AMD Milan-X Scaling to 0.75GB of L3 Cache per Chip
servethehome.comA bit more L3 cache, then remove physical RAM entirely - boom, M1-like memory on chip
Kinda cool how desktop CPUs seem to converge to having on-chip memory too
But having a on-chip memory removes my ability to swap the hardware when it breaks. Right now I can just remove* and put a new RAM for fairly cheap. Isn't that a good thing? I personally prefer modularity over Single Board computers. Or is making things modular no longer worth today?
I was having some unexpected restart issues with my one of my laptops (lenovo), which was at the time under warranty. Lenovo just swapped my whole board (Remember this is everything except the keyboard, screen and battery, so CPU + Power supply + RAM + motherboard) instead of bothering to isolate the issue. Ofcourse at the time I appreciated getting a new machine because it was covered under warranty, but it makes me uncomfortable that someone might end up paying for the complete board when say the issue was just with the power supply.
* Assuming the Ram isn't soldered on, which in the current state is often in case of laptops.
SOC is probably the pulse of the future, especially once we reach the point where game CGI is virtually indistinguishable from reality.
I'm sure the idea of connecting multiple things to your computer (like ram, graphics cards, storage, etc.) to increase its functionality will eventually be reduced away to maybe 2 or 3 pieces total, for instance a phone & some biometric sensors that are used to interact with it.
If wattage draw is low enough the whole thing could probably run on a supercapacitor and need a moments charge every couple of hours to stay up and running.
there was going to be an x300 chipset for ryzen that was basically just a boot rom. afaik it never happened.
but i definitely imagine, at some point, the main memory becomes semi optional too. basically we just have chips, with huge huge buck converters around them. and a couple data pipes optionally reaching out.
Kinda stink when you can’t upgrade components though. Gotta toss the whole thing out then.
generally i imagine most folks do want to use the gratis/free/included couple channels of memory bandwidth and the 20x channels of pcie.
the x300 said, screw the southbridge expander which i think is legit, a pretension which deserved to be dropped. but yeah i think most will want to just the main memory.
otoh with usb4 and it's mandatory host to host connectivity i am legit hoping we find some kick ass glueless non-coherent connectivity across cores. pcie was very close but the need to have ntb support complicated. my hope is that eith modern usb4 there's no excuse for missing good inter-system connectivity.
but what value that southbridge/chipset provides? very specious.