Probably fun for those who already bought DDR5 memory... still kicking myself for not just pulling the trigger on that 128GB dual stick kit I looked at for $600 back in September. Now it's listed at $4k...
Meanwhile I hope my AM4 will chug along a few more years.
Context: Early in the firmware boot process the memory controller isn't configured yet so the firmware uses the cache as RAM. In this mode cache lines are never evicted since there's no memory to evict them to.
Maybe in 50 years the cache of CPUs and GPUs will be 1TB. Enough to run multiple LLMs (a model entirely run for each task). Having robots like in the movies would need LLMs much much faster than what we see today.
In my case it began with 16K (yes, 161024 bytes) and 90K (yes, 901024 bytes) 5.25" floppy disks (although the floppies were a few months after the computer). Eventually upgraded to 48K RAM and 180K double density floppy disks. The computer: Atari 800.
I'll see your Atari 800 and raise you my Atari 2600 with its whopping 128 bytes of RAM. Bytes with a B. I can kinda sorta call it a computer because you could buy a BASIC cartridge for it (I didn't and stand by that decision - it was pretty bad).
KolibriOS would fit in there, even with the data in memory. You cannot load it into the cache directly, but when the cache capacity is larger than all the data you read there should be no cache eviction and the OS and all data should end up in the cache more or less entirely. In other words it should be really, really fast, which KolibriOS already is to begin with.
Unless you lay everything out continuously in memory, you’ll still get cache eviction due to associativty and depending on the eviction strategy of the CPU. But certainly DOS or even early Windows 95 could conceivably just run out of the cache
Yeah, cache eviction is the reason I was assuming it is "probably not possible architecturally", but I also figured there could be features beyond my knowledge that might make it possible.
Edit: Also this 192MB of L3 is spread across two Zen CCDs, so it's not as simple as "throw it all in L3" either, because any given core would only have access to half of that.
Well, yeah, reality strikes again. All you need is an exploit in the microcode to gain access to AMD's equivalent to the ME and now you can just map the cache as memory directly. Maybe. Can microcode do this or is there still hardware that cannot be overcome by the black magic of CPU microcode?
The extra cache doesn't do a damn thing (maybe +2%)
The lower leakage currents at lower voltages allowed them to implement a far more aggressive clock curve from the factory. That's where the higher allcore clock comes from (+30W TDP)
I'm not complaining at all, I think this is an excellent way to leverage binning to sell leftover cache.
Though if I may complain, Ars used to actually write about such things in their articles instead of speculate in a way that suspiciously resembles what an AI would write.
Given that the dies still have L3 on them does this count as L4 or does the hardware treat it as a single pool of L3?
Would be neat to have an additional cache layer of ~1 GB of HBM on the package but I guess there's no way that happens in the consumer space any time soon.
Per compute die it's one uniform L3 with the same access characteristics. It is about two cycles more latency than the configuration with less cache. But there are two compute dies, each with their own L3. And like the 9950X coherency between L3s is achieved by going to the third (IO) die via global memory interconnect.
That's what's different about this one. "Enter the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition, a mouthful of a chip that includes 64MB of 3D V-Cache on both processor dies, without the hybrid arrangement that has defined the other chips up until now."
Meanwhile I hope my AM4 will chug along a few more years.
It's probably not possible architecturally, but it would be amusing to see an entire early 90's OS running entirely in the CPU's cache.
Edit: Also this 192MB of L3 is spread across two Zen CCDs, so it's not as simple as "throw it all in L3" either, because any given core would only have access to half of that.
If you run a VM on a CPU like this, using a baremetal hypervisor, you can get very close to "everything in cache".
The lower leakage currents at lower voltages allowed them to implement a far more aggressive clock curve from the factory. That's where the higher allcore clock comes from (+30W TDP)
I'm not complaining at all, I think this is an excellent way to leverage binning to sell leftover cache.
Though if I may complain, Ars used to actually write about such things in their articles instead of speculate in a way that suspiciously resembles what an AI would write.
Would be neat to have an additional cache layer of ~1 GB of HBM on the package but I guess there's no way that happens in the consumer space any time soon.
For comparison, 9950X3D have a total cache of 144MB.
It is indeed 8MB per compute die but really 1MB per core. Not shared among the entire CCD.
If they are stacked then why not 9800X3D2?