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Comment by ThatMedicIsASpy | Hacker News Reader

All-around winner in what? For $500 you can get a lot more cores.

All-around winning, $500, 8 cores makes no sense.

This thing has a premium gaming price tag because there is nothing close to it other than their own 7800X3D.

In theory, yes. But in the real world the bottleneck of the same 128 bit wide memory, interface that's been popular way back since the time of dual core chips.

Less cache misses (on popular workloads) helps decrease power and increase performance enough that few things benefit from 12-16 cores.

Thus the M3 max (with a 512 bit wide memory system) has a class leading single core and multi-core scores.

I'm not so sure about memory actually being the bottleneck for these 8 core parts. If memory bandwidth is the bottleneck this should show up in benchmarks with higher dram clocks. I can't find any good application benchmarks, but computerbase.de did it for gaming with 7800MHz vs 6000MHz and didn't find much of a difference [1]

The apple chips are APUs and need a lot of their memory bandwidth for the gpu. Are there any good resources on how much of this bandwidth is actually used in common cpu workloads? Can the CPU even max out half of the 512bit bus?

[1] https://www.computerbase.de/artikel/prozessoren/amd-ryzen-7-...

For AMD I think Infinity Fabric is the bottleneck so increasing memory clock without increasing IF clock does nothing. And it's also possible that 8 cores with massive cache simply don't need more bandwidth.

My understanding is the single CCD chips (like the 9800x3d) have 2 IF links, while the dual CCD chips (like the 9950x) have 1. Keep in mind these CCDs are shared with turin (12 channel), threadripper pro (8 channel), siena (6 channel), threadripper (4 channel).

The higher CCD configurations have 1 IF link per chip, the lower have 2 IF links per chip. Presumably AMD would bother with the 2 IF link chips unless it helped.

I can't find anything to back that up.

That said, each link gives a CCD 64GB/s of read speed and 32GB/s of write speed. 8000MHz memory at 128 bits would get up to 128GB/s. So being stuck with one link would bottleneck badly enough to hide the effects of memory speed.

I've been paying close attention, found various hints at anandtech (RIP), chips and cheese, and STH.

It doesn't make much difference to most apps, but I believe the single CCD (like the 9700x) has better bandwidth to IOD then their dual CCD chips, like the 9900x and 9950x

Similarly on the server chips you can get 2,4,8, or 16 CCDs. To get 16 cores you can use 2 CCDs or 16 CCDs! But the sweet spot (max bandwidth per CCD) is at 8 CCDs where you get a decent number of cores and twice the bandwidth per CCD. Keep in mind the genoa/turin EPYC chips have 24 channels (32 bit x 24) for a 768 bit wide memory interface. Not nearly as constrained as their desktops.

Wish I could paste in a diagram, but check out:

https://www.amd.com/content/dam/amd/en/documents/epyc-techni...

Page 7 has a diagram of 96 core with one GMI (IF) port per CCD and a 32 core chip two GMI ports per CCD.

That's a gen old I believe, the max CCDs is now 16, not 12 with turin.

So "GMI3-wide" and similar terms are the important things to search for.

some diagrams: https://www.servethehome.com/amd-epyc-genoa-gaps-intel-xeon-...

From another page: "The most noteworthy aspect is that there is a new GMI3-Wide format. With Client Zen 4 and previous generations of Zen chiplets, there was 1 GMI link between the IOD and CCD. With Genoa, in the lower core count, lower CCD SKUs, multiple GMI links can be connected to the CCD."

And it seems like all the chiplets have two links, but everything I can find says they just don't hook up both on consumer parts.

Didn't find anything clearly stating one way or another, but the CCD is the same between ryzen and epyc, so there's certainly the possibility.

I dug around a bit, and it seems Ryzen doesn't get it. I guess that makes sense, if the IOD on ryzen gets 2 GMI links. On the single CCD parts there's no other CCD to talk to. On the dual CCD parts there's not enough GMI links to have both with GMI-wide.

Maybe this will be different on the pending Zen 5 part (Strix Halo) that will have 256 bits wide (16 x 32 bit) @ 8533 MHz = 266 GB/sec since there will be 2 CCDs and a significant bump to memory bandwidth.

I'm pretty sure that memory bandwidth is only for the GPU just like on Apple silicon.

