r/hardware•
CatMerc

I did some measurements of modern cores and made a chart. Also includes transistor count estimates.

Info

The Chart

Spreadsheet
Was bored, did this for fun.

Important caveat for transistor counts: This is based on average SoC density. Different structures on the SoC have different densities so these estimates will be quite inaccurate. Also yes I didn't truncate the decimals. I'm special.

As for Zen 2 4MB, I just cut the size in 1/4th, as Renoir die shots are not available to take a measurement.

Posted Apr 5, 2020, 5:41 PM UTC · edited

5336
ChrisD0•

Not to nitpick, you did a great job, but it would have been nice if everything was labelled sort of like it is for the A13. I’m having a tough time figuring out what’s what.

18
CatMercOP•

Yeah, forgot to do that

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[deleted]•

[deleted]

-5
CatMercOP•

It's to scale. I made a mistake with the L3 on Sunny Cove where the the X and Y axis are flipped. The image is however to scale, as it was quite literally cut from the same one and scaled the exact same.

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[deleted]•

[deleted]

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CatMercOP•

Again, I literally copied the image, scaled it, and then cut it up. There's no way for images from the same SoC to not be to scale. Images for different SoC's have a margin of error because I have to figure out the scaling myself, but it should not be too big unless I screwed up my math somewhere.

Edit: Aaaahhh, found the problem. There was indeed an error. Not with the scaling but with the math. I remeasured things multiple times, and it appears I mixed up numbers from different measurements. I'm working on an updated chart.

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Smartcom5•

Imagine appreciating something laborious some complete stranger did for you – just out of pleasure to lighten your day and grant you some additional knowledge completely free of charge – instead of instantly spitting hate upon the slightest mishap that one did by accident or just since you don't like it.

That would be nice …

People like you are the very society's embodied toxicity who made Reddit the infamous toxic place it is so damn well known for ever since. You could've said it a bit more friendly, just saying.

E.g … »Thank you! I'd like to point out some suggestions you could add to make your work even better; (…)«

You know, like being polite instead of trying to prominently shine with arseholery.

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[deleted]•

[deleted]

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galaxiusnota•

You are quite the character, aren't you?

1
Smartcom5•

I didn't ask, he didn't do for me, he did it because he wanted to, and imo, more power to him for that.

One can appreciate anyway, it doesn't hurt. I did, felt great.

But he's exposing himself on a public forum, a café, …

Just 'cause someone wants to contribute something noteworthy to the public, doesn't should expose the one in question being grilled for it for no greater reason anyway. This isn't /r/RoastMe.

… and he shouldn't be expecting the type of cordiality you wanted.

Imagine a world so awesome that he actually could! Wouldn't that be great?

Lastly don't tell me what to say and what to think, downvote away if you don't think my comment was useful and leave (or stay like you did and waste your time, whatever :))

Pardon me, but I refuse to waste any greater emotions like anger to express myself this way. Always dry on hate, can't help it. In addition, I also refuse to step down to those levels to misuse the downvote-button for showing my personal disliking, like so many already do on reddit here – I'm standing well above that.

0
CHAOSHACKER•

Nice work. I'm kinda baffled by how much bigger a Sunny Cove core is than a Zen 2 core. Seems so weird to me. I guess it's the AVX512 implementation.

13
KKMX•

Based on this image, without the AVX512 and the associated registers, Sunny cove might actually be smaller than Apple's A13 core.

10
Edenz_•

How much area do you think gets used on AVX512?

3
COMPUTER1313•

It is known for causing CPUs to drop their clock rates significantly to avoid exceeding power limits, especially on the server CPUs.

I remember seeing the overclocking arguments raging over if the max OC should be done with no clock rate reduction for AVX-512, or use a ratio for a certain amount of clock rate reduction to get higher clock rates for workloads that don't have AVX-512 at the cost of having a clock rate reduction for AVX-512.

2
Veedrac•

Sunny Cove has ridiculous internal specs, so it makes sense that it's physically huge to fit it all.

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[deleted]•

[deleted]

1
ashaza•

Thank you for this, however, could you make them all proportionally accurate, size wise?

Am I misunderstanding and they already are?

Maybe add a Skylake/coffee lake/kaby lake core for reference?

At a glance, this would be so helpful.

8
CatMercOP•

They're proportionally sized.

9
ashaza•

The sunny cove cache is not - that was throwing me off :)

3
CatMercOP•

It is though. It's literally the same image cut into two pieces. The scaling doesn't change.

5
ashaza•

There's some kind of misunderstanding.

If you look at the sunny cove core width, it says 1.928mm. Then if you look at the cache below it, which is exactly the same width proportionally, it is now labelled 0.76mm.

1.928mm does not equal 0.76mm, unless I'm misinterpreting what you are showing.

8
PastaPandaSimon•

Damn buoy, those Apple cores be thicc!! I had no idea they are almost the size of a Zen 2 core.

5
COMPUTER1313•

I had no idea how much transistors Apple crammed into their A13 until noticing that their Core+L2 surpasses Zen 2 and Sunny Cove.

3
lazertazerface•

The entire L2 for the A13 is shared, so does it really make sense to cut it into 1/4th?

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CatMercOP•

Yeah, first of all I intended to cut it by 1/2. And second I wasn't aware of that, Andrei from Anandtech brought that up. I'll be making a corrected chart soon enough.

3
dayman56•

Another comparison is Intels latest Atom Core - Tremont - which appears to be around 0.88mm^2 according to WikiChip which is a little smaller than an A76 in the Kirin 980 based on your chart!

4
Vince789•

Other points of reference:

Apple's Thunder is 0.58mm^2

Arm's Cortex-A65/Neoverse E1 is supposedly around 0.48mm^2

Note both Apple's Thunder and Arm's Cortex-A65/Neoverse E1 aren't as wide as Tremont and most likely have significantly lower performance

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[deleted]•

[deleted]

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Turkey-er•

Do you have a link to a version that is not as blurry and has less compression artifacts?

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CatMercOP•
3
Turkey-er•

Yes but that has the compression artifacting that makes it a pain to read

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CatMercOP•

Are you looking at the preview or something? It's entirely crisp for me.

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Turkey-er•

I hit the link and it shows my a fuzzy image on the imgur website idk what more I can do

1

I wish I was this productive with my quarantine

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[deleted]•

[deleted]

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KKMX•

Does your transistor density includes all the obvious blank silicon on the Ice Lake die?

-4
CatMercOP•

It's based on overall transistor count divided by size.

I don't see any more blank space than usual.

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[deleted]•

[removed]

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