I was reading somewhere (I’ll provide link here if I can find it again) that next generation motherboards will have “Dual Chipsets.”
In my mind it makes complete sense for there to start to be dual chipsets on high tier motherboards. With there being chiplet designs now on both… well I guess now all 3 major manufacturers AMD, Apple and Intel with the power of previous generation CPU’s it makes sense to allow more cores to have more dedicated CPU lanes and better BUS management.
For me this makes the most sense with the higher core count CPU’s that AMD is making because they are ALL high performance cores. So having those cores routed through two chipsets as I said above to improve bus speeds and increase PCIE lanes makes sense to me.
Now Apple and Intel have a different approach having HP (high performance) and HE (high efficiency) cores. Dual chipsets here could make sense, but less so with the lower powered HE cores. It would be hard to justify a second chipset here I would think. A controller to split or manage this interface to all the PCIE lanes could be interesting in my mind.
A second consideration… the X570 chipset (originals needed active cooling), why did that change later? Was the chipset revised? Performance or options dropped or was architecture size reduced? I never understood how that happened.
Is this a gimmic? A way to mitigate the chip shortage? (which would mean tech companies are expecting this chip shortage to last at LEAST a few more years)
What do you all think?
These are things I think about with my AM coffee.
Also, I hope you all had a great holiday and will have a great New Year!!!
From where I’m sitting I see most of the chip supply for high end chips - small node processes stabilizing, so e.g. if you’re doing orders for chips on recent processes (<10nm TSMC for example) and can afford to put in your order / pay 9-12 months in advance, you’ll probably be good. (if you can afford it).
Based on that, I suspect late 2022/early 2023 will probably see stable-er demand/supply, albeit at slightly higher pricing.
Re dual chipsets… the general trend has been to integrate more and more onto the soc, which is then implemented as multiple chiplets.
There’s this interesting Epyc mini itx board for example:
Which doesn’t have a chipset at all, most of what it needs is on the epyc soc.
I think if anything, we’re likely to see more and more stuff get into soc, fewer SKUs and higher prices for high end chip goods relative to cost of living until 2025.
They likely wanted the chip running cooler, since multiple components would be affiliated to it [USB, M.2s, etc.], including some boards having extra “perk”, to navigating fan airflow to meet neighbouring M.2s.
The fan ultimately became a source of problems [audibility, short working life, etc.]. More back to the drawing board, in coming up with a passive HS - I would be curious if these latter 570 boards, gotten the 550 treatment? [better memory support]
That is a good point, maybe it’s a divergent model of AMD for enterprise applications to simplify hardware?
It’s all just theory and conjecture on my part, but I like to think about these things.
Absolutely, I wonder if there’s a way to compare part numbers or something.
I may have to check “buildzoids” reviews to see I he explores this. I haven’t found too much info with my Google-fu… maybe there’s more out there.
I completely agree, I think manufacturers are just as strapped and are possibly just passing down the higher cost. 2nd Party vendors are just taking advantage at this point but hopefully that won’t last forever as supply picks up and can’t be bought out by a 2nd party.
PCIe lanes are not coming directly from CPU cores, but are off of the I/O part of the die, for a monolithic architecture, and off of the I/O die for a chiplet design.
So it’s not the core count that’s making more PCIe lanes.
Multi-socket like CPUs are the bane of any OS developer. And this setup sounds like it would pan out that way. Windows 10 already needed heavy OS scheduling to work well with chiplet desing CPUs. Such an heavier separation between cores is gonna destroy performance on any OS that’s not ready for it.
There’s also storage access penalty to keep in mind because, if you’re accessing a storage device through PCIe lanes on a different chipset from CPU cores on another chipset, you’re gonna wait and wait for those data.
All around sounds like a very bad and complicated idea to me. The only way forward I see is making everything more like a SoC than a CPU, so no chipset.
I don’t really see this happening any time soon.
Because i vthink that it would be a huge challenge in regards to chipsets and pci-e layout designs.
I highly doubt that AMD and Intel would start working together to realize an universal design
I think you are wrong on that one. There have been several instances of known accurate leakers that have already stated that the new high-end chipsets for AMD will be dual chipsets on board to handle the PCIe lanes. See link for more info:
PS: Regardless of what the comments say at the bottom about it being “rumor”, some twitter searching and other digging shows it comes from known accurate leakers, I think Moore’s Law is Dead even covered it in a video last week, and his inside people are very inside.
Of course i could be totally wrong about it I didn’t fully read the article correctly.
However i still think that there would be a pretty big challenge to realize it.
But ¨if¨ true it would definitely be interesting.
Not really all the challenging. Remember, Intel used to have a North Bridge/South Bridge setup, that was two chipsets on a single motherboard. Now the problem is going to be cooling those chipsets now AND figuring out how to get it on ITX boards for those that want it.
You’re missing the point entirely. The market will not pivot 100%. There will be a niche board, if any, that tries this, to little success and will be riddled with problems.
So you’ll be comparison shopping a board with mid-grade components for $950 or so, with a similar board but only one chipset, for $150 or even $200.
If you have the choice, would you pay $200 twice or $950 once?
Oh I didn’t miss the point. I was just pointing out that there are people that will pay whatever the price is because it’s either what they need, or think they need, or just to say that they have something not many other people do.
Problem with that is, there will always be someone out there with money to spend on whatever just because. As long as that segment is there, the manufacturer’s will put out the product as they know it will sell.
