Will be interesting to see how long this RAM insanity will last. If it doesn't calm down before Zen 6 releases, people like me on older platforms might just have to skip Zen 6 entirely and wait for the AM6 platform.
Can they double the memory lanes without switching socket ? If not I feel like PC is going to fall behind even further compared to Apple chips. Having ram on chip sucks for repairability but 500gb/s main ram bandwidth is insane.
They stumbled into the right direction with strix halo but I have a feeling they won't recognize the win/follow up.
So Zen 6/7 will have a core design and a CCD design. But like past gens, these will be packaged into different products with different sockets and packages (everything from monolithic APUs to sprawling multi-chiplet Server cpus).
So to say that Zen 6/7 supports AM5 on desktop, doesn't necessarily exclude that Zen 6/7 product family in general doesn't support other new/interesting sockets on desktop (or mobile) also. Maybe products for AM6 and AM5 from the same zen family.
Medusa Halo and the Zen7 based 'Grimlock Halo' version might be the interesting ones to watch (if you like efficient Apple-stlyle big APUs with all the memory bandwidth)
Higher DRAM prices might mean that there is less demand from new system builders mean depressed prices so it might be more tempting to upgrade your existing AM5 CPU to Zen 6
I’m sure there are a plethora of technical reasons it’s impractical - but my dream is a big, unified L3 cache across their CCD chiplets. Maybe 256mb in size for the x950 x3d chips.
There are challenges with really big monolithic caches. IBM does something sort of like your idea in their Power and Telum chips, with different approaches. Power has a non-uniform cache within each die, Telum has a way to stitch together cache even across sockets (!).
The PCI-Express bus is actually rather slow. Only ~63 GB/s, even with PCIe 5 x16!
PCIe is simply not a bottleneck for gaming. All the textures and models are loaded into the GPU once, when the game loads, then re-used from VRAM for every frame. Otherwise, a scene with a lowly 2 GB of assets would cap out at only ~30 fps.
Which is funny to think about historically. I remember when AGP first came out, and it was advertised as making it so GPUs wouldn't need tons of memory, only enough for the frame buffers, and that they would stream texture data across AGP. Well, the demands for bandwidth couldn't keep up. And now, even if the port itself was fast enough, the system RAM wouldn't be. DDR5-6400 running in dual-channel mode is only ~102 GB/s. On the flip side the RTX 5050, a current-gen budget card, has over 3x that at 320 GB/s, and on the top end, the RTX 5090 is 1.8 TB/s.
This. I needed a high speed link between two PCs and bought a mellanox card, cue me surprised that a consumers PCs do not have enough PCIe lanes to handle both a thickboii GPU and a thickboii 200GBe mellanox card...
And even when AMD does move their mainstream desktop processors to a new socket, there's very little reason to expect them to be trying to accommodate multi-GPU setups. SLI and Crossfire are dead, multi-GPU gaming isn't coming back for the foreseeable future, so multi-GPU is more or less a purely workstation/server feature at this point. They're not going to increase the cost of their mainstream platform for the sole purpose of cannibalizing Threadripper sales.
Just takes backwards steps from time to time with major architectural innovations that deliver better performance at significantly lower clock speeds. Intel's last backwards step was from Pentium 4 to Core all the way back in ~2005. AMD's last backwards step was from Bulldozer (and friends) to Zen in 2017.
7GHz is ridiculous and probably just a false rumour, but IMO; Intel and AMD are probably due for another backwards step, they are exceeding the peek speeds from the P4/Bulldozer eras. And Apple has proved that you can get better performance at lower clock speeds.
They should be reintroducing the 3D vcache [0] variants (X) in EPYC, with a higher cache/core ratio, that was present in EPYC4 (e.g. 9684X [1]) they for some reason wasn't available in EPYC5.
Makes a massive difference at high density and utilisation, with the standard cache/core performance can really degrade under load.
> This increases the maximum core count per chiplet from 8 to 12. Furthermore, it increases the L3 cache per CCX/CCD from 32 MB to 48 MB.
I'd say the amount of L3 is not increased but adapted/scaled to the increased core count, since per each core there is still the same amount of cache available as before.
