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> As a comparison, an IBM z15 mainframe CPU has 10 cores and 256MB per socket.

Well, that's eDRAM magic, isn't it? Most manufacturers are unable to make eDRAM on a CPU.

> My question is why they chose to have just 32MB for up to 80 cores when AMD can choose to have 32MB per 8-core chiplet.

From my understanding, those ARM chips are largely I/O devices: read from disk -> output to Ethernet.

In contrast, IBM's are known for database backends, which likely benefits from gross amounts of L3 cache. EPYC is general purpose: you might run a database on it, you might run I/O constrained apps on it. So kind of a middle ground.



Didn't Intel push eDRAM magic into various laptop chips around Broadwell?

> those ARM chips are largely I/O devices

Anything Neoverse-N1 is pretty good at general compute and databases. There's definitely a lot of Postgres running on AWS Graviton2 instances already :)


IBM doesn't fab its own chips, right? I thought they used GF.


It's basically IBM fabs that were "sold" to GlobalFoundries. AFAIK IBM processors use a customized process that isn't used by any other GF customers.




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