Yeah, the most relevant diagram I can find shows 32 bytes wide per core cluster and 128 bytes to the GPU.

Apple silicon manages around 50% (giver or take) for the CPUs.

This was only true for Epyc, and only true for a small number of low CCD SKUs.

Consumer platforms do NOT do this; this has actually been discussed in depth in the Threadripper Pro space. The low CCD parts were hamstrung by the shortage of IF links, meaning that they got a far smaller bump from more than 4 channels of populated RAM than they could have.

Ah, interesting and disappointing. I've been looking for more memory bandwidth. The M4 max is tempting, even if only half the bandwidth is available to the CPUs. I was also looking at the low end epyc, like the Epyc Turin 9115 (12 channel) or Siena 8124P (6 channel). Both in the $650-$750 range, but it's frustratingly hard to figure out what they are actually capable of.

I do look forward to the AMD Strix Halo (256 bit x 8533 MHz).

Well there's much more to memory performance than bandwidth. Generally applications are relatively cache friendly, thus the X3D helps a fair bit, especially with more intensive games (ones that barely hit 60 fps, not the silly game benchmarks that hit 500 fps).

Generally CPUs have relatively small reorder windows, so a cache miss hurts bad, 80ns latency @ 5 GHz is 400 clock cycles, and something north of 1600 instructions that could have been executed. If one in 20 operations is a cache miss that's a serious impediment to getting any decent fraction of peak performance. The pain of those cache misses is part of why the X3D does so well, even a few less cache misses can increase performance a fair bit.

With 8c/16 threads having only 2 (DDR4) or 4 (DDR5) cache misses pending with a 128 bit wide system means that in any given 80-100ns window only 2 or 4 cores can continue resume after a cache miss. DDR-6000 vs DDR-7800 doesn't change that much, you still wait the 80-100ns, you just get the cache line in 8 (16 for ddr5) cycles @ 7800MT/sec instead of 8 (16 for DDR5) cycles @ 6000MT/sec. So the faster DDR5 means more bandwidth (good for GPUs), but not more cache transactions in flight (good for CPUs).

With better memory systems (like the Apple m3 max) you could have 32 cache misses per 80-100ns. I believe about half of those are reserved for the GPU, but even 16 would mean that all of the 9800X3Ds 16 threads could resolve a cache miss per 80-100ns instead of just 2 or 4.

That's part of why a M4 max does so well on multithreaded code. M4 max does better on geekbench 6 multithread than not only the 9800x3d (with 16 threads) but also a 9950x (with 16c/32 threads). Pretty impressive for a low TDP chip that fits in thin/light laptop with great battery life and competes well against Zen 5 chips with a 170 watt TDP that often use water cooling.

> only 2 (DDR4) or 4 (DDR5) cache misses pending with a 128 bit wide system

Isn't that the purpose of banks and bank groups, letting a bunch of independent requests work in parallel on the same channel?

Dimms are dumb. Not sure, but maybe rambus helped improve this. Dimms are synchronous and each memory channel can have a single request pending. So upon a cache miss on the last level cache (usually L3) you send a row, column, wait 60ns or so, then get a cache line back. Each memory channel can only have a single memory transaction (read or write) in flight. The memory controller (usually sitting between the L3 and ram) can have numerous cache misses pending, each waiting for the right memory channel to free.

There are minor tweaks, I believe you can send a row, column, then on future accesses send only the column. There's also slight differences in memory pages (a dimm page != kernel page) that decrease latency with locality. But the differences are minor and don't really move the needle on main memory latency of 60 ns (not including the L1/l2/l3 latency which have to miss before getting to the memory controller).

There are of course smarter connections, like AMD's hypertransport or more recently infinity fabric (IF) that are async and can have many memory transactions in flight. But sadly the dimms are not connected to HT/IF. IBM's OMI is similar, fast async serial interface, with an OMI connection to each ram stick.

What would you suggest instead?

It is pretty competitive on the Multi-Core rating: https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/8633320 compared to other CPUs: https://browser.geekbench.com/processor-benchmarks

The benchmarks in the article suggest that more cores are largely wasted on real world applications.

Yes so buy according to your needs? 8 cores do not cost $500.

They do when those cores are 2 to 4 times faster than the rest.

Cores or "cores"?

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