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A comment on AMD Ryzen 3rd Gen 'Matisse' Coming Mid 2019: Eight Core Zen 2 with PCIe 4.0. Parent comment

Re:AMD Ryzen 3rd Gen 'Matisse' Coming Mid 2019: Eight Core Z... by wmf on Wednesday January 09, 2019 @03:19PM (#18868416)
The Zeppelin (Ryzen 1xxx) die is 212 mm2 and its CCXs are 88 mm2 leaving 124 mm2 for the uncore. Now we see that the Matisse (Ryzen 3xxx) IO die is 122 mm2 — virtually the same size on the same process for the same functionality. (I don't see how L4 cache would fit in there BTW.)

As to why it's so large, I guess connecting cores, memory, and PCIe at extremely high speed just requires a lot of transistors. Intel's uncore seems to be far smaller; I'm not sure how or why.

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Re:AMD Ryzen 3rd Gen 'Matisse' Coming Mid 2019: Eight Core Z... by pmarcelll on Wednesday January 09, 2019 @06:24PM (#18870078)
The Ryzen chips offer more PCIe lanes and ECC memory support. These chips also use the Infinity Fabric high-speed interconnect, which is not needed by Intel's single-chip designs. The two CCX units in Zeppelin also need to talk to each other, so probably all this complexity just adds up.
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