During Hot Chips 2023, Intel showed off a brand new CPU design featuring 8 cores but a massive 528 threads based on RISC.
Intel's 8 Core & 528 Thread CPU Can Provide Insane Parallelism & Multi-Threaded Capabilities
The motivations that led Intel to create such a unique chip design are based on some specific work-loads that not only require insane parallel compute capabilities but also lead to under-utilization of the available hardware, most importantly the cache. One such workload is Graph Analytics such as DARPA's HIVE program which is a petabyte-scale graph analytics workload and offers 1000x Perf/W when compared to traditional compute.
For similar workloads, Intel has devised a new CPU with 8 cores and 528 threads. Yes, that's a total of 66 threads per core with 192 KB cache per core and 4 MB SRAM. The CPU is based on the RISC architecture and not x86 but makes use of silicon photonics for networking. The CPU will come in a chipset-esque design featuring EMIB interconnect to connect the optical chips to the main CPU die.
Taking a closer look, this CPU design from Intel comes with 16 Multi-Threaded Pipelines (MTP) while the Single-Threaded Pipelines (STP) offer 8x higher single-threaded performance. The architecture, as stated above, is based on a custom RISC design featuring 32 registers per thread. The chip also supports a custom DDR5 memory controller, allowing for up to DDR5-4400 DIMMs with 8B access granularity, 32 High-Speed AIB ports, and PCIe Gen4 x8 protocol.
Following is the die breakdown:
- TSMC 7nm FinFET Process Node
- Interconnect: 15 Metal Layers
- 27.6 Billion Transistors (Total)
- 1.2 Billion Transistors (CPU Core)
- 316mm2 Die Area (Total)
- 9.2mm2 Per Core Area
- 705 Signals
- 3275 BGA Form Factor
Coming to the networking capabilities that make use of the aforementioned Silicon Photonics, Intel has laid out a 2D on-de mesh interconnect that uses 16 routers. The cores can talk to others off or on the system without the need to add other networking capabilities.
The socket (BGA-3275) will support 32 optical I/O ports at 32 GB/s/dir and 32 GB of custom DDR5-4400 DRAM. The platform will extend support to 16 sockets in an OCP sled form factor so that's 120 cores and 8448 threads on the top-most configuration. The platform will also support up to 512 GB DRAM.
A demo shown off by Intel details the power and clock speeds (Fmax) of the CPU. This particular 8 Core SKU has a 75W TDP and has the majority of its power budget being used by Photonics while the cores themselves take up 21% of the power budget or around 16W. The chip is said to balance out around 3.35-3.5 GHz with 35-55W power. The company claims to get linear performance as the core count is increased by 10 fold.
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