Ted J. (ted.delete@this.no.spam) on July 8, 2013 4:06 pm wrote:
> My guess is the dual socket Haswell-E priced above $1000 will have 2 Crystalwell
> chips per socket. The dual socket Haswell-E priced between $500 and $1000 will
> have one Crystalwell chip per socket. The quad socket Haswell-E priced above
> $2000 will have 4 Crystalwell chips per socket. The quad socket Haswell-E priced
> between $1000 and $2000 will have 2 Crystalwell chips per socket. I have no
> inside information. These guesses are just my opinion of what would make sense.

I agree that it makes sense for Intel to offer a big L4 cache with Haswell-E. AMD
and Nvidia can't make a chip like Crystalwell. Once software starts relying on a
big L4 cache, the performance of AMD chips running that software will be terrible.
Crystalwell will effectively lock AMD out of the high-end of the x86 market and
strengthen Intel's monopoly in this high-margin business.

Haswell doubles the flops per clock without doubling the DRAM DIMM bandwidth. A
big L4 cache can help compensate for that. Haswell-E is the generation that will
switch to DDR4 DRAM. This makes Haswell-E a good generation to change the package
footprint so there is room for the L4 cache chips. The package footprint of the
processor should be the same regardless of whether there is L4 cache inside.