In my experience memory bandwidth and shared L3 cache make conventional multi-core CPUs less than ideal for multi-tenant use in cloud infrastructure.

From what I understand the idea behind a “cloud native” processor such as Sierra Forest, Altra Max and Graviton is the weaker cores tend not to interfere with each other as much. Since AVX-512 can be particularly demanding on shared resources, it’s natural why Intel avoided AVX-512.

With Bergamo reducing per-core L1 cache might actually increase the noisy-neighbour effect–at least on average. On the other hand, creating the VMs aligned with the compute dies should avoid the noisy neighbours. This suggests 8 cores with 16 threads is the smallest size for a good VM on Bergamo.

It would be interesting if a reliable source would measure how much adjacent VMs interfere with each other on different architectures when running various kinds of workloads.

Throws an instruction exception and the process is killed. At least that’s how it works on Linux.

Just saw your question after asking similar one below. +1, LOL. I have the same issues and have wrestled with them in datacenter and cloud configurations. How do you go about loading these up with VMs and maintaining flexibility? Is Windows Server making major changes in operation and licensing, to fit? Or will it be left to boggled devops folks trying to make sense of it all after the fact? I respect Intel’s expertise in processors in the abstract but their ability to match that to reality has not always been great.

No one mentioned the CHIPS Act, but Intel is clearly a big beneficiary. No one mentioned share repurchases, either as far as I can see but I am a little tired. And while AMD might have the upper hand, it can only make so many processors and Intel will well the remainder. AMD’s job is to make what can sell and only make as many as it thinks it can sell. If AMD thought it could sell 100 percent of the X86 server market, it would do so. It does not. And hence, even it believes that Intel will continue to win sales.

I, too, find it perplexing based on raw feeds and speeds. But that is what is happening.

And Intel hasn’t made any share repurchases since Q1 2021.

Regarding the E-cores, it’s odd to imply that Intel can “lie” to hyperscalers. I don’t know which makes more sense, Intel’s full dedication to the market segment with optimized cores or AMD’s less-expensive rejiggering of their single core type, but the hyperscalers are going to make their decisions on internal testing, not on anyone’s marketing. The usefulness for any particular enterprise may come down to the licensing terms available for the software applications they use.

At some point, it is just going to be a rack in a socket, a row in a chassis, and a datacenter in a rack. HA!

These E cores though… the lying, uh, pardon me, the ‘marketing’ never stops. They are really only efficient at packing cores into small areas. They’re not particularly efficient at doing work per watt. They are efficient at being able to say a CPU has lots of cores, let’s put it that way. AMD’s full-fat-with-half-the-cache ‘C’ core still make more sense. My $0.02 anyway.