This is what a surprisingly small 80-core processor looks like inside
Ampere is a company dedicated to the design of processors with a high number of cores that use the ARM architecture. Its products are aimed at the professional sector, but for obvious reasons they have generated great interest, and it is not every day that we have the opportunity to talk about CPUs with a count of 80 or 128 coreand even less so with a configuration of monolithic corethat is, without having to resort to a modular design.
In certain scenarios, Ampere’s ARM processors can outperform their equivalents based on the x86 architecture, especially if we combine parallelized capacity and energy consumption. We know the architecture that Ampere uses in its processors and the number of cores that it has been able to mount, but how are these processors inside? It’s a very interesting question, and thanks to the well-known overclocker Der8auer we have a very clear and totally visual answer.
What we see in the cover image is an Ampere Altra Q80-30, a processor that has 80 QuickSilver cores, based on the architecture Neoverse N1which is nothing more than a derivative of the Cortex-A76 architecture, which has a few years behind it and is present in numerous SoCs for smartphones. It is built on TSMC’s 7nm node, offers 128 PCIe Gen4 lanes, supports DDR4 memory configured in eight channels, and runs at a maximum frequency of 3GHz.
As we can see, we have a monolithic chip, which means that all its elements are integrated into a single package. said encapsulated It measures 22.5mm x 22.5mm.and occupies an area of 574mm square. For comparison purposes, it’s only slightly larger than the Intel Core i9-7980XE package, which has 18 x86 cores and is built on Intel’s 14nm node (occupies a footprint of 480mm square).
However, the PCB of the Ampere chip it is much larger and has more contacts because it has more PCIe lanes. Yes, that is the reason why the Ampere Altra Q80-30 is so huge even though it uses such a small package (in comparison), because of the large number of contacts it has on the PCB.
When it comes to performance, the Ampere Altra Q80-30 reaches the 44,425 points in GeekBench 5, a figure that is higher than the 34,735 points achieved by AMD’s Threadripper 3990X with a significant overclock. Good performance, and good consumption, since the ARM chip registered a maximum peak of 180 watts during said test. In the video you can see more details, and also the “delid” process of the Altra Q80-30.
