Leo Says Ep 23: The AMD v INTEL High Core Count Episode!

Today Leo is back with a bang. The focus is on Intel v AMD in the High/Extreme Core count sector. But Leo also talks about the new MacBook Pros and their long-awaited upgrade to Intel 8th Gen processors, as well as the news that Nvidia is reportedly inviting press to an event at Gamescom, though there has been no mention of new graphics card. Leo also discusses the plight of Raja Koduri at AMD, as well as upcoming HEDT processors from both Intel and AMD.

00:15 Introduction
00:37 Apple launches new MacBook Pro
01:19 BlackMagic Launch eGPU system for Mac
01:58 Nvidia hold event at Gamescom
03:13 Was Raja incompetent at AMD?
04:35 AMD 2nd Gen Threadripper catch up
06:14 Intel Discussion and Catchup
09:23 AMD v Intel in high/extreme core count sector

NOTES:

Apple launches new MacBook Pro in 13-inch and 15-inch forms with 8th Gen Intel CPUs.
The 13-inch comes with 4-core Core i5 and i7 and Intel graphics while the 15-inch is available with 6-core i7 and i9 and AMD Radeon Pro 555X and 560X graphics.

Blackmagic launches eGPU with RX580 graphics - more gaming and rendering power for mobile users.

Nvidia is holding an event at Gamescom in Cologne, Germany late in August which is around five weeks’ time. Naturally we hope this will be the launch of their Turing graphics, although the invitation only refers to ‘seeing the latest games in action’.

Place your bets they mean a demo of Battlefield V, the question is, running on which hardware?

Was Raja incompetent at AMD? If Raja develops a miracle dGPU he will surely redeem himself. Let’s imagine Intel's dGPU as a scalable part, perhaps with multi-die/MCM, designed for laptops and HPC.

On the desktop Intel will eventually deliver a chipset called Z390 along with an 8-core Coffee Lake.

In the immediate future AMD will launch 2nd Gen Threadripper in mid-August
2950X 24-core
2990X 32-core
250W TDP

Intel Cascade Lake-AP “Advanced Processor Family” BGA5903 copies the CCX concept of Ryzen/Epyc, and will enable Intel to scale core count much easier than with the monolithic approach of previous Xeons. The idea first surfaced with Knights Cove, the successor to Knights Landing, that would have connected two 22-core Ice Lake-X dies to form a dual-die MCM package with 44 cores total.
How will Intel connect the two dies?

It might be an EMIB interconnect. For the logical part they will likely require a very high-speed interconnect that is new, along with 12-channel or 16-channel RAM for each socket. No wonder why they need so many pins on the BGA package

Intel Skylake-X on LGA2066 with up to 18-cores has gone quiet since its launch at Computex 2017.
Skylake-X was due to be replaced by Cascade Lake-X with only minor updates. Still 14nm, very small clock bumps of 100-200MHz and still 18 cores (or possibly 20 or 22) max but Computex 2018 seems to have changed all that.

The ‘up to 28-core’ Ultra HEDT we saw on LGA3647 at an overclocked 5GHz also appears to go by the name Cascade Lake-X, which is odd.
The 28-core Ultra HEDT was promised ‘by the end of this year’ however those CPUs appear to have slipped in Intel’s roadmap for 2019 which looks much more realistic.

Will the 24-core, 26-core and 28-core CPUs be repurposed Skylake-SP Xeons or they will be based on Cascade Lake X?

Power levels are likely to be stratospheric levels but Intel has form here. Examples using LGA3647 are Knights Landing at 260W and Knights Mill at 320W.

If Intel had been able to progress beyond 14nm, how many cores would we currently see in high core count silicon? The maximum at present is 28-core so perhaps 36-cores and it seems that AMD has caught up with the obvious truth that AMD has a massive technological lead over Intel.

At Computex we were told by AMD that EPYC Rome with 64 cores/128 threads will use Zen 2 architecture on 7nm.
They said:
Silicon in labs – Now (June 2018)
Sampling H2 2018
Launch in 2019.
we now hear that AMD will deliver a 48-core Rome before the 64-core version, which sounds like they are rowing back. 48-core EPYC will crush 28-core Xeon so there is no need to rush to 64-core.
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