AMDs chiplet design allows them to reduce cost of the Ryzen 9 3950X by half
Much is said and spoken about the Chiplet design from AMD. It works out well for them, really well. But the main reason of using chiplets was dropping expensive monolithic processor die designs, in favor of more economical cores to fabricate. But nobody really knew how much of a benefit that was in terms of money.
AMD revealed that if a monolithic design was used (as Intel uses), a 16-core processor would cost more than double what it currently costs. We mentioned this many times, but if you fabricate big huge die's then chances that on a wafer the yields are bad, is bigger. If you design lots of smaller processors dies on a wafer, the risk of a damaged die is far smaller, and thus far more economical to fabricate as you end up with more working CPU dies (better yields). Of course chipset design have challenges of their own, but AMD isn't rather bothered by it by designing an ultra fast IO chip.
So for a 16-core model you only have to add an additional core die and IO, which is much smaller, cheaper to achieve and this economic. As the new slides indicate, it turns out that it has reduced cost by half. Thanks to this new design, you have the possibility of only marking the price at US $750 to get the Ryzen 9 3950X with 16 cores and 32 threads, while it would surely have cost more somewhere north of USD 1250 perhaps USD 1500, if a monolithic design had been used.
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You could make a chiplet design with Bulldozer parts, but it would still suck... cheaper but suck.
Ryzen's advantage now is the chiplet design and overall core and I/O design. A monolithic Ryzen CPU would be almost as good... perhaps not in the clocks or price, but the IPC might even be a lot better.
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Lets not forget what these ...noobs says:
At its Xeon CPU launch event (2017), Intel accused AMD’s Epyc chips as being an “inconsistent” and “repurposed desktop product” with “glued-together” dies.
Once you look at the processor as a whole, it should become clear that “this is not a glued together desktop processor“.
Aylor also noted that the company could have built a monolithic part but it would involve “trade-offs that would performance down because it would too large and too difficult to manufacture“.
Its more realistically the other way around, with the desktop parts being cut down server dies, with their ECC support intact.
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You could make a chiplet design with Bulldozer parts, but it would still suck... cheaper but suck.
Ryzen's advantage now is the chiplet design and overall core and I/O design. A monolithic Ryzen CPU would be almost as good... perhaps not in the clocks or price, but the IPC might even be a lot better.
Of course, if the cores are garbage, adding more won´t make for a great CPU... But the good thing about the chiplet design is that AMD can add more cores easily, creating better products than Intel for the same price. For example if we have an 8 core AMD CPU against a similar 8 core Intel CPU, they are going to be evenly matched, trading blows depending of the benchmarks. But thanks to the chiplet design, AMD can offer mores at the same price than Intel products with less cores, providing a better product in the end.
For me chiplet design is a masterstroke from AMD that completely "destroyed" Intel this round.
And until Intel presents a similar design, AMD is going to stay on top.
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Intel made huge cuts to server CPU prices which we know is going to hit their bottom line especially with those more costly monolithic designs. This plays into AMD's hand as they can still make more per chip even with lower prices.
I truly believe once Zen3 is out Intel is going to be in a world of hurt for 1-2 years. If Zen3 really does bring in decent IPC changes and the 7nm+ does hit a little higher frequencies(it should due to EUV vs quad patterning) then AMD will have better performance regardless if its very high FPS games or what. Intel's Ice Lake(To clarify desktop/Server parts that are not out as of yet.) may be competitive so will have to see how this comes out in the wash.
Intels EMIB and Foveros are extremely elegant solutions far more advanced than anything AMD has to date. The ability to stack of silicon along with interconnected chiplets is lovely but we are still 2+ years from Intel having a desktop or server part. intel is projecting 2022 to have EMIB on 7nm using EUV which I tend to believe them this time around. Intel does not tend to fail more than once in a row at least if we look back at history.
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