Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by tonyplee 3286 days ago
It looks like this is putting 4 8 cores chips on the same package to scale up the cores counts, etc.

What are some of the technical limit to if AMD to 2, 4, 8x this approach?

Only power/heat? IO should not be hard since pins on MCM should be able to scale out easily, right?

3 comments

There's going to be a hit to I/O when one of those modules needs to access RAM that's on a different module's controller. The new bus seems to be really fast though, so I'm not sure how many you get have before it's a real problem.
Supposedly the big innovation of the Zen platform is its interconnect tech managing to scale performance nearly linearly with more chips. Or so AMD claims.
I'd guess external IO (memory and PCIe) might be a problem. How are you going to route all those wires out from the socket?

Secondly, there's probably some economic argument as well. Too few customers willing to pay for a humongous MCM, and with the attendant wiring complexity requiring more layers for the motherboard, it might be cheaper to go to more sockets instead?