George Cozma
Appearances
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
It had a very basic and bare bones AVX 512 implementation. But that's fine.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
Well, here's the thing, right? It's an old part, absolutely. But Intel bought the team and It was essentially an AccuHire. They got the folks from Centaur three years ago. Oh, so this is a recent thing.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
No, no, no. So Centaur was broken up essentially in 2021, as the Wikipedia article says. VIA still has x86 licensing, but the Centaur team isn't at VIA anymore.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
I'm talking about a chip that was due for release in 2022.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
The iceberg. The iceberg broke the line. So VIA, who was the parent company, basically shuttered the Austin headquarters. And the team was acquired by Intel for $125 million. That's a hell of an acquirer. Yeah. Here's the thing.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
was expecting it and it was very um the amount of information that has been shared about it has been close to zero interesting and if you ask anyone that formerly was there they they don't say anything it's it's kind of weird okay interesting and so then in via i didn't realize that via was an x86 license holder
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
So they had licenses from IDT, which is what Centaur used to be, and Cyrex, because they acquired Cyrex. Right. So they had licensing, and I think they still technically do, which is how Zhaoxin, which is a Chinese x86 manufacturer, has the ability to make x86 CPUs, which that's a whole history in and of itself.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
But the reason why I brought them up is because what was supposed to be their newest course, CNS, was supposed to have had ABX 512 capabilities, but it was a very bare-bones implementation of ABX 512.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
And if the eCourse had had a bare-bones implementation,
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
Yeah. Alexander Yee, the creator of Y Cruncher, did a very good write-up on Zen 5's AVX 5.12 implementation. Oh, yeah. And he went very, very into it and basically said, yeah, this is the best AVX 5.12 implementation so far.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
That's part of it. Another part is just the increase in the number of registers. They doubled the number of registers. Yeah. They made a lot of ops single cycle, which is nice. There were some trade-offs that were made. Some of the integer stuff was made to cycle, which was a bit of a cavity in the tooth, so to speak, fly in the ointment. But other than that, it's...
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
The way that AMD can just not have to... So with Intel, you always had that sort of clock offset where if you run any AVX-512 code, you would suddenly decrease in your clocks, right? AMD doesn't have that. How they accomplish that, I have no idea. But you can throw in AVX-512 instructions and...
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
thermal and power, um, like clock speed, um, pullback, it won't have this turbo clock thing where you have, where, where if you introduce any AVX 512 instructions, even if they're just loaded store instructions. they'll decrease the CPU clock regardless. You don't have that with Zen 5 or Zen 4 for that matter.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
Yeah. It's, How do I put this? So I think what Zen... And if you read the initial sort of coverage of Turin... Sorry, not of Turin, of Granite Rapids. So that's Intel's newest Xeon chip.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
They're... All the coverage was like, yeah, it's good. It competes with Genoa. But we were all briefed before this. And we were just sort of thinking, yeah, but is this actually going to compete with what's coming up next? And it's, let's put it this way. At least AMD isn't competing with itself anymore, if you get what I mean. But it's not a good competition for Intel.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
Like, it's not a winning one for Intel. They can at least bid on something and not be laughed immediately out of the room, but...
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
And the fact that there's only two 500-watt SKUs. I actually really like that. The fact that while they are going up to that 500 watt skew, they're only really leaving it for the highest end parts. Whereas everything else is 400 or below. And I really actually respect that.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
Yeah, yeah. It has... 400 watts is still a large amount of power, no doubt. But if you remember the slide that AMD showed with a seven to one consolidation. If you could do that, right? If you can go from a thousand racks of 8280s to 131 racks of- Oxide, what?
