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Milan - The Next Frontier? (22m28s)

Notes from SemiAccurate's CC with Susquehanna this morning

Various sources said things like "Milan will have 80 cores" or "Milan will have 15 chiplets".

The speculation, based on sources and other reasoning, is that the the 8-core chiplet will continue to be used going forward. They have great yields compared to bigger monolithic chips and AMD can simply make them smaller in size rather than boost core count of each to 10-12 cores. Zen 2 Epyc uses eight 8-core chiplets for up to 64 total cores, and a future version could use ten chiplets to get to 80 cores.

AMD and Cray will make a 1.5 exaflops supercomputer.

In fact while AMD has kept the details on the technology light, it sounds like this version of [Infinity Fabric] will be the most advanced version yet. AMD is specifically noting that it’s an “incredibly” coherent fabric, calling it the first fully optimized CPU + GPU design for supercomputing. AMD’s GPUs and CPUs will be arranged in a 4-to-1 ratio, with 4 GPUs for each EPYC CPU. It’s worth noting that AMD’s slide shows a mesh with every GPU connected to the CPU and two other GPUs, but I’m not reading too much into this quite yet, as AMD hasn’t disclosed any other details on the IF setup.

Design and Analysis of an APU for Exascale Computing

AMD may try to do something like create a server/HPC APU that consists of ten 8-core CPU chiplets, four GPU chiplets(?), and the I/O chiplet, with DRAM/HBM stacked on top of the I/O die which emits less heat.

If the GPU thing is a red herring but Milan does have 14 CPU chiplets + 1 I/O chiplet, that's a whopping 112 cores. Even if clock speeds regressed a bit, it could offer more multithreaded performance per dollar than predecessors.