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by xirbeosbwo1234
1928 days ago
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First off, it's not a direct comparison. The Epyc has one L3 cache per chiplet. This means that latency is not uniform across the entire L3 cache. This was a serious concern on the first generation of Epyc, where accessing L3 could take anywhere from zero to three hops across an internal network. AMD has greatly improved the problem on the more recent generations by switching to a star topology with more predictable latency. That said, there are two major reasons: 1. Epyc is on a chiplet architecture. Large chips are harder to make than small ones. Building two 200mm^2 chips is cheaper than building one 400mm^2 chip. Since Epyc has a chiplet architecture, this means they can put more silicon into a chip for the same price. This means that Epyc can be just plain bigger than the competition. This comes with some complexity and inefficiency but has, so far, paid off in spades for them. 2. Epyc is on a newer process. This means AMD can fit more transistors even with the same area. Intel has had serious problems with their newer processes, so this is not an advantage AMD expected to have when designing the part. The use of a cutting-edge process was, in part, enabled by the chiplet architecture. It is possible to fabricate several small chips on a 7nm process even though one large chip would be prohibitively expensive, and AMD has been able to use a 14nm process in parts of the CPU that wouldn't benefit from a 7nm process to cut costs. The first point is serious cleverness on the part of AMD. The second point is mostly that Intel dropped the ball. |
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