hobold (hobold.delete@this.vectorizer.org) on October 10, 2020 8:58 am wrote:
> Blue (blue.delete@this.blue.com) on October 8, 2020 9:58 am wrote:
> [...]
> > If AMD can keep up this 15-19% gains every generation, when do
> > the "big on ARM" folks think ARM will effectively catch up?
>
> Most of Zen3's gains seem to come from the reduction of latency (to memory, and between cores). In a sense,
> Zen3 shows how good the Zen2 core already was, if it hadn't been starved for data. The lowered base clocks
> of Zen3 also point to a higher utilization of core execution units (and thus more power draw) at 100% load.
> This seems to be more evidence for there being fewer pipeline bubbles in Zen3 compared to Zen2.
>
> But one cannot reduce latency below zero (no matter what marketing departments
> say), so these gains are not very likely to be repeated by AMD.
>
> On the flip side, SMT gains appear to be lower in Zen3, because a single thread
> alone can now utilize more of the core execution units than it can in Zen2.
>
>
> It's not ARM that needs to catch up; it's Intel.

Intel's ICL design is the highest performing ST int microarchitecture across the industry. It's AMD that has to bring *credible* evidence of the performance of its new core design.

Even if ICL turns out to be lower perf, the catching up Intel needs to do is in its process, not uarch.