#anyway well done SRAM!

[noorhelming]

PONEDJELJAK, 10:12

[dailytechnologynews]

GloFo 7nm: A Lost Hope

So as you may know GloFo 7nm was recently cancelled, in this article im going to analyze all of what this implies in a lot of levels but mostly on the technical one, both in short and long term

before beginning please have in mind:

1) im Spanish and my english writing might be poor, also this is by far the longest article ive ever wrote and it took me 2 and a half Hours to complete, there can be mistakes but don't be harsh pls

2) i currently own a bit of AMD stock, this means I focus on them more, but as you will see this doesn't affect my thinking

3) i link various articles in this one, i recommend you reading them for better comprehension

4) this article contains A LOT of estimates, they are based on public knowledge, if some of that knowledge turns out to be false or inaccurate the estimates based on it do the same, however they are the best that I can do, if I had more hard data I will use it. in particular, my estimates about TSMC 7nm are… weak and early, please don't complain about them, its the best I can do without more hard data

9001) WARNING: this article is LONG, the character count its literally OVER 9000!!!!

with that said lets begin

The first important question is WHY? Why did GloFo cancel their 7nm node? the answer is simple: MONEY, this quote from anandtech sums things up:

So, the key takeaway here is that while the 7LP platform was a bit behind TSMC’s CLN7FF when it comes to HVM – and GlobalFoundries has never been first to market with leading edge bulk manufacturing technologies anyway – there were no issues with the fabrication process itself. Rather there were deeper economic reasons behind the decision.

the full article is here: https://www.anandtech.com/show/13277/globalfoundries-stops-all-7nm-development

The second question is: how does GloFo 7nm compare to TSMC 7nm, because if glofo’s node was worse than TSMC's then the only loss here would be the competition, well this is absolutely not the case, GloFo 7nm was superior than TSMC 7nm, maybe by a wide margin, but this depends literally of thousands of factors, so the best that i can do is to approximate the final answer basing on all that we know first we have to know the specifics of GloFo 7nm, here is an excellent article containing them and more: https://fuse.wikichip.org/news/641/iedm-2017-globalfoundries-7nm-process-cobalt-euv/ if you read the article and understand most of it, you have my respect, but lets list the facts that we care about:

1) 55% power reduction at the same frequency

2) 40% frequency improvement at the same power

3) extremely tuned fin profiles

4) cobalt for some critical layers, improving interconnect speed and drastically reducing electromitigation, this is very important as the wall to reaching high clocks is interconnect speed

this looks extremely nice, but how does this translate into real world max clocks? Well if you assume the GloFo chart was linear then the results are very good, here is a calibration based in real data, done in the anandtech forums by /u/catmerc (thanks!): https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/next-gen-zen-2-3-starship-and-derivatives.2511914/page-3#post-39322122 you watched right: 4,6 GHz at the same power you would get 3,3 GHz on 14nm, WOW, this means that (again if the chart was linear) 5 GHz wouldn't be far fetched at all, this is probably too good and my estimations are that GloFo 7nm was a bit worse than what this chart implies, still I think 5 GHz would have been doable, but only for single core turbo, just in case: im referring to the SoC version, clocks on 7HPC would have been ludicrous

now we have to analyze how good TSMC 7nm is, this is harder to know and there is less data about this but lets do it anyway. first we have to get the advertised numbers, and those are 60% power reduction at the same frequency or 30% frequency improvement at the same power, source: https://www.anandtech.com/show/12677/TSMC-kicks-off-volume-production-of-7nm-chips, this is starting to look worse than GloFo from the first moment, however there is a big issue here: the bases are different, GloFo bases their 7nm numbers on their 14nm, and TSMC does it over their 16nm+ this makes comparison hard, I remember that TSMC 16nm clocked higher than Samsung 14nm which is the same as GloFo 14nm, but consumed a bit more and was less dense, I cant source those claims but if you look at the numbers they make sense, anyway this approach failed as a solid comparison point so lets move on, how about taking the words of their clients? Spoiler alert: worse than GloFo

Speed gains of 16% at 10 nm may dry up at 7 nm due to resistance in metal lines. Power savings will shrink from 30% at 10 nm to 10–25% at 7 nm, and area shrinks may decline from 37% at 10 nm to 20–30% at 7 nm, said Paul Penzes, a senior director of engineering on Qualcomm’s design technology team. source: https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1333109

