Y'know and manufacturing costs from being able to minimize the die size on a new process. And being able to bin and reuse those dies across the whole product stack. And being better able to optimize for frequency with most IO spun off to a seperate die. And being able to provide semi-custom designs at a dramatically lower price point.
So again, its a tradeoff. You get flexibility and pay in terms of cost, performance, and power. They are *only* doing this because of the slowdown in scaling.
I see a nice benefit for servers, especially if they want to get it out quick. And that's what it looks like AMD did. But for the mass client market where the dies sold are in the 100mm2 or smaller range, all loss and no wins.
Yes, and I do realize the chiplets are only 70mm2. That's why I can see them making a chiplet + I/O part that replaces Pinnacle Ridge? But for an iGPU part?
That's why it makes more sense to do it this way:
-iGPU-less Desk-Ridge and EPYC = chiplets on MCM
-Raven Ridge market = monolithic.
I'm not sold on memory latency being a big deal, in gaming or in general, else we would see much better scalling with memory speed on Intel systems.
Go open up your computer and look at the board. See where the CPU is. Then look at where the DRAM is. That distance = latency. Say in an imaginary world you make the DRAM zero latency and infinite bandwidth, but there's still the latency of having to travel the physical distance.
Integration achieves the lowest physical distance between the CPU and the DRAM. That's how you reduce the latency. Of course other things matter like how the memory controller deals with things but all things equal, integration is faster because of that.
For larger Server chips sure. For Desktop/Laptop parts? I don't think so.
I agree. And it probably makes sense on Kabylake-G successors. Everything else its better having it monolithic.
AMD is a small company relative to Intel.
Do you really think they have the resources to do an across the board release of many 2019 products at once?
Even Intel doesn't do this. But that has more to do with needing time to cater for different markets than anything. Also, just because you have more money on hand, doesn't mean you go wasting it.