The chip image surprised me: where's the L3 cache? On previous generations, L3 cache was a significant amount of real estate. Is it no longer shared between cores?
I don't see any coherent fabric blocks — what looks like large cache sections to my eyes are entirely inside the "Core" blocks. Maybe they're just not drawn correctly. Here are some much older i7s, for example:
Right, that was really my main question: besides the labeling (which is of course approximate), the positioning sure looks like each core would have its own "favorite" section of the cache. And being shared, it seems like this could make for some interesting performance behaviors.
Yeah, you need something like that to scale to large core counts, and especially if you wanna pull off some chiplet goodness (like AMD did with Ryzen). I think that's why it got lumped with the Fabric Interconnect layer in one of the block diagrams.
