10 ms·

Intel Skylake Review

102 points by p1esk 11y ago

igravious 11y ago
64GB! Sixty-four! For a desktop/laptop architecture! At 64GB (GiB?) main memory we're getting to the point where you could copy the entire working set of the OS to memory from disk on boot and then simply save to disk periodically. So long as you have a battery/UPS that'd work. Is that a crazy? I'm currently on 3rd gen, the i7-3537U. My dream machine would be 13/14" laptop w/ 1080p (though 4k-ish wouldn't hurt), Skylake i7, usb-c, hdmi out, 16GB RAM, 256 decent SSD. Have I forgotten anything?
- rbinv 11y ago
  The next MacBook Pros should have Skylake processors in them. Might feature USB-C, too. Although the i7 might be exclusive to the 15-inch model.
  - melling 11y ago
    I would hope everyone would feature USB-C with their Skylake processors. There's no reason not to.
  - igravious 11y ago
    Dell's XPS[1] range should eventually get a refresh also, but Dell seems to have a habit of launching laptops juuust before Intel does a refresh which is myopic or careless or I don't know what. Looking at those benchmarks[2] the Skylake i5 is no slouch but I just have an aversion to the i5 for no rational reason whatsoever. Seems to be clocked lower and doesn't have hyper-threading. If you're going to get the top of the line CPU and chipset you may as well go for the i7 rather than the i5. is my thinking. I guess the i5 exists to create mid-range gear -- pair an i7 with a dedicated GPU, i5 uses integrated; i7 gets a retina panel w/ touch, i5 gets 1080p and no touch; i7 gets more RAM, i5 gets less; and so on. [1] http://www.dell.com/ie/p/xps-13-9343-laptop/pd http://www.dell.com/ie/p/xps-13-9343-laptop/pd [2] http://anandtech.com/show/9483/intel-skylake-review-6700k-6600k-ddr4-ddr3-ipc-6th-generation/19 http://anandtech.com/show/9483/intel-skylake-review-6700k-66...
    - abrowne 11y ago
      The mobile i5, at least he dual-core U-series, do have hyper-threading.
    - toyg 11y ago
      Dell probably does that so that they can quickly benefit from the following price drop. Most of their market will not even know what the latest processor is, anyway.
- agumonkey 11y ago
  Until we have persistent memory. 3D X-point is a pragmatic step in the direction. It would be weird to reorganize a system around lots of RAM and persistent dram/flash hybrid.
- jkot 11y ago
  My 4 years old mid range CPU and motherboard supports 32GB. Linux does copy-to-ram for at least decade (Slax, Knoppix...). > My dream machine would be 13/14" laptop Toshiba Portege Z30 supports 16GB RAM, in theory it handles 32GB RAM. I am waiting for new version with Skylike and retina.
  - choudanu4 11y ago
    Amen, for linux's copy-to-ram! I use the Slitaz distribution on my old Compaq computer from 1999, and wow! Even with only 384 MB of RAM, the system is blazing fast, all thanks to copy-to-ram!
- cm3 11y ago
  I would say it's very sad that we have only 64GB. We should be allowed to install at least 128GB or 256GB in consumer grade mainboards. Similarly for a developer workstation one has to choose a Xeon to get more cores, but a smaller GPU and twice as many cpu cores in the non-Xeon line would be great because enthusiasts don't use the iGPU anyway. Developers don't need a fast GPU unless they really need one and then any iGPU is too little too slow so most chips should have more cores in place of bigger iGPUs. It's true that your office clerk workflow doesn't benefit from more cores due to legacy software, but software developer workflows benefit a lot when building code or running virtual machines or running (modern) concurrent applications. It's very very sad indeed that AMD is the only x86 vendor who puts more cores on consumer chips. Let's hope Zen will force a change.
  - lagadu 11y ago
    Well, they're described as being "enthusiast" chips but the core i7 line does have 6 and 8 core versions: the 5820/5930 and the 5960 respectively.
  - nharada 11y ago
    Don't people use GPUs all the time now because of Netflix and movie streaming? My old laptop's GPU would always kick in when I played something in 1080p.
    - soylentcola 11y ago
      I believe that streaming video can make use of GPU acceleration for decoding (to take some load off of your CPU).
  - RogerL 11y ago
    We are not consumers. Intel would be foolish to optimize their consumer chips for us. If you want a workstation class machine you buy a Xeon. Adding memory channels is not free, and with 4 channels you get 64GB given current DDR4 capacity.