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
Yeah, but if you can do that reduction, even though the single SKU power has gone up, your total power savings has gone, like your total power of the data center has gone down.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
It was obviously a lot more focused towards the high end. Yeah. Like it was very much skewed, pun intended, towards the hyperscalers, right? Towards those people who can take that much power and just not care. But I think especially with the Turin SKU stack, I think it's a lot more sort of a refresh across the board. Yeah. Which is really good. Yeah.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
No. I've noticed that Hacker News has been picking us up more and more. That's great. And... Ironically enough, so we recently moved over to Substack and we noticed that Seemingly, the SEO for Substack is a lot better. So that article got a lot more traction.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
So it being at the top of multiple sites, aggregator sites, doesn't surprise me.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
Yeah, basically what AMD has said is there's these 500-watt SKUs But if you are an end user, like if you're a small-medium business and you bought, say, four Turret servers from Dell or whoever, don't just swap out the chips.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
And you can get some very weird, weird, bizarre behavior that you're just going, why is it doing this? And you'll tear your hair out for a week trying to figure it out. And it's just because of the power.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
You know, this could be... Yeah, and what's funny was the video actually did really well.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
Yeah. Oh, so there was the video part of the article.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
And most... What I've noticed is that, so you guys can't see the like ratio, but it currently has a 100% like ratio.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
Yeah. And with the voltages that current server CPUs are running, you're having, at those 800-watt spikes, it's not 800 amps. It's 1,000-plus amps, which means more power stages.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
So actually, sort of the thing sort of related but unrelated to TURN directly at the event that was announced was Pensando, new Pensando stuff.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
I don't know if you saw these Adam, but it was just like, I have, I think a lot of it is because like, I mean, we, what, last month or just the month before Anand Tech closed?
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
So speaking of how you guys don't want to do DPs, because AMD didn't just announce DP, which is Pensando Selena 400. They also announced Polara, which I think is just a standard NIC. Like it's P4, but it's not a DPU.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
Okay. Yeah. Cause I was going to say, is that the one that you're more interested in?
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
For the last time, a lot of the older folks like Ace Hardware Review, Real World Tech, David Cantor doesn't really write anymore. So a lot of the in-depth stuff has sort of disappeared over time.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
yeah um and i know you guys as were a lot of us disappointed with uh intel discontinuing the tofino line of switches.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
Yes. But yeah. And one question I have One question I have with AMD is, does it make sense for them to make their own Switch eventually?
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
Which, ironically enough, Intel is now a part of.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
More so that I think people want an alternative to... That really goes in depth.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
So that was Y Cruncher. a hundred billion, uh, BPT, uh, B, B, B, B, B, excuse me. It's hard to say. Um, but basically it, it, All it does is it's a compute benchmark. So it just wants as many threads and as high clocks as you can get. It's not memory bound at all. But the prior record at the time of that video was about 10 seconds. And that was a sub five second result.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
And I see Jordan in the chat or as one of the audience members, he was running it with someone else in the room, Jeff from Graph Computing. And I was doing my video and I see him in my eye trying to wave this laptop.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
So I know when I was first booting my 9950X system, I put in the dims, I turned it on, I went, grabbed a cup of coffee, came back,
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
It's really funny that you guys are talking about like three megabaud and whatnot, because, so slight tangent. So I used to work, back when I was in college, I used to work at the on-campus observatory. And there was a data uplink from the observatory to the lab, which was about a mile and a half distance. It was still running 800 baud for some serial connection.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
Yeah, but mind you, this was just a, all it was was basically just the go signal to start the power up for everything.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
Yeah, so basically you would send the message and then you would either walk or drive up And by the time you got there, it was done. But it was like, and then, and then the way that you had to connect to all of it was through a, through a BBS.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
Speaking of sort of... Again, sort of a question to you guys, because this is stuff that I... I know a lot more about CPUs and GPUs than I do sort of the networking and the sort of lower level intricacies of all this.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
Yeah. But sort of, So I asked you this back when I was in San Francisco meeting you guys in person. What do you think of sort of the updates to OpenSeal and how that's been going to get rid of AGESA?
