| Bofferbrauer2 said: Well, that external I/O die serves a dual purpose: It allows to turn the CPUs into mass-produced CPU chiplets that can be used in a multitude of products without needing tons of different masks and for AMD to keep it's obligation with Globalfoundries in terms of minimum wafers they have to buy from them. Besides, for an external I/O chip, the latencies are quite good. I agree on the frequency, but I think the IPC was their priority, as it should be. Increased clock speeds will probably come with future chips. I'm interested to see what Zen2 will do in Laptops and APUs early next year, and how they implement these. Will they keep the chiplet designs or go for a more monolithic design? And how will it fare against the newly announced Ice Lake chips there? |
Hopefully, AMD will just go back to monolithic at least in the desktop/mobile space once their obligations with GF are met by the end of 2021 because consumer applications are still sensitive to latencies ...
AMD still needs to bake some more timing optimizations into their future micro-architectures ...
Personally, I'm more interested in future processors based on Zen 4/5 or maybe something even from Intel if they get their shit together to replace my 6600K. New features like PCIE5, USB4, and DDR5 are a must have in my new system. I don't know if I'll go with 8 or 16 cores ... (probably 8 though since I'll just save 16 cores in the future for PCIE6/DDR6)
