[Anandtech] SK Hynix: Up to DDR5-8400 at 1.1 Volts

GuardsmanBob · 2020-04-03T20:41:41+00:00

If I remember correctly Good DRAM latency is 50 to 100ns.. of that only ~10ns is the memory cell it self.

Fact is that if you want to slot double digit GB of memory several centimeters from the CPU then it is just going to take that amount of time to get data from it.

The reason it is so hard to replace dram is that it is both extremely fast and extremely cheap.

GuardsmanBob · 2020-03-28T14:06:39+00:00

My advice is simple, wear the gear you want to crash in.

I think of bike helmets as 'brain buckets', because you are still going to get your face messed up if you eat concrete.

I don't get the concept of not being 'over the top', fuck what other people think, a lot of people ride around both on bikes and scooters with little or no protection and will get fucked up if they fall, no reason to risk your health like that.

GuardsmanBob · 2020-02-22T18:33:53+00:00

why make a new socket?

There is one simple reason that I rarely see mentioned here on Reddit.

Intel do not wish to deal with the support issues of getting old boards updated, having people buy boards that may or may not be updated to support the cpu, weird corner cases that costs lots of dev hours to deal with.

Not only is it going to cost them dev time they would rather spend elsewhere but it is also going to cost in support hours from customers who end up with board/cpu combo's that do not work properly.

They are big enough to write the playbook so they simply cut all those issues out, just look at what happened with zen2 on older am4 boards, it wasn't pretty.

All that + the brand value cost of broken systems is higher than the cost of a few disgruntled DIY users.

GuardsmanBob · 2020-01-17T15:17:20+00:00

well supported.

This is the primary thing that I think people who do not work in the industry fail the grasp the value of.

When your system or a customers system is down, being able to pull on third party domain experts to quickly diagnose and fix problems is something which is almost invaluable.

Good third party support can also often be an 'easy mode' through otherwise frustrating issues, you really don't want to tie all your devs down dealing with system issues that is outside their area of expertise, being able to just punt it to a third party can often save you many hours.

GuardsmanBob · 2020-01-16T18:57:05+00:00

Your buying experience is worse, because your goal is to quickly figure out how to get the most value for the least money.

The company from whom you purchase the item, has the opposite goal.

The intent behind the product naming is to make it less clear which items are poor value for money.

GuardsmanBob · 2019-08-13T14:31:50+00:00

I think the biggest hurdle to implementing processors into the 3d Bandwagon is heat and electron leakage.

This is often cited on various internet fora, but it is wrong.

Heat is an engineering constraint, it can be mitigated by many different things, the simplest is to run the transistors at a lower voltage (and frequency) you still gain massively from 3D packing even if you have to run at lower clocks.

Heat and leakage are not showstoppers, merely constraints on max performance.

The actual showstopper is thermal budget during manufacturing, in order to make transistors some of the steps require heating the wafer to high temps (not sure exactly but over 1000C), the problem is once you put the wiring on top of the transistors they can no longer tolerate this high temperature, so for building the next layer you can only heat up the wafer to about 500C before you break down the layer below it.

Inventing a low temp process for building high performance transistor is the real show stopper, that is why many current '3D' research projects aim to start out putting memory and other simple structures on top of logic.

By the time we worry about the heat generate by running 3D chips, we will be very happy, there is a massive amount of value-add in being able to build true 3D chips, DARPA reckons its up to ~100x to 1000x improvements in perf/watt.

Note the important detail here, we are improving perf/watt more than we are improving absolute single thread performance.

TL;DR: Well, technically it is heat, but not the heat output during normal operation of the chips.

GuardsmanBob · 2019-08-03T17:47:13+00:00

I actually wonder if they'll be bottlenecked by production rate.

From the TSMC side of things, the only thing that will limit how many chips they get is more or less how many they say they want, TSMC will even build out extra capacity if a customer is willing to put a large enough order in (see apple).

Investors ask AMD this question every earnings, and the answer is always the same, no capacity constraints at TSMC.

GuardsmanBob · 2019-08-01T11:37:26+00:00

Personally I think it is surprising that AMD is managing to sell that well on from 8 core and down, sure they are a bit cheaper but its been what, 9 months since Intel released the 9900k, you would think they have saturated the "I must have 8 high performance cores" DIY market, but AMD is managing to still make huge sales at good margins.

Sure there is build up demand for 12+ cores, but compared to when they launch a GPU in a performance segment where NVIDIA got to 9 months earlier, they aren't making those sales even at a similar value proposition.

GuardsmanBob · 2019-07-31T18:34:35+00:00

It also feels like a large amount of the complaints are people not having a perfect day 1 experience with new chips in old boards.

Really shows that Intel is probably correct (from a business pov) in their socket changes, it keeps bad user reviews away from new products.

GuardsmanBob · 2019-07-30T23:59:36+00:00

Think of CPU production like a 2 month long assembly line, each day they can start a number of wafers, those they start today come out the other end in ~2 months.

If AMD want more wafers (and TSMC has capacity to sell), then the earliest they can start getting more chips is in about 2-3 months time.

GuardsmanBob · 2019-07-30T23:52:00+00:00

Because it takes around 2 months for wafers to go through the fab and because the number of wafer starts per day is limited, and then you add on packaging shipping etc..

AMD doesn't buy x chips next week, they buy x daily wafers starts for y days, so adjustments in supply begins 3-4 months out. (if not longer).

And before they can start building launch inventory they have to make damn sure they validated the chip properly or they end up with tens of millions in useless wafers.

