I need… more powahhh…
No but seriously why don’t they build a 128-core atom server. That’s really all anybody wants. I don’t need the fastest most immersed cpu ever, just a bunch of decent ones at 30W or less.
No but seriously why don’t they build a 128-core atom server. That’s really all anybody wants. I don’t need the fastest most immersed cpu ever, just a bunch of decent ones at 30W or less.
30 watts is low power mobile and "edge" compute.
After M1 and Graviton, there's a big rush for making denser server CPUs, pretty much bifurcating the market. Much more powerful than old Atom cores, but more power-efficient than regular ones, and targeted mostly at hyperscalers. AMD should have a dense variant of Zen 4 out next year, going up to 128 cores and reducing per-core power significantly. Intel will likely have a competitor out in 2024, and AMD might hit 256 cores then, although rumors of things that far out aren't very specific. On the ARM side of things, NVIDIA is launching CPUs like this next year. Qualcomm bought Nuvia, which was working on similar server CPUs, but probably switched focus to PCs. There are some other oddballs like Tenstorrent as well.
One interesting part with pushing per-core power so low is that communication between cores starts to be a serious part of total power consumption.
They were an uncomfortable middle ground though, between normal CPUs and GPUs. My benchmarks showed that there wasn’t much of an advantage over 20-ish normal xeon cores (for my HPC workloads).
(Memory is a little fuzzy - that was 4-6 years ago).
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/details/pro...
Though, unless if you 100% need X86, there is the Ampere Altra 128 core Cortex-N1 chip.
Part of that, I think, was lack of parallelism in applications: in order to fully take advantage of those cores, you need to have a nearly-embarrassingly-parallel problem. Otherwise, you're not going to get the performance that you'd expect (but you'll get power efficiency!).
The fact of the matter is, that's not "all anybody wants."
They keep designing chips that use less and less per core. Why not cram as many cores as possible into a single server? Lower density means more wasted material, and once you go below 2GHz you're not saving very much power any more.
Manufacturing yields
Not that it matters either way for this discussion? Whether it's "one server" in that 2U box, or "twenty servers" in that box, you're still shoving in lots of cores and lots of watts to get that density up.