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Apple also uses massive cache sizes, compared to the industry.

They put a 32 megabyte system level cache in their latest phone chip.

>at 32MB, the new A15 dwarfs the competition’s implementations, such as the 3MB SLC on the Snapdragon 888 or the estimated 6-8MB SLC on the Exynos 2100

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16983/the-apple-a15-soc-perfo...

It will be interesting to see how big they go on these chips.



> Apple also uses massive cache sizes, compared to the industry.

AMD's upcoming Ryzen are supposed to have 192MB L3 "v-cache" SRAM stacked above each chiplet. Current chiplets are 8-core. I'm not sure if this is a single chiplet but supposedly good for 2Tbps[1].

Slightly bigger chip than a iphone chip yes. :) But also wow a lot of cache. Having it stacked above rather than built in to the core is another game-changing move, since a) your core has more space b) you can 3D stack many layers of cache atop.

This has already been used on their GPUs, where the 6800 & 6900 have 128MB of L3 "Infinity cache" providing 1.66TBps. It's also largely how these cards get by with "only" 512GBps worth of GDDR6 feeding them (256bit/quad-channel... at 16GT). AMD's R9 Fury from spring 2015 had 1TBps of HBM2, for compare, albeit via that slow 4096bit wide interface.

Anyhow, I'm also in awe of the speed wins Apple got here from bringing RAM in close. Cache is a huge huge help. Plus 400GBps main memory is truly awesome, and it's neat that either the CPU or GPU can make use of it.

[1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/16725/amd-demonstrates-stacke...




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