Re: Tough Times at Santa Clara
On Ryzen: I am one satisfied customer!
AdoredTV on YouTube has a good summary of events: the design of the Infinity fabric is to make use of the fact that smaller cores give higher yields (so you can get more chips per wafer, which means lower costs per unit, and more working cores per wafer). For example: an 8 core Ryzen is 4 units tied together, ThreadRipper will be 8 of these tied together, Epyc 16 tied together (and one rather large chip area) - but the main point is that the Zen architecture is shared up and down the line for everything - making development costs a lot easier for AMD. If this design holds up to what is asked of it: AMD can wheel out multi-core chips at a faster pace, throwing more cores in as needed.
So yes: AMD this time around appear to have a good formula, and a solid plan for the CPU division, backed by a whole lot of engineering into a fresh architecture. Hopefully they get better on the marketing.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