- rsi_oww 11y ago
  > 64GB! Sixty-four! For a desktop/laptop architecture! and still no ECC support, sigh
  - Osmium 11y ago
    > and still no ECC support, sigh Are there any technical reasons not to have ECC by default, or is it just market segmentation?
    - lmz 11y ago
      Market segmentation. Core i{5,7} with ECC support is sold as Xeon E3.
      - miahi 11y ago
        For a while some of the Xeon E3s were the thing to buy, as they were sold at lower prices than the equivalent i7 CPUs (Xeons with 4 cores+HT and lots of cache were sold at the same price as the quad or dual+HT i5s), but this was "fixed" and now the cheap Xeons are crippled (no HT anymore).
      - caycep 11y ago
        What about motherboard support? I can't usually find any motherboard with ECC support that also has decent onboard sound...
        hga 11y ago
        Don't know about the quality of the support†, or what "decent" onboard sound is, but Supermicro sells a bunch of boards that support 1 or 2 Xeons (and generally also support consumer chips), ECC and have onboard sound. E.g. for the low, low price of $289 this board http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813182967 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813182... will support two processors, up to a half terabyte of memory, and has a Realtek ALC888 for 7.1 channels of sound. †I'm using a one processor chip X9SAE to type this with, with HDMI output with sound included to my receiver and then monitor.
- tarikjn 11y ago
  I have to admit, at the moment, the one thing that fills my laptop memory the most frequently are browser tabs. There has got to be a better way -- and I know there are solutions, but their UX have failed me so far. Hardware advances are nice, but software/UX still has a long way to go.
  - coldtea 11y ago
    >There has got to be a better way Sure: don't open so many tabs.
- vbezhenar 11y ago
  > 64GB! Sixty-four! For a desktop/laptop architecture! At 64GB (GiB?) main memory we're getting to the point where you could copy the entire working set of the OS to memory from disk on boot and then simply save to disk periodically. So long as you have a battery/UPS that'd work. Is that a crazy? That would be very unreliable, would cause huge loading times, huge powerdown times. Also modern OS uses free memory as a disk cache, so you are already getting all speed benefits. So basically you might just do find / -type f -exec cat {} > /dev/null \; to fill your disk cache if you have enough memory.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- mkl 11y ago
  A 64GB maximum is seriously disappointing - I upgraded my 3 year old pc to its 32GB maximum a few months ago and right now it's using all that plus 27GB of swap. I could easily and usefully use much more.
- seiji 11y ago
  we're getting to the point where you could copy the entire working set of the OS to memory I've run diskless, boot-from-network systems with 2 to 4 GB RAM with the entire OS+data+servers in memory. If you know your exact sizes, you don't need giant RAM. As far as desktop or interactive systems go, in 2009 I made a desktop with 24 GB RAM which essentially never read from the disk after everything got cached appropriately. save to disk periodically. That's what your kernel does. There's a long history of flushing dirty pages back to disk. My dream machine would be It looks like you want a MacBook Pro from 3 years ago?
devmoat 11y ago
Anyone know if Skylake comes with SGX extensions?
- bitL 11y ago
  Yes, that was one of the main points of architecture overhaul.
norea-armozel 11y ago
I can't see myself retiring by i5-3570k since it's not a sufficient bump in performance for me (even with DDR4 quad channel). So, I'll have to wait and see what Intel does with its iGPU technology. If the iGPU technology gets as good as a gtx 970 (or r9 290x) then I might buy one of their next generation CPUs when they come to market. :/
- Nursie 11y ago
  From what I've read, the Skylake GPU capability is a step backwards from the Broadwell ones, though it may be that's because the audience for the two chips released so far is considered to be gaming enthusiasts, who will probably have one or more discrete cards anyway.
  - norea-armozel 11y ago
    Yeah, it just seems like only AMD understands that you have to marry the GPU with the CPU aspects of the processors now. And I don't know if AMD can keep it up at this rate considering some of the projections hint at a potential default around 2020.
bitL 11y ago
Pros: - 64GB for desktop (finally!) - 26 PCIe lanes (i.e. multiple fast M.2 PCIe NVMe, making 5k/4k RAW video previewing possible in real-time) OK: - very small performance increase comparing to Haswell two generations ago (Broadwell?) - DDR4 performance matches XMP DDR3 performance; to see any difference you need to use quad channel configuration - SGX, the jury is out on this one (double-edged sword, could improve security but also turn into a complete malware mess due to enclave isolation and inability to detect running encrypted botnets once they gain ring 0) Cons: - power consumption is up (!?) - no AVX-512 for desktop
- iaskwhy 11y ago
  I don't know much about this but, regarding DD4, the article says on page 7: "upgrading to DDR4 doesn’t degrade performance from your high end DRAM kit, and you get the added benefit of future upgrades, faster speeds, lower power consumption due to the lower voltage and higher density modules." So maybe it balances out the power consumption?