We get faster cores, so we need to get from 5600 to e.g. 6000 DDR5. Since core count is increased by 50%, we'd need 9000... DDR5^W, well yes, we'd need actually as planed before AM6 and DDR6!
There are already DDR5 CUDIMMs at and above 8000 MT/s, and 9600 MT/s has been demonstrated but none are currently in stock. By the time AMD ships Zen 6 desktop processors, the market should be ready with memory modules that will mean even the highest core count Zen 6 parts will be at worst only slightly more bandwidth-starved than their predecessors. And the lower core count Zen 6 CPUs with a single CCD should be able to provide substantially more bandwidth than their predecessors. All without requiring DDR6 yet.
Readit News
https://overclock3d.net/news/cpu_mainboard/amd-extends-am5-l...
They stumbled into the right direction with strix halo but I have a feeling they won't recognize the win/follow up.
So to say that Zen 6/7 supports AM5 on desktop, doesn't necessarily exclude that Zen 6/7 product family in general doesn't support other new/interesting sockets on desktop (or mobile) also. Maybe products for AM6 and AM5 from the same zen family.
Medusa Halo and the Zen7 based 'Grimlock Halo' version might be the interesting ones to watch (if you like efficient Apple-stlyle big APUs with all the memory bandwidth)
Only if they overestimate demand and overproduce CPUs. Otherwise it will lead to higher prices because there's less economy of scale.
I'd love to build a new desktop soon but I couldn't justify the cost and am instead building out a used desktop that's still on ddr4 / lga1151.
I just checked how much the 64 Gb ddr4 in my desktop would cost now... it starts at 2.5 times what i paid in 2022.
Sorry AMD, I would maybe like a new desktop but not now.
Something like 5900x on 2nm or 4nm
https://chipsandcheese.com/p/telum-ii-at-hot-chips-2024-main...
https://www.eecg.utoronto.ca/~moshovos/ACA07/projectsuggesti...
(if you do ML things you might recognize Doug Burger's name on the authors line of the second one)
The PCI-Express bus is actually rather slow. Only ~63 GB/s, even with PCIe 5 x16!
PCIe is simply not a bottleneck for gaming. All the textures and models are loaded into the GPU once, when the game loads, then re-used from VRAM for every frame. Otherwise, a scene with a lowly 2 GB of assets would cap out at only ~30 fps.
Which is funny to think about historically. I remember when AGP first came out, and it was advertised as making it so GPUs wouldn't need tons of memory, only enough for the frame buffers, and that they would stream texture data across AGP. Well, the demands for bandwidth couldn't keep up. And now, even if the port itself was fast enough, the system RAM wouldn't be. DDR5-6400 running in dual-channel mode is only ~102 GB/s. On the flip side the RTX 5050, a current-gen budget card, has over 3x that at 320 GB/s, and on the top end, the RTX 5090 is 1.8 TB/s.
There are some exceptions, but I haven't seen one with for example four x16 slots that support PCIe 5.0 x4 lanes with bifurcation.
When did the GHz race start again?
Just takes backwards steps from time to time with major architectural innovations that deliver better performance at significantly lower clock speeds. Intel's last backwards step was from Pentium 4 to Core all the way back in ~2005. AMD's last backwards step was from Bulldozer (and friends) to Zen in 2017.
7GHz is ridiculous and probably just a false rumour, but IMO; Intel and AMD are probably due for another backwards step, they are exceeding the peek speeds from the P4/Bulldozer eras. And Apple has proved that you can get better performance at lower clock speeds.
Leaks = the author just made something up, but now it ranks extra highly when someone searches for "[upcoming thing] leaks"
Makes a massive difference at high density and utilisation, with the standard cache/core performance can really degrade under load.
[0] https://www.amd.com/en/products/processors/technologies/3d-v...
[1] https://www.amd.com/en/products/processors/server/epyc/4th-g...
I'd say the amount of L3 is not increased but adapted/scaled to the increased core count, since per each core there is still the same amount of cache available as before.
We get faster cores, so we need to get from 5600 to e.g. 6000 DDR5. Since core count is increased by 50%, we'd need 9000... DDR5^W, well yes, we'd need actually as planed before AM6 and DDR6!
x86 releases will never again be as interesting.