Re:Supermicro Throws Its Weight Behind Arm Servers
by nine_k on Wednesday January 04, 2023 @04:59PM
(#34252476)
Agreed. Most whole cores on most consumer CPUs are idle, or close to idle. much / most of the time. The big-little architecture is built around the idea of large cores idling / shut down most of the time, and only waking up to serve a peak load, e.g. when a new web page is being rendered.
I an even imagine spacing functional nodes wider on the silicon, where size and latency limitations allow, to give them more heat-dissipating area.
Re:Supermicro Throws Its Weight Behind Arm Servers
by rbanffy on Wednesday January 04, 2023 @05:36PM
(#34252925)
> The big-little architecture is built around the idea of large cores idling / shut down most of the time, and only waking up to serve a peak load
This would suggest placing E cores between (or even inside) P cores, every cluster of them maybe on a small chiplet.
I wonder if the idea could go as far as having efficient and performant execution units in the same processor, with the reorder buffer issuing instructions to different units according to how far down the instruction stream the result is needed.
The opposite.
A lot of these chips are being designed as "dark silicon", with extremely specific hardware that is rarely used.
When the silicon is dark, they form a heatsink that can absorb excess heat from all other parts of the chip and help regulate the temperature.
I expect more-and-more extremely specific circuitry to be added to future chips, so that more and more silicon can be "dark" and serve as a place for heat to go inside of the microseconds of execution.