What is #1 based on? Not denying, just curious about the numbers.
As for #2 I'm not sure DC make or breaks the desktop?
#1 is my strong "guess" and is based on the idea that as long as share prices are high (based on the promise of 18A and future products), it is expensive to purchase Intel .... and risky. Buy now and things go south and you eat billions upon billions of dollars loss on your investment (ie, Twitter).
Should be enough cause the architecture is not a power hog and has better PPA tham zen at lower power levels like their P cores
Yes, but not power per core and certainly not in MT. Per core licensing would make a Zen 5 solution highly preferable to a 288 core Skymont solution due to licensing costs.
Theoretically, Clearwater Forest is a tour de force. I say theoretically, because Granite Rapids is suffering from scaling issues. It's rushed just like Arrowlake is. Intel says Arrowlake's performance issues can be mitigated, I don't know if that's true for Granite Rapids. 20% difference in MT would have been good. It's 40% in 2P. Unfortunately due to that the situation has not improved substantially over when they got Emerald Rapids.
Sierra Forest seems to have little bit of scaling issues too. Can't tell if that's tile immaturity or something to do with the Birch Stream platform. Remember CWF uses same socket as Sierra.
Again, since Skymont is essentially Zen 5c in Integer performance per clock, and in FP it's much closer. 288 cores is more than enough to make up for lack of SMT over a 192 core SMT enabled one. This is a theoretically very viable approach. Actually in some cases it is advantageous, because the total amount of threads are less.
As a product? It depends on how much the base Foveros cache layer will help with scaling that many cores. It depends on many minor details we don't know. How is the fabric? How does the memory controller scale? Bandwidth and latency of all the parts.
If it does well it won't just threaten Turin, but their own P core Xeon.
Core per core, I can't see Skymont being anywhere near Zen 5c in DC workloads. It lacks SMT and AVX512. In fact, I could see Zen 5c being anywhere from 40% to 60% higher performance per core than Skymont in DC workloads.
So lets first look at just overall performance of a 192 core Zen 5c vs a 288 core Skymont under these assumptions. Skymont has 50% more cores, but Zen 5c performs 50% better per core .... so an even race but.......
Now look at it from a licensing standpoint. Skymont has 50% more cores and from an annual license costs 50% more per year to operate than Zen 5c.
Lots of assumptions here for sure, I just point out that Clearwater forest isn't necessarily a slam dunk for Intel.
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