It's clear that the beast needs to be fed better. Hopefully, with the 14nm++ refresh (Cascade Lake) Intel ships these things with faster L3 cache and higher out-of-the-box memory speed support.
The difference if true, is astonishing. A 33% increase in mesh speed increase results in 12% increase in Tomb Raider and 5% increase with Total War.
Unfortunately, I do not believe the situation will improve, if much.
Skylake-X is
disappointing for
client because its a derivative of a server architecture. Because many cores are more readily taken advantage of, you can go with lower clocks but have more cores. Since we have an upper limit on the frequency of about 5GHz, and that's with overclocking, the stock chips end up being fair bit less.
The die is already complex with all the additions so to reach the clock speeds expected on the client side, something had to go. That happens to be the mesh, which the L3 cache uses to communicate, and since its a much more integrated interconnect(unlike Infinity Fabric) it essentially becomes to represent L3 performance.
But on server, they won't have such issues. The cores are in the lower 3GHz range, which means client cores are 30-45% higher in frequency. Because uncore speeds likely won't change, relatively the mesh will perform 30-45% better than on client.
The real end of Moore's Law isn't about density, or the whatever the nm(or what marketing wants to you to believe) is supposed to represent. It's that there's no such thing as pure gains anymore. Using a car analogy, with newer generation you could end up with a truck that blows away the hauling capacity of preceding trucks while at the same time being able to still outperform previous generation race-oriented cars in acceleration and top speed.
Now, its all a trade-off. That's why purpose-built chips and circuits are all the rage. GPUs, ASICs, various accelerator instructions and circuits in CPUs. The trade-off is a normal thing in every other part of human life. Except... computers. Until now.
Presumably it travels from one die to another via EMIB using a mesh "lane
Yea.... no. Totally different. Mesh is a purpose-built internal interconnect. There are different electrical and physical aspects to consider and because of that it ends up being way different.