Arm claims that the latest 7-nm nodes will only deliver 2% to 3% more speed than the 16-nm node. “There hasn’t been much frequency benefit at all since 16 nm … wire speed hasn’t scaled for some time,” said Peter Greenhalgh, an Arm fellow and vice president of technology. source: https://www.eetasia.com/news/article/18060102-arm-announces-high-performance-laptop-cpu

so basically two clients of TSMC are saying that there are close to none clock gains on 7nm (compared to 10nm, this is important) and I know they mean TSMC and not GloFo because they both say the problem is interconnect speed which if you remember from above is one of the things GloFo 7nm improved a lot thanks to cobalt and other things, also GloFo is a much smaller fab, it was going to get into HVM later and most people were going to use TSMC anyway. So now we know TSMC 7nm isn't as good as GloFo 7nm was, but by how much? Well a little time ago I made a prediction of how Ryzen 3000 would clock on both nodes, I recently updated it to reflect that AMD will use the HPC variant: https://www.reddit.com/r/aceshardware/comments/923t76/ryzen_3000_clock_predictions/ so there is your answer, a not at all laughable 300 MHz loss, but I think you also want to know how did I get to that concussion, well… it is a bit tricky and fail prone also it has a 100mhz or higher margin of error, anyway here it goes: the base is Ryzen 7 1800X which turbos up to 4 GHz on GloFo 14LPP TSMC 16nm+ clocks higher than GloFo 14lpp but lower than 12LP, 4,2GHz is my best estimate, TSMC 10nm should give about 5% of a boost to max clocks (remember max clocks ALWAYS increase less than “performance” for high end CPUs) that gets us to >4,4 GHz, going from 10nm to 7nm should give a negligible boost of around 2% but this is just enough to put that number on 4,5 GHz, this is the number for the mobile variant, but as i discovered during the writing of this article, AMD is going to use the HPC variant which features a 7.5 track library instead of the 6 track one found in the mobile variant it also should use fater interconnects, finding how much will this variant boost clocks is again as there is EVEN LESS data on it, the only numbers that I could find are +13% perf over the mobile variant and up to 4,4 GHz speed for the sram(L* cache), cache usually is a bit slower than the CPU itself so this doesnt mean the limit is 4,4 GHz. with all of this my estimation for 7nm HPC is 4,7 GHz which is still lower than the GloFo 7nm SoC version, have in mind im being a bit cautious with this one 4,8 GHz is possible , just for laughs if we compared max clocks of GloFo 7nm HPC(IBM only) vs TSMC 7nm HPC the difference will be ~0,8GHz, LOL just LOL (the number is serious tough) as you can see this is tricky as is based on estimates over estimates, however there are some limits to how good or how bad it can clock, so while my number might (and possibly will) fail, it cant fail by much The third question is: who this affects and how does it? The answer is AMD, IBM, Intel, TSMC and maybe Samsung, so lets analyze how it affects everyone on that list

AMD: Negatively

after the previous paragraph you can see why: 300-200mhz loss its not good, but this is just the tip of the iceberg, even if GloFo continued with 7nm AMD might have chosen TSMC 7nm for ryzen 3000 because of time constraints, the really bad thing about this is that the clocks of TSMC nodes are expected to be flat until 3nm which will mean a tech change from finfet to gaafet, this means Intel has 3-4 years of wide and increasing clock leadership so the only way AMD can beat Intel’s performance in the desktop market is through big IPC increases, which are unlikely to be big enough,still AMD should be able to beat Intel in value (perf/price) by a very good margin, server and laptop market are a VERY different story and I expect AMD to do very well on those. another HUGE concern for AMD should be prices, with near zero competition TSMC can increase prices both on the short and the long term, similar to the DRAM market, this means either smaller margins for AMD or higher final product prices.

for those all reasons I did cut my personal stock price target for AMD by a BIG 20%, yes you heard right: the day before the announcement I thought AMD was going to reach a 25% (because percentages work that way) higher price than today, im not going to say what my exact price targets are but I believe AMD is going to go up from the current price, just much less than before

IBM: Negatively, VERY negatively

well.. this guys really take the worst part, basically they have no node suitable for their high-end CPUs for the foreseeable future, glofo spun off an ASIC group which is said to help port costumer designs to other nodes, the problem is that there is no high performance 7nm class node apart from intel 10nm (if they fix it)

Intel: Positively

a lot of what I said for AMD applies here in reverse, Intel basically has an assured performance lead in the desktop market over AMD, but still they will have to compete to a denser, cheaper to produce 7nm chip lineup with their 14nm one, their server market share is still posed to get lower maybe by a bog amount

