Intel Publishes Blazing Fast AVX-512 Sorting Library, Numpy Switching To It For 10~17x Faster Sorts

[ms178]

I think they figured DDR5 would already be mainstream, not premium. Having support for both memory standards adds cost and complexity, in part because they have some fundamental differences (i.e. DDR5 splits each DIMM into two independent subchannels).

Probably, but as such transitions happened in the past and RAM prices usually took around 1,5 - 2 years after a major platform release to come to reasonable levels, AMD could have taken that experience into account. At least it turned out to be a major platform advantage for Raptor Lake. In addition, it is unfortunate that Zen 4 is also more RAM-sensitive which makes highly-tuned DDR5 more desireable on that platform unless you go with one of the X3D SKUs that might help to hide that sensitivity. Hardware Unboxed just had a video on this topic.

It seems very hard to believe that the Ryzen 5000 I/O die is forward-compatible with Zen 4. Maybe you mean the Ryzen 7000 I/O die is backward-compatible with Zen 3? However, that would only enable you to put Zen 3 in AM5 with DDR5, which is the opposite of what you're talking about and wouldn't seem to make a ton of sense.

I do wish AMD would've released a 6000-series socketed CPU that was essentially a Zen 4 compute die with an AM4-compatible I/O die and package. That would've been the most sensible way to support DDR4, but only up to about 8 cores. Beyond that, I think DDR4 would've been too much of a bottleneck. I'm sure the multithreaded performance improvement of the 7950X has a lot to do with DDR5.

I've got that info from Moore's Law is Dead, he mentioned it in one of his latest videos. As he has got good contacts to AMD engineers, he might know more than we do about all the technical options AMD could have chosen instead of what they shipped.

It's a fairly minor distinction, but the Z690 boards don't have PCIe 5.0 x4 from the CPU, whereas AMD X670 boards do. Also, are you sure you're looking at launch pricing of DDR5 Z690 boards? Back when Alder Lake launched, I remember quite a bit of consternation about how expensive its motherboards were.

Agreed, Z690 was very expensive at first, and in my eyes it still is, with decent boards starting at around 190 EUR. But lately I've seen far better deals now as low as 100 EUR for an entry-level Asrock DDR4 Z690 model or better models around the 150 - 179 EUR mark. AM5 is still miles away from that price point and we are approaching the "six months after launch" mark soon. If A620 is heavily cut down on the feature side, it might not bring anything exciting to the market to care about it much. That also depends on the street price, of course.

Concerning PCIe 5.0 SSDs, the need for giant heatsinks with active cooling is making that form factor look stupid. I wonder why the firms haven't brought a different form factor to market already to address this issue.

From a motherboard complexity standpoint the top M2 slot is usually very near to the CPU and I guess PCIe 5.0 should be doable on Z690 PCBs at that distance, but I don't know why Intel didn't want to support that officially. Maybe they had no means at that time to validate this functionality? I'd argue that the PCIe 5.0 x16 slot is more important anyways, as it is more flexible, you can use either a GPU or a M2 in there via a M2-to-PCIe adapter card. It would be great to have both on a board, no question about that. But I'd rather like to see more innovation to drive costs down and without the need of active cooling on SSDs.

[coder]

Concerning PCIe 5.0 SSDs, the need for giant heatsinks with active cooling is making that form factor look stupid. I wonder why the firms haven't brought a different form factor to market already to address this issue.

U.2 would like to remind you that it's still around. Intel has some U.2 drives in the 2.5" form factor with TDP of up to 24 W.

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us...3d-xpoint.html