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
Sort of three things here, if you don't mind. Um, What surprised me most about Turrent specifically was one, the fact that they hit five gigahertz on some SKUs.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
Yeah, because I know when we last talked about OpenCell, it was very much in sort of the initial stage of it being ramped up and what was happening with it. It does seem like AMD is adopting more open standards with regards to sort of, because they also announced Calibra, which is open source root of trust stuff.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
On a server CPU. Yeah. But not just hit five gigahertz. Like I wrote in the article, Wendell from Level One Text in a essentially web server workload was hitting 4.9 gigahertz all core. That's nutty. That's utterly, utterly nutty.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
Well, not just populating it, the fact of having that channel, right? So for Turret, it's 6,000 up to 6,400 with validation, but 6,000 with one DPC. 4,400 with two DPC, and then 5,200 if you're running one DPC in a two DPC board. So the fact of just having that second channel, you're losing a whole bunch of your memory clocks.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
Well, no, IBM C is the only, or really the only folks that do that sort of over five gigahertz consistently in server. Intel back in the day, if you remember those Black Ops CPUs, they were doing five gigahertz. And I believe that there was one, the last Oracle, Spark CPU, the M8, went up to five years. Did it really? But other than that, I'm having to draw upon some fairly niche CPUs here.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
Yeah, I think that the 12 channel, one DPC move is probably the right move. I do like that AMD is giving the option for a two DPC setup with all 12 channels. But I could definitely see how people would really want Especially if in the future we go to, say, 16 memory channels. There's no way you're doing 2 DPC on that. Right. Yeah. Right? We're going to have to go to 1 DPC.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
Now, stuff like MR DIMMs can help with capacity and bring back that sort of 2-channel capacity or the capacity that 2 DIMMs per channel will get you. But... Yeah, I think the 2D PC has been, the writing has been on the wall for it for a long time now.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
Because Intel's MRDIMS on Granite Rapids is not the JDEC MRDIMS. They are different. It's essentially just MCRDIMS relabeled, which made me tear my hair out because they're not technically compatible standards.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
So I wanted to scream and shout and let it all out as the famous song goes, because that was utterly infuriating to me because you're saying you have MR Dems, but they're not really MR Dems, the Jadak spec.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
The fact that what is effectively a mainstream CPU can do this is crazy. But add on to that, just... The fact that Zen 5C, so sort of those compact cores, have the full 512-bit FPU, I think that that's really impressive considering that they're sticking 16 of them into a single CCD now.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
The 9175F is a 16-core turn part up to 5 gigahertz. But it's 16 CCDs with one core per CCD. It's designed for EDA. It is. Absolutely.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
Yeah, so the 9175F, I think for any EDA workloads, is sort of the torrent part for that. Then you have the 9575F, which to me feels like the drop-in replacement for all the OEMs for Genoa. You just take out all your Genoa chips and you put that in, and it's just...
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
Yeah, so here's the difference between Zen 5 and Zen 5C. From an architecture perspective, nothing. Until you hit L3, there's no difference. Now, are they on different nodes? Yes. Is there an Fmax difference? Yes. But the fact that they're still hitting 3.7...