TSMC: Positively, VERY positively

on the short term they get more volume and therefore revenue, and in a now 2-player game (3 if intel opens its fabs) they get the ability to increase or even pact prices

Samsung: Positively

Samsung on the short term will probably see no gains, but on the long term they might win some designs, however the big win for them is the lack of competency driving prices an therefore margins up

YOU, the consumer: Negatively

as per the points stated above you might get more expensive chips, and maybe even worse ones, cutting-edge node development is mindblowingly expensive and that maybe is an understatement, with less competition tsmc and samsung might opt to do less aggressive jumps to save a huge amount of money on RD, this remains to be seen, it may not happen, but the possibility is out there and I wont dismiss it

to end I would like to quote an excellent comment from /u/nagromo which summarizes perfectly some of my thoughts:

I was hopeful that IBM research working with them meant it would be more like "IBM 7nm, manufactured by GloFo", similar to how they've done well with Samsung 14nm. I still think there's a decent chance it really was on track, and they're telling the truth and just think they can be more profitable using their successful 12/14nm technologies instead of investing $10B+ into 7nm. I'm really disappointed to hear this. I thought it was a reasonable hope that the IBM research team would be able to achieve or approach their 40% performance, 55% power numbers. There's rumors about poor performance from TSMC 7nm. My hopes for Ryzen 3 aren't nearly as high as they were yesterday.

this article was originally wrote by me to /r/aceshardware

[martinlawless]

National Masters Circuit Race Championships 2019

E1234 (44-49 year old category), Hillingdon, London Sunday 14 July 2019

The Masters National Circuit Champs popped up in my calendar only recently. It was a welcome aiming point for mid-summer. I’d never done it before. Indeed, I had never raced on road at a national event before. Only grass track racing before. So this was all new.

It was nearby in Hillingdon this year – so no excuses, really. I’d spoken to Steve who had raced it last year at Rockingham and he said it wouldn’t be the hardest race in the world: just the usual fast start and middle bit. Easing back before the sprint. I found this insight encouraging. I’d set my aim as simply to finish and say I’d taken part. I was also keen to feel the national standard of racing. All summer (and a lot of winter) I’d been racing Masters series crits down at Lee Valley. I begun to wonder what the standard was nationally. Certainly it felt hard in the South East. How would it be different elsewhere? So, this race offered an opportunity to find out.

My category had the biggest field. 44-49 year olds. I had scanned the start list beforehand and it was full of talent, as to be expected. This resolved my ambitions to simply finish. The good guys I know from the local region would be finding it hard. So I should be doing well just to keep up.

In the build-up, I had decided to keep my legs fresh. So, following an earlier mid-week Masters crit on the Wednesday, I’d done nothing but a nice Friday evening tempo, under-threshold ride around my area beforehand. That would be it til Sunday.

It’s not a nice drive to Hillingdon. It’s pretty grim. Fortunately, the traffic was good and I arrive to a warm afternoon in good time. I get the chance to park on the green behind the HQ and chat with the others whilst watching Jenny race and brilliantly bag Bronze in her race. Well deserved.

As I go through my prep routine, I am encouraged by many other riders who seem nervous. You can sort of tell it in their faces. I was expected to be intimidated, but instead I feel confident and relaxed. Most seem to take their tension out on the rollers, but I can’t be bothered and would much rather tootle around on the circuit. As soon as Jenny’s race is over, I lean into the commissaire’s booth and ask if it’s OK to spin around the track. He gives me a thumbs up and so I’m off to warm up for real a good half hour before our start. The circuit looks damp, but it’s simply the colour of the tarmac. Hillingdon is pretty worn in areas but generally OK. We’d be going around clockwise, which I prefer here. The wind was light-ish and hard to pin down in direction. It was slightly overcast, but when it cleared, the July sun was baking. I had to zip my top down a fraction.

A bit more fettling and hydration is required to fill the time and then I’m all set. A good prep, with the only omission being to forget to remove my watch which I like to do now as the vibrations hurt my wrists a bit. My bike is feeling its age at 10 years old. These Cervelos are untouchable – made when they were still independent. And the Mavic Carbone SL wheels are bombproof. But the old SRAM Red groupset I fear is simply worn out. The springs and tensions are fading. The bike clicks a bit despite new cabling and all sorts of fettling. I need to think about a new bike – or new second-hand bike.

I’d be carrying one gel I’d plan on taking half way around on the 75 minutes race. And a bag of High-5 sweets that I quite like that I’d plan on taking to help concentration a bit near the end.

