Post #2409962

2025-09-09 05:20 UTC

@JamesWidman@mastodon.social @steve@discuss.systems @regehr@mastodon.social Mind, it's not exactly like you decide to "just go for IPC", that's not easy! But especially near the high end of what a design supports, power consumption grows exorbitantly. Power use scales with something like the 3rd power of clock frequency near the top. So 10% higher boost clock = 33% higher power draw. Those last few 100MHz _really_ cost you.

Replies (2)

@JamesWidman@mastodon.social 2025-09-09 05:24

@rygorous@mastodon.gamedev.place @steve@discuss.systems @regehr@mastodon.social hm... i do like marginally faster builds... but i also like it when my laptop doesn't melt into the ground.

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@rygorous@mastodon.gamedev.place 2025-09-09 05:29

@JamesWidman@mastodon.social @steve@discuss.systems @regehr@mastodon.social You can see the trajectory with Intel's E-cores. They went 3-wide fetch/decode in Goldmont+ (2017) to constrained 2x 3-wide in Tremont (2020) to much more flexible 2x 3-wide in Gracemont (2021) to 3x 3-wide in Skymont (2024). Over the same period, they widened the backend from 7-wide (Goldmont) to 10-wide (Tremont) to 17-wide (Gracemont) to 26-wide (Skymont). So just way more focused on perf via higher IPC instead of clock. (Because it's more power-efficient.)

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