What's up with the low cache sizes in Kabylake-X and Skylake-X?

[pyrojoe34]

Looking at the expected cache sizes of the Kabylake-X chips (up to 8MB) and Skylake-X (up to 16.5MB on the 12 core, only 8.25 on the 6 core), I noticed those are very low compared to Broadwell-E. My 6 core 6800k has 15MB and the 10 core 6950X has 25MB. Why the downgrade in the new lineups? Are they having issues with L3 manufacturing or was it done on purpose? Even the L2 cache sizes seem to have taken a step down.

[Damascus]

Giving up cache for higher clocks and less production cost

[EPPHO]

Maybe they came up with something new

[mrzoltowski]

Or trying to compete with Ryzen's price-point and shaving things off? It's all speculation at this point.

[HKZeroFive]

It's a "new cache system" where L2 gets bumped up to 1MB and L3 gets reduced to save die space. Or at least that's what people currently think.

[DocSwag]

These are still all rumors though, so you gotta take that with a grain of salt.

 

Cache takes up a lot of die space, so cost is probably most of the reason.

[pyrojoe34]

2 hours ago, HKZeroFive said:

It's a "new cache system" where L2 gets bumped up to 1MB and L3 gets reduced to save die space. Or at least that's what people currently think.

Is the 1MB per core or total? Because Broadwell-e only has 256KB per core but that's 1.5-2.5MB total.

[HKZeroFive]

3 hours ago, pyrojoe34 said:

Is the 1MB per core or total? Because Broadwell-e only has 256KB per core but that's 1.5-2.5MB total.

Per core.