We line up and there’s a good bit of banter in the bunch as the commissaire reads his safety script. We’re off and I clip in OK. Pretty essential when the road rises straight away here. In the first 30 seconds I can tell I’m in good company, the group is sensible and good at making obvious indications of their movement, mostly. I’m happy. There are many old-dogs here. And the unspoken accord and bond in the movement of the bunch is quite pro-like at times. Hillingdon is a smooth loop where you can manage the top twisty bit quite effortlessly if you are all in a groove. Which we were, often. Rhythmically, we’d swoop around, I’d punch through the short climb, tuck in on the drop and echelon the ascent to start the loop again.

Of course, there are attacks from the start. Some solo, some with a few riders. But it’s pretty clear to me that none will stick. At our smooth and high speed, it would take a miracle or a lot of team work (where no team was here in numbers) to make a break stick. I reckoned the chances of a break here were greater than 50-1. But that didn’t stop people trying.

I mostly lolled around the top 20-30 riders, halfway, mixing it up with riders who I knew. Safely tucked in and being sensible. Steve was burning matches up front, in part to help his teammate Chris for a sprint at the end. I was all fine, and enjoying it. I gave the team cheering me on a nod and thumbs-up. At one point, the line split and I found myself on the front of the bunch. Rather than pull back to be taken over, I thought what the heck and gave it beans to bridge to quite a sizeable break. I enjoyed this proper full-gas moment. It wasn’t worth anything and I didn’t react at all when the break fizzled as quickly as it had begun and we all regrouped.

I was pleased with my intelligence in energy conservation. Alas, some other riders were more wasteful. They over-cooked some big efforts and then struggled to recover. We lost a few riders off the back this way. Heroic attempts I suppose to win. But they won’t get their full race and a chance in the sprint.

I take my half-way gel. I am aware I’m drinking plenty and have to be careful not to empty my bottle too soon. It’s hot – for me. I see Chris by the side of the road at one point. He’s clearly punctured and out. What a shame. I see Jess and know he’ll do well. He works the bunch magnificently and I struggle to keep his wheel. Steve, as ever, is super aggressive on the front. And the other folk I know from the Lee Valley summer series give me a good barometer of the effort being applied. I see we creep past 27.2mph average. But, I’m not phased. This effort is, by and large, steady.

The lap boards go up and the pace eases a little. Frustratingly for me, but I know this was always likely to happen. Two laps to go, and as we climb to the final lap, on reflection, my golden opportunity appears. I’m wide right and sheltered by the wind. I can climb through the ranks to the top 10 or so. I should have punched on and gone to the tip. A big gamble with a full lap left. But, instead, the right side gets swamped. I’m almost on to the grass verge. But stay on just. All the left-side riders get a massive advantage. We loop around and string out and from here, any change in position will be very hard to earn.

We stay more or less as we are in a thin line and turn for the 300 metres sprint for the line. I’m already out of the top 15 here. I give it some welly and we at the back remain statically positioned. I’m so boxed in at one point I have to stop pedalling. But it’s moot anyway. I put in a sprint that will equal my fastest Hillingdon sprint. But I should really have smashed that record: if only I’d have had a clean run. I need to position super early and find depth in crits. My short sprint is a joke.

We’re all over the line, safe and well. I’m 23rd. It’s good to catch up with Dave and Jenny. I tell Dave he’s about to race the fastest crit of his career, next in his category race. Which he indeed does. What I didn’t expect was his race to be a lot less dynamic and more a straightforward wattage TT pointed arrow bunch burn. Ouch. But that’s what you get for being 5 years younger I guess.

The afternoon weather turns out rather nicely. I take in some of Dave’s race and then grab a massive blueberry muffin and can of Limonata from the boys in the HQ café. I see the results and note the fella riding for the Kingdom of Brunei wins. I wonder if he flew in especially. One of the Welsh boys came second. I see Jess got into the top 10 – and other names I know spread across the results. It was a high standard race and I did OK. I could have maybe scraped a top 15 and a point another time. Really hard to do though. I’d love to do a Masters road race in among all these crits. And I should work harder to find a Regional A road race that suits me. But for now, the summer is coming in fast and will bring a lull in opportunities and a welcome bit of time off the bike. It’s a fine balance of enthusiasm, motivation, fatigue, family life, work life and hard to pin down sense of relevance. In it all too there’s a good group camaraderie with Masters racers, battling against modern life.

Strava link:

[vonbaghager]

A quick Commander review of the Aether Revolt legendaries

why not??

please note that I’m not a super hardcore player, nor am I very capable of seeing destructive combos, so I’m likely to miss some details that may affect my personal ratings on some of these legends. Feel free to let me know about things I miss!

