this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2024
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[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 11 points 4 months ago (5 children)

The overhead of additional instructions isn't the issue, they often translate those instructions into a smaller set of actual operations. It's not like they have a special circuit for every instruction, a lot of instructions translate to a pipeline of multiple, modular circuits.

The actual silicon will look more like ARM despite having a very large difference in instruction set sizes.

[–] bruhduh@lemmy.world 0 points 4 months ago (4 children)

Then why AMD is more efficient then intel and arm nowadays?

[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 12 points 4 months ago (3 children)

That depends on what you mean, but here are a few reasonable explanations:

  • Intel's chips are still on their Intel 7 process (similar to TSMC's 7nm process), whereas AMD is using TSMC's 4nm process, so AMD's CPUs are 2 nodes ahead; smaller process generally means more transistors in the same area, as well as lower power usage per clock
  • AMD's chiplet architecture makes it easier for them to move the CPU bits to a smaller arch, and the IO bits can stay on a cheaper arch (e.g. AMD uses 4nm for the cores, 6nm for the IO die); this increases yields and dramatically reduces costs, so AMD can invest more in architectural improvements
  • ARM prioritizes battery life over performance, so performance per watt won't be great at the high end, but it'll probably win at the low end; they also don't make their own chips (just designs), so comparing process nodes is meaningless
  • AMD focuses on different aspects of computing than either Intel or ARM, so perhaps they've just done a better job optimizing for what you care about

Anyway, that's my take.

[–] sauce@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 4 months ago

Correction, meteor lake's (Intel 14th gen) CPU tile is on the Intel 4 process (though admittedly that's a 7nm euv process). And they've also moved to a chiplet design. (CPU, GPU and IO are on 3 different processes)

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