AMD's Upcoming Ryzen Line-up Could Feature 6-Core Chips After All
It's always a dance between rumours, expectations and "theorycrafting" when it comes to the launch of any particularly exciting product. And with AMD's Ryzen chips currently being the most hotly anticipated development (and product launch) in the hardware world, well, let's just say that anticipation is really building up to enormous levels, with any possible details surrounding AMD's line-up being the cause, in some cases, of heated debate.
Case in point: with AMD's CCX (CPU Complex) being
indivisible, this would mean a blow not only to budget-conscious consumers, but also to AMD's ability to engender its product line. Flexibility has always been the name of the game with AMD (discounting their CMT-based Bulldozer and derived architectures), with the company offering triple-core processors in the past (and weren't those the good old days of processor unlocking). However, now reports have come in that Ryzen's CCX are actually divisible, which could open up possibilities for some theoretically value-breaking hexa-core Ryzen chips.
More specifically, reports are now coming in (claiming 100% accuracy) that AMD's CCX are in fact divisible: basically, it is possible to disable each CPU core separately (together with its dedicated L2 cache) without affecting the total shared L3 cache, with possible L3 cache configurations being 1/1 (8 MB), 1/2 (4 MB) or completely disabled (hence, a quad-core, SMT-enabled, 8MB/16MB L3 Ryzen chip can theoretically be harvested from a full, octa-core chip, so long as two CPU cores and corresponding L2 cache are disabled on each CCX). A rule of thumb that the reports claim is that due to AMD's CCX design and overall architecture design, both CCXs must have similar CPU core and L3 configuration (meaning that both CCXs must be configured identically, whether with 3 cores and full 8 MB L3 cache enabled per CCX, which would result in a six-core, 16 MB L3 design.
I for one think AMD's line-up becomes much, much more interesting with a hexa-core offering. This would mean that AMD can position its 8-core, 16-thread offerings above Intel's Core i7 line of CPUs (at the respective premium), with their 6-core, SMT-enabled CPUs going toe to toe (pricing-wise, assuming performance parity) with Intel's i7 line of quad-core, HT-enabled processors. This would put Intel in trouble from a value perspective, possibly even prompting the company to totally revamp their line-up of processors for the next generation, democratizing true quad-core processors at the base of consumer CPU designs.
