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...
p12tic|1 month ago
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.
markhahn|1 month ago
rbanffy|1 month ago
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.
markhahn|1 month ago
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.