing the related Spectre-Meltdown design blunders...

... "It did not fix its then-current chips, and over three successive generations, Intel did not redesign its chips to ensure that AVX instructions would operate securely..."...

... "These secret buffers, coupled with side effects left in CPU cache, opened what was tantamount to a backdoor in Intel’s CPUs..."...

... Beyond Downfall, there have been other flaws related to AVX.

The court filing describes how the various plaintiffs have seen processor performance degradation ... on PCs patched for Downfall...

The pricing stays up as the performance goes down...

Happy crunchin'?
Martin

---

See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

Intel is back in the news for all the wrong reasons...

Intel Accused of Inflating Over 2,600 CPU Benchmark Results
wrote:

... SPEC, has invalidated over 2600 of its own results testing [Intel] Xeon processors...

... which means the results weren't indicative of how end users could expect to see performance in the real world...

... might have been inflating the relevant results of the SPEC test by up to 9%...

Same old "game"?...

IT is what we allow it to be...
Martin

---

See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

Intel 14900KS runs so hot, PC makers can officially dismantle it

The first delidded Core i9 14900KS gaming systems appear, promising improved cooling, and they're reportedly backed up by Intel's warranty.

... Overclockers have already had it running at 9.1GHz with liquid helium cooling, and it potentially offers an enormous amount of processing power if you water cool your PC. For those of you who prefer to just set and forget your CPU settings, delidding a CPU basically means you’re popping off the metal heatspreader that sits on top of your processor’s silicon.