More Intel Xeon Clearwater Forest Enablement Merged For Linux 6.13

[phoronix]

Phoronix: More Intel Xeon Clearwater Forest Enablement Merged For Linux 6.13

Squeezing into the mainline Linux 6.13 kernel code today as part of the latest batch of "fixes" are two additional enablement bits for the upcoming high-density Intel Xeon Clearwater Forest server processors...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.13-More-Intel-CWF

[npwx]

"Clearwater Forest", seriously? I guess I'm not relevant to Intel as I prefer to buy fast CPUs, but again, what's up with those idiotic names and who is supposed to remember all of them? When I see an AMD CPU designation, I immediately know what were talking about. Intel - no fucking idea.

[AdrianBc]

"Clearwater Forest", seriously? I guess I'm not relevant to Intel as I prefer to buy fast CPUs, but again, what's up with those idiotic names and who is supposed to remember all of them? When I see an AMD CPU designation, I immediately know what were talking about. Intel - no fucking idea.

Clearwater Forest is the successor of the current "Sierra Forest" server CPUs, like Xeon 6780E. Clearwater Forest is supposed to be launched during the second half of this year.

Sierra Forest and Clearwater Forest use medium-size processor cores, without AVX-512 support, unlike the server CPUs Granite Rapids and its future successor Diamond Rapids, which use much bigger cores that also have AVX-512 a.k.a. AVX10 support.

Siera Forest has cores that are very similar to the Crestmont E-cores of Meteor Lake, while Clearwater Forest will have cores very similar to the Skymont E-cores of Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake, except that they should be made by Intel themselves, and not by TSMC, like in the consumer CPUs.

The cores of the current Sierra Forest Xeons are similar in performance to the medium-size Arm Cortex-A7xx cores from smartphones, like Cortex-A720, while the cores of the future Clearwater Forest will be much more powerful, being very similar in performance with Cortex-X4, which is used as the biggest core in many smartphones (or with the server version of Cortex-X4, i.e. Neoverse V3).

[gotar]

"Technologyi"?

[coder]

When I see an AMD CPU designation, I immediately know what were talking about.

Okay, so without use of the internet, tell me what each of these are:

• Raven Ridge
• Picasso
• Renoir
• Lucienne
• Cezanne
• Rembrandt
• Mendocino
• Raphael
• Dragon Range
• Hawk Point
• Strix Point
• Krackan Point
• Strix Halo
• Phoenix
• Granite Ridge
• Fire Range

Oh, and that's just Zen-based APUs and desktop CPUs. We could do Threadrippers and EPYCs, next.

[AdrianBc]

Okay, so without use of the internet, tell me what each of these are:

• Raven Ridge
• Picasso
• Renoir
• Lucienne
• Cezanne
• Rembrandt
• Mendocino
• Raphael
• Dragon Range
• Hawk Point
• Strix Point
• Krackan Point
• Strix Halo
• Phoenix
• Granite Ridge
• Fire Range

Oh, and that's just Zen-based APUs and desktop CPUs. We could do Threadrippers and EPYCs, next.

Unfortunately, when discussing Intel and AMD CPUs or when selecting compilation options for a software project, the knowledge of the meanings of such random words chosen as internal code names for CPU design projects becomes mandatory, because the commercial names used by both Intel and AMD can be very misleading, because both of them use very similar SKU names for CPUs that can have very different features and micro-architecture.

For a recent example among the CPUs launched just a few days ago:

"Intel® Core™ Ultra 7 Processor 255H" has Lion Cove and Skymont cores made by TSMC,

while

"Intel® Core™ Ultra 7 Processor 255U" has Redwood Cove and Crestmont cores (i.e. the cores from Meteor Lake) made by Intel (but made with "Intel 3" instead of the "Intel 4" used for "Intel® Core™ Ultra 7 Processor 155U", resulting in higher clock frequencies).


If you compile a program with gcc for them, you must use "-march=arrowlake" for the former and "-march=meteorlake" for the latter.


AMD is not better because also for its CPUs knowing just the commercial part name is not enough, you must know whether it is a Zen 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5, and for Zen 5 you must know whether it has full vector pipelines, like Granite Ridge, Fire Range or Turin, or it has reduced vector pipelines, like Strix Point and Krackan Point (for Strix Halo it is unknown yet whether it has full or reduced vector pipelines; hopefully it has full pipelines).