Does it actually scale well to that many cores? If so, that's quite impressive; most video game simulations of that kind benefits more from few fast cores since parallelizing simulations well is difficult

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Neywiny 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

No, see https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=44KP0vp2Wvg . You're right it didn't scale that well

	▲	epistasis a day ago \| parent [-]
		Looks like it may be capped at 32 cores in that video, if they are hitting 25%-30% of a 96 core CPU? Here's analysis of a prior LTT video showing 1/3 of cores at 100%, 1/3 of cores at 50%, and 1/3 idle cores: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqSCRZJl7S0 In any case, CS2 can take advantage of far more cores than most games.

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markhahn 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

these big high-core systems do scale, really well, on the workloads they're intended for. not games, desktops, web/db servers, lightweight stuff like that. but scientific, engineering - simulations and the like, they fly! enough that the HPC world still tends to use dual-socket servers. maybe less so for AI, where at least in the past, you'd only need a few cores per hefty GPU - possibly K/V stuff is giving CPUs more to do...

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p12tic 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

> not ... web/db servers, lightweight stuff like that.

They scale very well for web and db servers as well. You just put lots of containers/VMs on a single server.

AMD EPYC has a separate architecture specifically for such workloads. It's a bit weaker, runs at lower frequency and power and takes less silicon area. This way AMD can put more such cores on a single CPU (192 vs 128 for Zen 5c vs 5). So it's the other way round - web servers love high core count CPUs.

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markhahn 2 days ago | parent [-]

not really - you can certainly put lots of lightweight services on it, but they don't scale. because each core doesn't really get that much cache or memory bandwidth. it's not bad, just not better.

	▲	tucnak 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Not true. You should look up Sienna chips and something like ASUS S14NA-U12. It has six DDR5-4800 channels, two physical PCIe 5.0 ports, two M.2 ports, and six MCIO x8 ports. All lanes are full-bandwidth. The 8434PN CPU gets you 48 physical cores in a 150W envelope. Zen 4c really is magic, and LOTS of bandwidth to play with.

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rbanffy 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> not games, desktops, web/db servers, lightweight stuff like that.

Things like games, desktops, browsers, and such were designed for computers with a handful of cores, but the core count will only go up on these devices - a very pedestrian desktop these days has more than 8 cores.

If you want to make software that’ll run well enough 10 years from now, you’d better start using computers from 10 years from now. A 256 core chip might be just that.

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markhahn 2 days ago | parent [-]

why do you think lightweight uses will ever scale to lots of cores?

the standard consumer computer of today has only a few cores that race-to-sleep, because there simply isn't that much to do. where do you imagine the parallel work will come from? even for games, will work shift off the GPU onto the host processor? seems unlikely.

future-proofing isn't about inflating your use of threads, but being smart about memory and IO. those have been the bottleneck for decades now.

	▲	rbanffy 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		> why do you think lightweight uses will ever scale to lots of cores? Because the cores will be there, regardless. At some point, machines will be able to do a lot of background activity, learn about what we are doing, so that local agentic models can act as better intelligent assistants. I don't know what will be the killer app for the kilocore desktop - nobody knows that, but when PARC made a workstation with bit-mapped graphics out of a semi custom built minicomputer that could easily serve a department of text terminals we got things like GUIs, WYSYWIG, Smalltalk, and a lot of other fancy things nobody imagined back then. You can try to invent the future using current tech, or you might just try to see what's possible with tomorrow's tools and observe it first hand.