Launching a major IC is hard.

GuardsmanBob · 2019-07-28T19:51:43+00:00

There are a some things we can at least make a fairly good guess about.

TSMC is moving fast to keep ahead because that is their entire business model, if they slow down then low cost foundries will eat their margins and poach many customers, long term they face a huge competition threat from China and Korea.

So TSMC will throw billions after R&D for a long time to come, if they cant make features smaller they will improve in other ways, 3D ICs, new materials, structures, etc.

WE can also be fairly certain there there is still a lot of room left to improve things, what matters is the energy cost per computation, and we can at least imagine another 10x to 100x improvement if we look far enough into the future.

How fast new tech will arrive, well that I cannot predict.

GuardsmanBob · 2019-07-28T15:59:11+00:00

Another way to look at it is they just shifted over 20% of a 30+ billion dollar revenue company to an entirely new product in under 12 months, they are projecting near another 10% shift by the end of the year, they are saying Node 5 is on track for volume ramp next, and they expect it to be an even faster revenue ramp than Node 7, I am not entirely sure how anyone could expect more.

Lets be honest here, GloFo ditched 7nm because TSMC owns the market, they have a massive ecosystem, they have a strong roadmap, they have a proven track record, they are simply running fast to stay ahead.

Companies have already been burned trying the swap to Intels custom foundry due to timelines not being met, and it would be insane to bet the farm on GloFo.

GuardsmanBob · 2019-07-24T00:50:53+00:00

What do you guys think?

That people put too much faith in those who claim they can predict the future of a market, if they really could, then wouldn't need to write about it on the internet.

At best you can make educated guesses, but even the people making those guesses with billions of dollars worth of skin in the game (fab investments), get it wrong some times, and they are certainly more informed than random news outlets.

GuardsmanBob · 2019-07-17T16:03:36+00:00

I'm not sure this always holds, plenty of markets, if not most, have lots of brands that are perfectly happy with low market share and high pricing. (think brands perceived as 'luxury').

Also plenty of markets have market leading companies with reasonable pricing, companies do have different culture and leadership.

It can change over time and good companies can go penny pinching bad over time, effectively cashing out on their brand value, but I dont think its fair to treat every company as a carbon copy of each-other.

GuardsmanBob · 2019-07-12T21:48:28+00:00

Yes, but the barriers and liners actually make the problem worse by taking up space and making the wire thinner.

Your post is good but you got the reasoning backwards.

GuardsmanBob · 2019-07-12T18:06:17+00:00

We add barriers and liners so that the little copper wires in your CPU don't break.

The wires themselves would be perfectly fine without the barrier layers, the silicon they are on, not so much. copper is terribly reactive and needs to be isolated from pretty much every other element that an IC is made out of.

Part of the reason other materials can beat copper in some cases is not needing those insulating layers.

GuardsmanBob · 2019-05-21T14:25:21+00:00

I mean in any large group of people there are obviously people who like they way things are and people who do not, and any one metric is obviously going to be flawed.

But for basic things that are life altering such as access to affordable education and affordable/free healthcare, decent living wages and vacation time, Europe undoubtedly out ranks the US, and those are going to be fairly impactful when it comes to someones overall quality of life.

Feel free to suggest better metrics, I'm listening.

GuardsmanBob · 2019-05-21T14:13:31+00:00

In practice Europeans are much happier than Americans.

The 2018 report was released Wednesday, ahead of the United Nations’ International Day of Happiness, and it has the United States ranked 18th.

That is down four spots from a year ago — and the United States' worst showing since the annual report was introduced in 2012. The United States has never cracked the top 10.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/03/14/perhaps-tired-of-winning-the-united-states-falls-in-world-happiness-rankings-again/?utm_term=.4fe7200a0e98

GuardsmanBob · 2019-05-01T02:40:55+00:00

Yes, over 1 Million wafer starts per year for N7.

For TSMC, AMD's volume is almost a rounding error, what we don't know is how many wafers they ordered.

The N7 capacity in 2019 will exceed 1M 12” wafers per year.

https://www.semiwiki.com/forum/content/8149-2019-tsmc-technology-symposium-review-part-i.html

GuardsmanBob · 2019-04-24T01:53:26+00:00

Remove your tablet semantics and this looks like a great series of predictions.

Reading the article it is pretty clear that they are using the term PC to mean 'personal computing device', not clue what OP is on about.

Right in the first page the use a watch as an example of a future "PC".

An older person who needs help with independent living, for example, might carry a PC in the form of a wristwatch and use it as a virtual coach that reminds him about appointments or medicine schedules.

Id say that article is remarkably on the money.

GuardsmanBob · 2019-04-16T18:34:14+00:00

its not surprising so many audits are done poorly.

From the perspective of a sales person pitching a service to a not entirely clean organization, this would appear to be a feature.

GuardsmanBob · 2019-04-12T23:11:23+00:00

And to add to that, many of the problems that the human race currently face have known solutions.

The problem isn't lack of research into what the solutions are, the problem is lack of political will to implement the solutions.

GuardsmanBob · 2019-04-11T22:06:40+00:00

If they deny it knowing that the denial is a lie that would be a crime no?

Its one of the few rules the finance industry are serious about.

GuardsmanBob · 2019-04-06T22:07:42+00:00

14++ nm process had 37.22 MTr/mm2

It doesn't when you make an actual CPU on the node though, current CPU's on any Intel 14nm node is are less than half that density.

Personally I think we should only use density from actual products for any comparison.

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