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0 pointsbee_rider1y ago0 comments

Another nice thing—it looked like Intel was lagging AMD in PCIe lane counts, until somewhat recently. I suspect selling GPUs has put them in the headspace of thinking of PCIe lanes as a real figure of merit.

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tpm1y ago· 3 in thread

AMD AM5 are also not great at having enough PCIe lanes, hence at most one connected PCIe5 x16 GPU, if you need more it's x8 for 2 GPUs and so on, and that's before we connect fast M2 storage, fast USB4 slots etc. If you need more PCIe lanes, you have to buy a Threadripper or Epyc and that's easily 10 times the price for the whole system.

colejohnson661y ago

PCIe lanes and DDR channels take up the most pins on a CPU connector (ignoring power). The common solution (for desktops) is to have a newest generation protocol (5) at the CPU level, then use the chipset to fan out more lanes at a lower generation (4).

tpm1y ago

I understand the tradeoff, but it left a segment of the market between pure consumer solutions and pure productivity/server solutions in no mans land.

bee_riderOP1y ago

Yeah. Theadripper/Epyc is what I’m thinking of—it isn’t obvious (to me at least) if it was just a coincidence of the chiplet strategy or what, if so it is an odd coincidence. The company that makes both CPUs and GPUs has ended up with data center CPUs that are a great match for the era where we really want data center CPUs that can host a ton of GPUs, haha.

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