News Ryzen 5 7600X Beats i9-12900K by 22% in New Single-Core Benchmarks

[escksu]

I'm not missing anything, to be honest. As Terry mentioned, if AMD wanted to include more than 16 cores into the same packaging that fits in AM5, then they need to slim down the cores (Zen4-dense) or increase the size of the CCD (effectively lowering the amount of CPUs/dies per waffer). Thinning out the cores won't be without a performance sacrifice and making the CCD fatter won't be free either; sacrifices will be made for either. As it stands, AMD found that 8-core CCDs is their perfect balance for what they need and this restriction makes it so that if they want to increase over 2 CCDs per package they need to get creative, much like Intel did wth bigLITTLE. I'd love to see 10 or even 12 core CCDs, but that is a redesign of the IF (interconnects), package size and even arrangement on it. I'd even be willing to say they'd need to modify a lot of tooling that just works now.

I guess another way of saying that is: the package size is limited. For AM5 AMD can only do 1 or 2 CCDs. For Server they can do up to... 16 I think? So that's how they can escale, but it also restricts them. Zen4-dense will try to do a bit of bigLITTLE without sacrificing too much and we'll have to wait and see if AMD will release that to consumer.

And yes, a single CCD, unless they have a very good contract for defects and such, I don't think it is very cost effective for them. But keep in mind, like I said, we do not know how their margins and costs look like. Given how they managed to price Ry3K very well, I'm sure they can get away with low-ish prices; or at least comparable to Intel bis-a-bis in the performance tiers. Assuming the overall platform cost is also comparable. We'll see how AMD positions Ry7K vs Alder/Raptor Lake in terms of platform cost, but I do believe AMD can go lower than what Intel would like still. Raptor Lake's die size is humongous, so each defect must hurt a lot (lost profit, kind of?) and they can still price the 12600K competitively. Well, at least reasonably XD

Regards.

Regarding alderlake die, well, they mostly just block out those defective cores and use them for low end series. It's a common practice.

 

[TerryLaze]

Well, I can't give AMD the benefit of the doubt there, only because Zen2 (Ry3K chiplets) was using the same manufacturing nodes and packaging as Zen3 (Ry5K) and they launched at lower prices in their respective segments and even selling the 3600 as low as $120 (IIRC) for a long time.

AMD or resellers?! Because I very much doubt that AMD was selling them at that price.
Resellers often use dump prices to get rid of old stock before new stock comes in.
And AMD' web store shows reseller prices first and you have to go and check AMD.com availability to see the prices AMD charges.
(Spoiler, AMD themselves never reduces prices)

 

[-Fran-]

AMD or resellers?! Because I very much doubt that AMD was selling them at that price.
Resellers often use dump prices to get rid of old stock before new stock comes in.
And AMD' web store shows reseller prices first and you have to go and check AMD.com availability to see the prices AMD charges.
(Spoiler, AMD themselves never reduces prices)

It'll depend on how AMD does it. We all lack a lot of information there, so it's going to always be assumptions. AMD could help blunt some of the cost for 3rd parties (not all) if they need to sell under cost (what they paid for), but as I said, I don't believe that has ever been the case with chiplet-based CPUs from AMD.

In short, I just don't have enough information there and I can only assume.

Regards.

 

[peachpuff]

That would be fine if AMD had an endless supply of CPUs (wafers etc) but they can only buy that much to make all of their products. Using more cores per product would result in less CPUs for AMD to sell.

That's what competition looks like.