Discussing Arrow Lake, Zen 5, and Xeon vs EPYC w/ Anonymous Intel Engineer
Added 2024-10-11 23:57:38 +0000 UTCThe next episode of Broken Silicon will see the return of the Anonymous Intel Engineer! Of course, we will be heavily discussing Arrow Lake, Lunar Lake, Panther Lake, Zen 5, Turin, and Granite Rapids...but we can talk about anything from "the usual companies" you want!
This person is a veteran who can speak with authority about architectures while also having exposure to many different types of products that he himself is interested in - so don't be scared to ask anything! You have ~48 hours to submit, but we would appreciate if most could be submitted over the next 4-8 hours!
Comments
For tech companies to stay relevant they have to provide products and solutions that help solve current problems. The hottest current problem is AI and a lot of money is being invested in AI itself and also products and solutions supporting AI. But has this focus on AI gone too far? What does the state of the Royal Core project say about Intel’s expectations of the future of x86? It feels dangerously close to saying that x86 doesn’t have a future.
Chris Rijk
2024-10-13 15:59:01 +0000 UTCArguments about x86 vs ARM come up a lot despite both being decades old. Looking at consumer processors from a performance or efficiency perspective, what advantages would you say modern x86 has over modern ARM and what advantages would you say ARM has over x86?
Chris Rijk
2024-10-13 15:58:22 +0000 UTCCinebench and Geekbench are popular and easy to run, but are they any good? What do you consider to be their weakest aspects? Is there any benchmark that you would consider to be the best for comparing consumer processors from a user perspective. What about from a chip designer’s perspective?
Chris Rijk
2024-10-13 15:57:31 +0000 UTCIt seems like AVX10 is primarily to bring vector processing to e-cores. Please discuss how this will benefit AI, gaming, content creators etc. Also when might we see this released for consumers?
Kiln God
2024-10-13 14:06:47 +0000 UTCAs an engineer, what do you think of the AI marketing stuff all around silicon today? It seems like every tech product must be linked to AI in some way. Also, what do you think of the Intel Ultra branding? I don’t think it has caught on and it proved to be less iconic than the i7 brand.
MultiNati
2024-10-13 09:16:46 +0000 UTCHave you heard anything about Intel's successor to their N100 and N200 CPUs? These are probably the coolest products from them in years and I am excited to see an even more powerful sub-15W PC in the near future.
Wolfie
2024-10-13 01:53:26 +0000 UTCIn every Zen generation, AMD has focused on the development and production economics of their platform, small CCDs to get high yields, re-usable, modular pieces to avoid reinventing the wheel. Intel, on the other hand, I would argue has so far struggled to find direction with their multi-die designs, using wacky mirrored dies for Sapphire Rapids, reducing die counts in Emerald Rapids, and only splitting IO with the client dies before Granite rapids. Why do you think intel struggles to focus on a coherent, overarching design philosophy, whereas AMD has basically locked into one from the start (of Zen)?
qhfreddy
2024-10-13 01:27:02 +0000 UTCCan you give a ballpark figure for the cost to sell for a typical desktop processor die/package? I.e the variable cost for producing each additional unit. I feel like a lot of people vastly overestimate how much the unit production cost really is.
qhfreddy
2024-10-13 01:22:22 +0000 UTCHow would he rate Pat’s leadership and decision making from 1-10?
Paul Hope
2024-10-12 15:13:34 +0000 UTCHello Tom and Mr. Engineer. Two questions here. Do IFS stumbles effect how Xeon products are designed? Do Intel engineers prefer TSMC over IFS?
CompressedAIBlocks
2024-10-12 14:31:33 +0000 UTCWhere did Arrow Lake go wrong? It's multiple node jumps with multiple chiplets and it's still (seemingly at least, let's wait for reviews/in depth testing) behind on power consumption and performance, outside of maybe productivity.
CompressedAIBlocks
2024-10-12 14:26:42 +0000 UTCWhat ever happened to Intel Adamantine? That sounded like such a cool feature for Intel to be adding to their products in the future, but as far as I know it hasn't materialized in any way. Is that still on the roadmap somewhere, or has it faded into the aether like Royal Core?
Mozria
2024-10-12 13:42:05 +0000 UTCWhere do you see the server CPU market going in the future? Is it going to be a 1000-2000 mini-cores chip? Or will it be like nothing but a conductor for an orchestra of GPUs and ASICs?
Sakosha
2024-10-12 08:02:35 +0000 UTCHello Tom and AIE! What do you think is biggest Intel opportunity at the moment and its biggest concern?
Gian Violi
2024-10-12 07:24:24 +0000 UTCHello, Tom and AIE. I've heard that some of the devastation wrought by Hurricane Helene included mines yielding quartz vital to the processor manufacturing industry. How serious do you think this really is to the industry as a whole, and will it drive prices on C/GPUs up or cause production delays until operations can resume?
Schattenjäger
2024-10-12 04:30:02 +0000 UTCWhen designing a processor for the desktop market, do you know how much effort is put into simulating gaming performance compared to other workloads? Do you know how accurate those gaming simulations are? If you don’t have any specific knowledge on this can you talk about how results from simulations are used to drive design decisions in general?
Chris Rijk
2024-10-12 02:02:43 +0000 UTCWhen I look at how the gaming focused 7800X3D has dominated DIY sales in the last year, it seems obvious that consumers value gaming performance more than anything else. As an individual, would you agree? How would you say Intel as a whole sees it? The reason I ask is that it seems strange to me that both AMD and Intel seem happy to launch new processors into the DIY market that are bad at gaming and then seem surprised at poor sales. I have to wonder how and why this is happening.
Chris Rijk
2024-10-12 01:47:57 +0000 UTCHello Tom and Anonymous Intel Engineer! What does Intel's leadership think of AMD's competitiveness internally, both on the desktop and server? Publicly, they've seemed somewhat dismissive. How confident are they actually in their ability to execute on the roadmap, both design and manufacturing side? Finally, what products/features coming down the pipe excite you the most?
panic582d
2024-10-12 01:24:38 +0000 UTCHello Tom and Anonymous Intel Engineer, After seeing the release of Zen 5 on server it makes me wonder if some of Zen 5's issues are related to the IO die. For instance, the supported memory speeds are higher on server then desktop for the first time ever I think.
Joseph Kelly
2024-10-12 00:03:26 +0000 UTC
