The instruction level parallelism in the 2-ahead branch prediction is super cool stuff, I know zen5 had this feature but it's kind of crazy that memory is so slow relative to the cores that this complexity is beneficial and worthwhile.
> AMD has reduced the number of integer multiply units from three to two, with PDEP and PEXT throughput also falling from three instructions per cycle to two.
Are PDEP and PEXT using the same (parts of) circuits as multiply (they are very different operations...), or are this just two independent drops of circuitry and the wording is just a bit unclear?
They are unlikely to share circuits with the multipliers, but the 2 of the 6 execution units that include multipliers must be identical, to simplify layout, and the PDEP/PEXT circuits are allocated to these 2 units, like the multipliers.
32 cores is a lot of cores in a CCD. Is there a there any smaller logical unit between a CCD and a core, or are you expected to wrangle 32 cores in your lowest NUMA level?
What looks like a lot of small balanced improvements to the core itself. Four vector loads per cycle at 256b of less, I wonder if the gather performance is finally acceptable? Another balance example, they actually reduced the number of integer multipliers down to two. I wonder if that was to make diespace for the vnni pipes?
The real star looks like the c cores though. 32 C cores per chiplet with increased l3 cache is impressive
This is amusing since Intel seems to be sort of going in the other direction lately: their efficiency cores are becoming more like their performance cores with each new generation (at least in so far as they are getting wider and more capable of higher clock speeds), and there even seem to be some rumors that the two design trains may get "merged" in the future.
I was going to be sad than Zen 6c was divergent, but they increased a bunch of OoO structures on Zen 6c? To absorb more potential latency, since the memory is going to be heavier loaded? Ok, that I can appreciate!
It's absolutely wild that adjusting some l3 and using a smaller node goes from 12 to 32 cores for basically the same chip.
I wonder if the CCD will remain as monolithic as it does, for how long? The l3 latency being signficantly higher for 6c (10.3ns zen5 -> 10.7ns z6 -> 16.4ns z6c) feels like a symptom of a broader scaling challenge as the CCD hosts more and more. I can imagine dividing zen 7 or zen8 CCD into partitions, perhaps?
One thing I wonder about is that these CPUs are just so much faster than their memory controllers. So why not add more? Why don't they have a memory controller per core, for example?
Cost, and especially now, cost of memory! But you can buy AMD chips with 2 controllers (consumer), 4 (threadripper), 6 (8005), 12 (EPYC) memory channels, so in effect you can. Next generation Zen 6 Epyc has 16 channels. Roughly you get about 1 channel per chiplet, but you csn adjust if you need more memory bandwidth by buying fewer chiplets, eg there is an 8 core EPYC if you want to optimisise for bandwidth. But many applications are not bandwidth bound so this isn't the right choice, eg they are IO bound, rarely compute bound.
I think it mostly is for more controllers to be useful that means more PHYs and more actual pins on the package and more traces on the board and more sockets for the memory and... The space and cost of all of that is substantial (to a point, and then it just physically can't be manufactured).
More memory controllers would add more bandwidth. That can help, but few workloads are bottlenecked by memory bandwidth. (Dual memory channels have been a thing in desktops and laptops since the early 2000s single-core era at least, but newer generations of DDR have increased bandwidth to keep up with increased core counts.) What's really needed is less memory latency (less latency = faster), which has not improved as much as bandwidth.
It's not always trivial to saturate available memory bandwidth. You may need to use more than one core, or you need to carefully consider the topology of the chip you're working with (see lstopo). For example, what if the L3 cache is actually split in two [0]? In such cases, adding more bandwidth doesn't do much for you.
It is hilarious that the SPEC2026 graph does not include apple's P-cores. And no, not because they are ARM and not x86, since Graviton is included. It is because their integer & FP scores of 9.8 & 13 respectively absolutely wipe out everything else on this chart.
The single-threaded results of the Apple cores are excellent, but the multi-threaded results per socket of a Zen 6 absolutely wipe out any Apple CPU.
The Apple CPUs may be great for a personal computer, but they are not competitive with a server CPU.
Moreover, the SPEC floating-point results are not really representative for the floating-point performance of Zen 5 and Zen 6 that can be reached with optimized AVX-512 programs, which is much greater.
Regular Ryzen parts are still reasonably relevant for server use! They support ECC, so there's nothing immediately disqualifying them - see the rebranded "EPYC" 4005 series, for example.
A company like Hetzner isn't going to care an awful lot whether they deploy one big SP5 server or four small AM5 ones for the VM instances they rent out: the only thing that matters is TCO per performance.
Want to stick four NVMe SSDs, a 25Gbit NIC, 256GB of ECC RAM, and some OOB module on a Ryzen board? No problem whatsoever. Want to do the same with an Apple CPU? Ehhh, that's going to be slightly more challenging...
The 9950X3D2 was already tested. And was included as comparison point with the fastest possible version of its predecessor (Zen 5).
Some evidence that contextless numbers are meaningless is that your source, David Huang, does include the 9950X but in his results it scores much higher than everything on C&C's chart too (7.25/11.4)
I have absolutely no idea what this is benchmarking or how, but is there any reason not to just read this as the "consumer/low core ryzen" is twice as fast as the m5 pro?
Are PDEP and PEXT using the same (parts of) circuits as multiply (they are very different operations...), or are this just two independent drops of circuitry and the wording is just a bit unclear?
The real star looks like the c cores though. 32 C cores per chiplet with increased l3 cache is impressive
It's absolutely wild that adjusting some l3 and using a smaller node goes from 12 to 32 cores for basically the same chip.
I wonder if the CCD will remain as monolithic as it does, for how long? The l3 latency being signficantly higher for 6c (10.3ns zen5 -> 10.7ns z6 -> 16.4ns z6c) feels like a symptom of a broader scaling challenge as the CCD hosts more and more. I can imagine dividing zen 7 or zen8 CCD into partitions, perhaps?
[0] https://en.algorithmica.org/hpc/cpu-cache/sharing/#saturatin...
The Apple CPUs may be great for a personal computer, but they are not competitive with a server CPU.
Moreover, the SPEC floating-point results are not really representative for the floating-point performance of Zen 5 and Zen 6 that can be reached with optimized AVX-512 programs, which is much greater.
2. What flags & compiler?
3. Can't run Linux on that M5/M6 can we?
A company like Hetzner isn't going to care an awful lot whether they deploy one big SP5 server or four small AM5 ones for the VM instances they rent out: the only thing that matters is TCO per performance.
Want to stick four NVMe SSDs, a 25Gbit NIC, 256GB of ECC RAM, and some OOB module on a Ryzen board? No problem whatsoever. Want to do the same with an Apple CPU? Ehhh, that's going to be slightly more challenging...
The 9950X3D2 was already tested. And was included as comparison point with the fastest possible version of its predecessor (Zen 5).
Some evidence that contextless numbers are meaningless is that your source, David Huang, does include the 9950X but in his results it scores much higher than everything on C&C's chart too (7.25/11.4)
> AMD Ryzen 9 9950X 16-Core 63rd 4 40132379 +/- 2530724
> Apple M5 Pro 52nd 5 22108587 +/- 260160
I have absolutely no idea what this is benchmarking or how, but is there any reason not to just read this as the "consumer/low core ryzen" is twice as fast as the m5 pro?
It's the best chess engine used by millions of people and part of SPEC2026, natively compiled
Different story when you're talking about the context of a desktop or mobile.