Thursday, February 27th 2020
AMD Gives Itself Massive Cost-cutting Headroom with the Chiplet Design
At its 2020 IEEE ISSCC keynote, AMD presented two slides that detail the extent of cost savings yielded by its bold decision to embrace the MCM (multi-chip module) approach to not just its enterprise and HEDT processors, but also its mainstream desktop ones. By confining only those components that tangibly benefit from cutting-edge silicon fabrication processes, namely the CPU cores, while letting other components sit on relatively inexpensive 12 nm, AMD is able to maximize its 7 nm foundry allocation, by making it produce small 8-core CCDs (CPU complex dies), which add up to AMD's target core-counts. With this approach, AMD is able to cram up to 16 cores onto its AM4 desktop socket using two chiplets, and up to 64 cores using eight chiplets on its SP3r3 and sTRX4 sockets.
In the slides below, AMD compares the cost of its current 7 nm + 12 nm MCM approach to a hypothetical monolithic die it would have had to build on 7 nm (including the I/O components). The slides suggest that the cost of a single-chiplet "Matisse" MCM (eg: Ryzen 7 3700X) is about 40% less than that of the double-chiplet "Matisse" (eg: Ryzen 9 3950X). Had AMD opted to build a monolithic 7 nm die that had 8 cores and all the I/O components of the I/O die, such a die would cost roughly 50% more than the current 1x CCD + IOD solution. On the other hand, a monolithic 7 nm die with 16 cores and I/O components would cost 125% more. AMD hence enjoys a massive headroom for cost-cutting. Prices of the flagship 3950X can be close to halved (from its current $749 MSRP), and AMD can turn up the heat on Intel's upcoming Core i9-10900K by significantly lowering price of its 12-core 3900X from its current $499 MSRP. The company will also enjoy more price-cutting headroom for its 6-core Ryzen 5 SKUs than it did with previous-generation Ryzen 5 parts based on monolithic dies.
Source:
Guru3D
In the slides below, AMD compares the cost of its current 7 nm + 12 nm MCM approach to a hypothetical monolithic die it would have had to build on 7 nm (including the I/O components). The slides suggest that the cost of a single-chiplet "Matisse" MCM (eg: Ryzen 7 3700X) is about 40% less than that of the double-chiplet "Matisse" (eg: Ryzen 9 3950X). Had AMD opted to build a monolithic 7 nm die that had 8 cores and all the I/O components of the I/O die, such a die would cost roughly 50% more than the current 1x CCD + IOD solution. On the other hand, a monolithic 7 nm die with 16 cores and I/O components would cost 125% more. AMD hence enjoys a massive headroom for cost-cutting. Prices of the flagship 3950X can be close to halved (from its current $749 MSRP), and AMD can turn up the heat on Intel's upcoming Core i9-10900K by significantly lowering price of its 12-core 3900X from its current $499 MSRP. The company will also enjoy more price-cutting headroom for its 6-core Ryzen 5 SKUs than it did with previous-generation Ryzen 5 parts based on monolithic dies.
89 Comments on AMD Gives Itself Massive Cost-cutting Headroom with the Chiplet Design
That actually confirms my hope that they could make an 8/16 core APU.
Such things improve task switching performance. If you have united scheduler you load back the program runtime, afaik. There isn't any seperate second thread discretization.
- Contemporary multi-chip design first probably goes to Pentium D.
So, don't give them too much credit and trust that they use the money in a proper way.
Still waiting for RTX 2080 Ti competitor that was launched back in 2018, soon to be 2 years already.
To name a few, Intel Smithfield (2005), Kentsfield (2006), Clarkdale (2010) and desktop Broadwell (2015) are MCM, although not in the same way as Ryzen 3000.
AMD Bulldozer, Piledriver, Ryzen 1000, Ryzen 2000 are all single die
Back then AMD mocked Intel for not using true multi-core, but "gluing together" CPUs instead. Tbh, Pentium D was horrible.
I had this under wraps in the Broadwell era Iris Pro lineup. Did you know Broadwell G was as quick as 7700k in ST? Considering one is hof material, the clock frequency difference between them pronounce this notion.
It's like a dual core 4.4 GHz Pentium 4 X2.
Slower dual cores like Core 2 Duo at 1.5 GHz will be horrible for browsing.
You have heavy sites like Facebook, YouTube which even if for a moment during the initial loading of the contents, use all the available resources of your CPU.
You can 100% stress an 8-core Ryzen 7 or Core i9.
Cheaper production means more margin and thus more profit. Good for shareholders, good for consumers or enterprises, because if Intel attempts a price cut AMD can pretty much answer that and still make profit.