Re:ARM Mac Impact on Intel
by hajile on Tuesday June 23, 2020 @11:52AM
(#23615586)
They need to prove they can do a few things before I'm worried.
* They need to ramp the clockspeeds -- much easier to say than do.
* They need to include 256 or 512-bit SIMD operations without breaking the power budget.
* They need to design a consistent and fast RAM controller (and likely need to add extra channels)
* They need to integrate power-hungry USB4/thunderbolt into their system.
* They need to add a dozen extra PCIe 3 or 4 lanes without ballooning the power consumption.
* They need an interconnect (like QuickPath or HyperTransport/Infinity Fabric) so all these things can communicate.
These are the hard issues that Intel, AMD, IBM, etc all must deal with and form a much bigger piece of the puzzle than the CPU cores themselves when dealing with high-performance systems.
* They need to ramp the clockspeeds -- much easier to say than do.
* They need to include 256 or 512-bit SIMD operations without breaking the power budget.
* They need to design a consistent and fast RAM controller (and likely need to add extra channels)
* They need to integrate power-hungry USB4/thunderbolt into their system.
* They need to add a dozen extra PCIe 3 or 4 lanes without ballooning the power consumption.
* They need an interconnect (like QuickPath or HyperTransport/Infinity Fabric) so all these things can communicate.
These are the hard issues that Intel, AMD, IBM, etc all must deal with and form a much bigger piece of the puzzle than the CPU cores themselves when dealing with high-performance systems.