AMD CTO says the future will bring more cores

Tom's Hardware had an interview with Mark Papermaster, the CTO of AMD. Lets take a look at some of the talking point. First up, Papermaster confirmed the future will deliver more cores. Papermaster says he doesn't see a saturation point for more cores, but software remains somewhat of an issue. Single-core performance remains important for a lot of tasks as it's not easy or too much work for developers to turn software into multi-core beasts. Multimedia for example benefits from this massively, but other light-weight tasks like checking forex quotes in your browser won't.

"In the near term, I don’t see a saturation point for cores. You have to be very thoughtful when you add cores because you don’t want to add it before the application can take advantage of it. As long as you keep that balance, I think we'll continue to see that trend."

He also commented on whether CPUs will get slower as they shrink to smaller nodes, as we've seen with the Intel Ice Lake generation. Papermaster says he's confident in AMD's ability to offset the disappearing frequency scaling opportunity via smarter architecture. This includes Infinity Fabric as well as the adoption of new technologies like DDR5 and PCIe 5.0. More performance will enable you to get your tasks done quicker, which may give you more time for activities like gaming, forex traders, social media, and aimlessly surfing the web.

"That's why we invented the Infinity Fabric," he explained, "to give us that flexibility as to how we put in CPU cores, and how many CPU cores, how many GPU cores, and how you can have a range of combinations of those engines along with other accelerators put together in a very efficient and seamless way. That is the era of a slowed Moore's Law. We’ve got to keep performance moving with every generation, but you can't rely on that frequency bump from every new semiconductor node."

You can read the full interview over here.