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by zaarn 2930 days ago
Keep in mind that AMD has an inherent advantage: the Zen architecture and Glue.

When AMD fabs a TR2 they have to find 4 good Ryzen dies which are fairly small and they make a lot of them since they are part of the entire lineup. Once they have 4 good dies, they get glued together.

If they wanted 64 cores they'd just have to look for 8 good Ryzen dies, halving their yield compared to 32.

On the Intel side they have to increase the silicon area and then hope that all 64 cores are capable of full core speed in the current setup.

Glueing CPUs together makes it cheap to scale at little cost.

1 comments

Err, that's only partially true at best. If you have many dies, the cost (in money, in chip real estate and in performance drop) of the interconnect skyrockets.
The interconnect cost also skyrockets on the cores themselves. Intel's moved to a mesh network on their newest cores: https://www.anandtech.com/show/11550/the-intel-skylakex-revi...

AMD's advantage of picking and choosing smaller parts still reigns supreme. If a Infinity Fabric component on the AMD die is defective enough to necessitate it is turned off the die is no longer able to participate in some of the more complex multi-die couplings. If the mesh component on an Intel die is defective the core(two actually because SKUs) has to be fused off and the part automatically bins as a lower SKU. As the mesh increases in complexity more and more of the design can be compromised.