Baral, Chief of Compliance: Incredibly cheap cost with the power to make all of your instants and sorceries just a tad bit cheaper as well. Baral rewards Blue’s most obnoxious behavior in Commander, allowing you to cycle through cards each time you counter a spell. Thankfully, Baral is a bit more fair than he could have been, as you MUST discard a card if you draw one, preventing you from simply making up for the card you lose countering the spell in the first place.

A very balanced counterspell-based legend that can fit into any spell-based deck, but Baral probably does better as one of the 99 rather than the Commander itself. 6/10.

Yahenni, Undying Partisan: Undying indeed. Yahenni comes out swinging via built-in haste and makes for a devastating Voltron Commander with their ability to make their self indestructible for a turn. Because they grow stronger with each enemy minion that dies, it’s insanely easy to exploit their abilities through cards such as Grave Pact, making them one of the stronger legendaries of the set and maybe the format in general.

I hesitate to say that Yahenni may be one of the strongest monoblack Commanders in existence, but they are definitely in the top 10 because they make for an efficient sacrifice outlet that’s incredibly difficult to get rid of once they get going... And even then, their cheap cost means they’ll be right back on the field before the enemy even starts to miss them. The party’s just starting, darling. 10/10

Rishkar, Peema Renegade: Rishkar feels like a lesser version of another already-existing Commander, but I can’t put my finger on who. As a mono-green elf, Rishkar already basically has a deck built for him which will allow him to easily fill the space of a more powerful elf legend to keep the table from being flipped into your face. His effect is minor but can be impactful, granting up to two of your creatures an extra +1/+1 counter... And turning all of your counter’d creatures into mana batteries.

In a token/counter deck, Rishkar can easily outspeed your lands when it comes to producing mana, though at the cost of your monster’s ability to attack or block. Still, if you can get the mana ramp to work, Rishkar can pave the way for... Well. A mono-green beatstick deck. It’s not flashy, but it gets the job done. 5/10.

Sram, Senior Edificer: As much as I want to say “Voltron,” that almost feels like it might be a red herring. Sram draws you a card whenever you play any typical Voltron component (Auras, Equipments, and now Vehicles), allowing a generous heap of extra resources to help power your engine, and on paper it feels like he might be a contender for the Strongest Voltron Commander spot. I don’t know how it will turn out in practice, but I have hope.

In a dedicated Voltron deck he can very easily let you draw your whole library, but without the ability to protect himself from anything like Yahenni can (or generate backup like Kemba can) he’ll probably just end up eating spot removal time and time again. He could make for a very interesting lynchpin for some sort of White combo deck, or as one of the 99 in a different Voltron deck to give it some added consistency, since Sram doesn’t care if he’s actually targeted with the equipment, only that it’s played. 8/10.

Kari Zev, Skyship Raider: I really want her to be good simply because of how funny her ability is to me. She doesn’t scream Voltron as loudly as Sram or Yahenni, but it’s definitely a possibility with her keywords menace and first strike forcing the enemy to block with two creatures to prevent taking Commander damage, which she can then trade with favorably thanks to first strike. And then there’s her third ability, summoning her loyal monkey companion Ragavan into play to attack alongside her until he scampers off at the end of the combat, meaning your opponent technically needs three creatures in play to block Kari’s damage completely.

Ragavan is a 2/1, thus insanely weak and fragile, but every bit of extra damage helps now and then. Since Ragavan exiles himself each combat anyway, he can also be sacrificed for some engine or another without much stress. Kari is an amusing card with an interesting ability I’m desperate to break in one way or another, though just on paper she has little utility outside “attack each turn.” 7/10.

Hope of Ghirapur: A 1-mana 1/1 thopter with flying. I really don’t want to yell Voltron again after three of the five legends listed so far have made me say it, but come on! It can be summoned turn 1! Hope is a little hampered by its lack of a color keeping it from attaching any auras (aside from Eldrazi Conscription) but the fact it can come out on turn 1 makes up for it.

Its actual ability, the power to shut down someone’s spellcasting by sacrificing itself, is worth note. Hope can come down swinging and ram into an enemy you feel might be ready to combo off, delaying them at least for one more turn so the other players at the table can deal with it. The other thing worth actually bringing up is its synergy with Alesha, Who Smiles at Death, who can potentially permanently lock a target out of playing anything but creatures. On its own, Hope makes for an amusing Commander who can be out on the field on turn 1 and has utility far later in the game when other players have begun to assemble their armies. 7/10.