Question How do manufactures determine the number of cpu cores?

[FreeBee101]

Currently amd has 6/8/12/16.
Why have they not done something like 8/12/16/24?
what is the limiting factor?

Would they ever come out with a 7960x3d? Maybe with 3 chiplets and 1-3 ccds?

Couldn't they just converge their threadripper and am5 stuff and then make the workstation cpu's cheaper and make workstations more about multiple cpu/rambanks motherboards or something. Then people could buy what they want.

 

[USAFRet]

what is the limiting factor?

$$$, physics and actual need.

Having 24 cores is somewhat useless if software can only use 2 or 4.

 

[TerryLaze]

$$$, physics and actual need.

There fixed it for you, if they could do it cheap they would do it because there are always enough people that would buy them because a youtuber or reviewer told them that they are the best thing ever.
But TSMCs prices are on fire and AMD barely makes any money from CPUs as it is.

 

[BFG-9000]

Why have they not done something like 8/12/16/24?
what is the limiting factor?

I don't understand this question, as AMD make 128 core chips which you could buy today. They've had 24 and 32 core Threadrippers since 2018 and 24 and 32 core Epyc since 2017. As with all many-core chips the clockspeeds are lower to keep power consumption sane when loading all of the cores at once, so they are only really useful for massively parallel tasks. Which would be severely hobbled by being limited to only 2 memory channels, meaning that many slower cores makes no sense for a desktop platform.

So you are asking why AMD doesn't sell a chip to you which would be inferior to what they already sell to consumers, instead of selling it to the people who could use it and are willing to pay $12,000 for it.

It should also be obvious that they would give you more cores if they had to in order to compete with Intel, even if this did not improve performance for most tasks. The CCX thing would make adding them easy.

 

[thestryker]

Currently amd has 6/8/12/16.
Why have they not done something like 8/12/16/24?
what is the limiting factor?

If you're talking about consumer platforms starting at 6 has already hurt them a fair bit when it comes to OEM sales. They're a company that has to make money and since their CCD sizes are 6 and 8 cores respectively they have designed their SKU lists to maximize wafer returns.

Really what it comes down to entirely is just money: they can compete with Intel in client and don't undermine their own workstation/server sales.