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
You get better ST, so single thread and sort of low thread count workload performance to the 9654, so that's the top end Genoa SKU, but basically just as good multi-thread performance at similar power pulling, similar power numbers. So to me, that feels like the drop in replacement And then the big boys, the 9965 and the 9755.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
Those are the top end big performance that the hyperscalers and all the... people who can use that power will grab. Right.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
Speaking of GPUs, something that wasn't covered in the media, even by us, was that when AMD gave their turn presentation to the media, While AI was a big part, they didn't just... When asked about HPC and FP64, they're like, yeah, we're absolutely supporting that. Do not worry. And that was sort of a big relief on my shoulders because it was like, thank God you're not just talking about AI.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
Like, there's HPC going on here. There's more than just... like low data types, there's FP64 things happening, thankfully.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
So, so yeah, the, the 9575F was, was targeted towards sort of the head node for AI CPU that, that was its, what AMD was targeting it as. But I honestly think that in a general compute sense, it's, it's sort of the all rounder in my opinion. Yeah. Um, so.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
Yeah. Yeah. Um, and sort of wrapping up with instinct because there was some, a lot of people were concerned about the APU chip, which I think you and I had talked about.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
So I think there was some misunderstanding or was misheard in what was said Um, because when I, when I went and I asked for clarification after, uh, after the presentation, what it sounded like was. They aren't making APS every generation right now because their customers see sort of the X use as the AI chip and the ACE uses the HPC chip.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
f max so that's your top clock is really impressive and the no difference is i think you're on what three nanometer for the 5c and four nanometer for the yes and five is that right yes these are all tsmc obviously so on their c cores they jumped uh 600 megahertz so from 3.1 to 3.7 um god that is amazing yeah yeah and and i there was a good point made and i think the biggest jump
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
So all of the big hyperscalers are only looking at the X use. And it's like, when, when you have to fight between. The hyperscalers and this slightly more niche part, it's like, yeah, unfortunately that will win. But from what I was able to gather, they do see the APUs as the future for not just AI, but for HBC and moving forward. So they are continuing development. There's no ending going on.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
Just much like 3DVCache, That was announced that Turrent X is not coming. And it's because the cadences are different, and there's certain dials that you get to pick. so to speak.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
No, so this was something that I've been bugging them for a while about. And by the way, if you guys see an AMD MI300A dev kit come out, I'm going to claim some level of responsibility for that.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
Yeah, I've been trying to get them to put that out and sell it on Newegg, like Ampere Computing sells their Altera Max bundle where it's the board and a CPU. I'm like, just sell that on Newegg for, I don't really care how much money, just have one.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
But yeah, I've been pushing them to do that. And in general, I've been pushing them as much as it's within my ability to fix certain parts of their software stack. Rock them.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
Yeah. On the APU side in, in just in general on the sort of getting there. Cause the perennial problem for AMD has been software. And to the best of my ability, I've been trying to get through to them that they need to have Rockham support on every single piece of AMD. Anything that has the AMD logo on it should run Rockham.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
With the one exception maybe being consoles, because those are a special little thing. But that's a different argument over there.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
in recent AMD history in terms of the server performance. It's not Zen 4 to Zen 5. It's Zen 4C to Zen 5C.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
And you know, we're, it helps not hearing it from, from, but if any AMD users are listening to this at, at super computing and at CES, I'm going to be harping on you guys.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
I think that performance jump is far from... Like, I think that that's really, really exciting performance. But what I really like about Turret is not just that there's these big old high-end SKUs, the 128 and 192 core SKUs, but they've paid attention to this mid-range, right?
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
With the 9575F, that's a high-frequency 64-core SKU that I was talking about that was getting 4.9 from Windows testing on all cores. I think that that sort of skew, the fact that they still are paying attention to sort of the mid-range is really good. It's expensive, no doubt, but... Yeah.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
So, Joe McCurry from AMD put it, economy cores. Economy cores. When he said that on stage, Ian and I were laughing for about five minutes straight.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
And I... let's just say that's, that's something I've harped on Intel about is they really, the fact that they now have an ISA segmentation.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
It's bad. It's bad. Don't segment your ISA, please. Yeah. Like that's, that's how you shoot yourself in the foot. Something fierce.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
Is that right? So on the client side, yes, that's true. On the server side, that's not correct. All server chips have the same cores. So there are two Xeon 6 lineups, the Xeon 6000Ps and the Xeon 6000Bs.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
and the p's are for the p cores there's no merger of yeah so just to be clear it's like it's like ryanair it's like all economy yes on this one but but the thing with that is and here's sort of the cleverness of zen 5 versus n5c and that is amd can just have one big skew stack and that's it yeah intel you need these two different skew stacks
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
And it can start getting confusing with what has what and where.
Oxide and Friends
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
The thing here is I think the area would be, even if it was a bare bones implementation, I don't know if you guys remember Centaur, Centaur CNS. That was, if you guys remember VIA, that was a VIA CPU that never actually hit market, but you were able to test Um, thanks to a couple of guys who acquired some during the Centaur, uh, buyout days about three years ago. Um.