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 understandable reasons they have generated a lot of interest, and it is not every day that we have the opportunity to talk about CPUs with a lot 80 or 128 coreand even less with configuration monolithic corei.e. without having to resort to modular construction.

In certain scenarios, Ampere ARM processors can outperform their x86-based equivalents, especially when we combine parallelized capacity and power consumption. We know the architecture Ampere uses in its processors and the number of cores it was able to build, but how are the processors inside? It’s a very interesting question, and thanks to the well-known overclocker Der8auer, we have a very clear and completely visual answer.

What we see in the cover image is the Ampere Altra Q80-30, an 80-core QuickSilver processor based on the Neoverse N1which is nothing but a derivative of the Cortex-A76 architecture, which has been around for a few years and is present in many smartphone SoCs. 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 3 GHz.

As we can see, we have a monolithic chip, which means that all its elements are integrated into a single case. said encapsulated It measures 22.5mm x 22.5mm.and occupies an area Square 574 mm. 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 (occupying an area 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’s why the Ampere Altra Q80-30 is so huge, even though it uses such a small case (in comparison), because of the large number of contacts it has on the PCB.

When it comes to performance, the Ampere Altra Q80-30 delivers 44,425 points in GeekBench 5, a number that’s higher than the 34,735 points scored by AMD’s heavily overclocked Threadripper 3990X. Good performance and good consumption because the ARM chip recorded the maximum peak 180 watts during said test. In the video you can see more details and also the “delid” process of the Altra Q80-30.