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Comment by twotwotwo

Like the post says near the end, this seems like at least partly the result of AMD not being the size of Intel or Apple, so not being able to have the staffing to create, validate, etc. two radically different large and small designs. So instead they tweak the synthesis of one design to lower max freq in exchange for area. There's less perf downside to using these cores, but less area/power upside.

The perf impact of this or any hybrid design is also blunted by the power/cooling limits on non-hybrid designs: you can't afford to blast all the full-size cores on the chip at the max theoretical frequency at once anyway. Then, at the other end, lightly-threaded workloads can run mostly or only on the larger cores, so they're not heavily impacted either.

If there's a way this ends up fun for consumer folks that follow this stuff, it'd probably be by allowing products w/more cores. In server chips using Zen 4c (Bergamo), more cores is explicitly the focus. On their desktop platform, one CCD of full-sized cores and one of smaller cores would allow a 24C two-CCD package. That would add another "flavor" of CPU, the way X3D is another "flavor", but I suspect there are applications where the extra throughput could help. No particular hints that this is part of their plans, to be clear.

parent twotwotwo 2 years ago

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