AMD and Intel Would Both Like To Share Something With You
A Good News, Bad News Day For CPUs
Today we heard some speculation from The Inquirer based on a noticeable absence in the slide deck provided to AMD’s investors. Nowhere in that deck does the third generation of Threadripper appear, which would seem to indicate it will not launch alongside Rome and Ryzen 3. While disappointing to enthusiasts looking forward to upgrading, this is probably not a bad thing in the long run as the roadmap does include mention of a new 7nm+ process which will roll out in 2020 which could well be the technology that TR3 will be built on. There is also the limited amount of volume on 7nm lines which could mean that every Threadripper wafer made could be one less Rome wafer produced and it is not foolish for AMD to focus on their growing share of the server market.
The competition also made a major announcement, with DigiTimes reporting on Intel’s statement that their CPU shortage should start to taper off in June. Specifically, it will be entry level chips which will become more numerous, which will be attractive to low end pre-built systems and the mobile market. While good news for Intel, it may have come too late for this generation of products; as Jim reported, Lenovo has already decided to depend on AMD to power at least some of their upcoming ThinkPads.
Team Red is also making a big play for the data centre chip markets with 7nm Rome processors, so again it might be wanting to have its 7nm fabrication geared up for those chips rather than Threadripper parts.
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It looks like intel is mostly focusing on mobile, since that is where they still compete well. With Ryzen 3000 IGP parts still being 14 or 12 nm, Intel mobile chips should still look pretty good, whether they are 14 or 10 nm. Amd may offer more cores and better igp performance, but at a higher power cost. I don’t think there is going to be a 7 nm Ryzen 3000 chiplet based part with a gpu chiplet. There isn’t really room on the die for an HBM based chiplet and there isn’t much market for such a bandwidth constrained chiplet based part without HBM. It would be better to mount a IGP part on a board with an HBM based gpu.
I just hope that a 16 core part will be available at launch. I don’t need Threadripper, but it will be good to get as many cores as possible on a cheaper AM4 platform. It might be quite expensive. I am expecting the performance to be quite good. I think the latency will be reduced significantly from Ryzen 2000. The enthusiast community doesn’t seem to have really figured out how it will work yet. I have some idea, which is why I am waiting for it.
The supply of cpus for ThreadRipper is probably somewhat constrained With the tiny die size, they can make a lot of them even with a constrained water count, but every Epyc processor needs 8 of them. They may not have that many defective IO die to launch a ThreadRipper just based on salvage parts. It is kind of a waste to use a fully functional IO die since only half of it would be used in ThreadRipper. They may be stockpiling them all for as big of Epyc launch as possible, so it may not be the cpu supply that is the main constraint. We don’t know how they are going to work the desktop Ryzen parts yet. They have a lot of different combinations of parts that can be made with 2 die containing 4 CCX. Since the IO is now separate, the parts could be used in Epyc or Ryzen just as easily with some cores disabled. The clock speed and power bin will be more important than number of active cores or CCXs. With one core per CCX deactivated it would still be a 48 core chip. It is possible that they will actually launch the high end expensive 8, 12, and ,16 core parts first due to supply and launch the higher volume lower end parts later. I don’t know how much demand there will be for ThreadRipper anyway with a 16 core AM4 part.
Jeremy, Please forgive me if this question has already been answered. Given the arrival of PCIe 4.0, is it possible that AMD are re-working their BIOS/UEFI futures to accommodate the 16 GHz clock rate on PCIe 4.0 x1 lanes? There has already been several mentions of “trace length” limitations at that 16 GHz rate. Have you heard anything more about PCIe 4.0 being limited to the first PCIe x16 slot i.e. the one closest to the CPU socket?
hmm well the rumors of X570 say that the chipset will use PCI-E 4.0 and offer up PCI-E 4.0 lanes. Not sure on E-ATX and other large/tall boards but MINI-ITX/MINI-STX/M-ATX/ATX boards shoudl be fine. Granted those other slots that run through the chipset are limited by the x4 link between chipset and CPU…
AMD is really good at keeping existing chipsets relevant for several generations but I think that might be asking a bit too much. I expect real PCIe 4.0 to be limited to the new chipsets, though who knows, there may be an ‘overclock’ feature added for the brave owners of this generation.