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> just imagine how much of their chips is just decode.

This article has some annotated pics of AMD Ryzen 7: http://wccftech.com/amd-ryzen-architecture-detailed/

Based on these photos, I’d estimate instruction decoder takes about 10% of each core, and about 7% of the whole chip.

For Intel I was unable to find similar pics, but my estimation is 3-4% of the chip area. The instruction set is the same; the complexity should be comparable. But most Intel chips have like 50% of the area occupied by integrated graphics.



I'd add to that Agner Fog's early report on Ryzen:

http://agner.org/optimize/blog/read.php?i=838

The micro-op cache size increased to 2048 from Intel's 1536 μops. His testing shows 5 instructions per clock cycle up from Intel's 4. There are limits to the ILP a scheduler can find; more in one area means more demand in another. This is no mean feat for AMD to pull off.




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