- pdkl95 11y ago
  SGX is terrifying. Botnets are not the main problem. Windows (N+1) using SGX to make it hard/impossible to remove the spyware (and other junk)[1] is the problem. As an example, take a "trusted" environment[2] and add SGX as a way of keeping end users out of the TEE. While it is still early, SGX may be a key battlefield in the War On General Purpose Computing. [1] e.g. the stuff discussed recently https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9976298 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9976298 [2] http://i.imgur.com/rjbzWyB.jpg http://i.imgur.com/rjbzWyB.jpg
  - yk 11y ago
    Is Doctorow's 28c3 keynote so well known, that a link is not necessary anymore? http://boingboing.net/2011/12/27/the-coming-war-on-general-purp.html http://boingboing.net/2011/12/27/the-coming-war-on-general-p...
  - userbinator 11y ago
    Very terrifying indeed. IMHO these days there is far too much freedom being traded away for security, and users are gradually conditioned toward it. The thinking is almost like "How about we put everyone in prison, because some percentage of them will become criminals anyway?" Back then it was relatively easy to patch your OS --- even if it was proprietary and closed-source --- to make it behave how you wanted to, if you knew what to change (see all the Windows customising forums for an example, and the whole cracking community.) You didn't have to give up proprietary software completely and move to something like Linux. Now it's become much harder, and I feel that the middle ground between fully open-source and fully closed has mostly disappeared as the two communities are gradually distancing from each other. http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html
snake117 11y ago
So I'm planning on building a new gaming rig because my current PC is still running Sandy Bridge. Would you guys recommend Skylake? I found this MoBo + CPU + Memory package on Newegg for $500: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=19-117-601 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=19-117-601 From my understanding, the i5 CPUs are great for gaming and i7 is great for running multiple applications at the same time. I appreciate any help, thanks!
- wlesieutre 11y ago
  The i5 is fine for running multiple applications at once. The i7 adds hyperthreading, which allows each core to act like two virtual cores to run parallelized calculations more quickly, but in some cases it actually comes out slower than with hyperthreading turned off. The only way to know for sure is testing, but games are almost certainly not optimized for this. For a gaming rig, I wouldn't bother.
- talmand 11y ago
  I'm about to build a new rig as well and was waiting on Skylake to see if I wanted to jump in. After seeing the reviews and price points, I'm going to pass and go with Haswell. The pros do not justify the price premium to me. Right now the difference for me is around $150, which I'd rather sink into the video card. Also, I've read that the Skylake CPUs don't come with a cooling solution, you have to buy your own third-party cooling solution which adds to the cost. I know many people think the stock cooling sucks, which it does for overclocking. But if you don't overclock, the best reason for a third-party cooling solution is to reduce noise. Currently I'm planning on an i5 as I've never seen an advantage to having an i7 for gaming. An i5 and a good video card is all you need.
  - kenrikm 11y ago
    I can recommend the i5 4460 which is about ~$180. It's a locked 4690k for about $60 less but honestly is able to play even the most demanding games on Ultra settings (Witcher 3 / GTA 5) if pared with a good GPU. I would advise picking up a Z97 Motherboard to go with it so if you do want to upgrade the processor in a few years you have a path to the higher end of the Haswell line.
kenrikm 11y ago
CPUs seemed to hit their sweet spot around 2010 and have not made a huge amount of practical progress since. Up until about 2 weeks ago my gaming PC was running a i5 750 a processor released back in 2009 and still able to run all but the most demanding games on max settings GTA5 being the exclusion. Even my video cards (GTX660ti in SLI) are on older side having been released back in 2012/2013?. Recently My PSU Blew and took the motherboard with it so I purchased a i5 4460/Z97 Combo for about $300 from Amazon which clears up the bottleneck in GTA5. This CPU is already a year old but I'm glad to see it's within 1-2FPS of the new chips in most games. Most likely won't even need to look at upgrading for another 5 years. I think to some extent intel is backing themselves into a corner with this release, their last generation was so good (i5 4690k or 4460) that Skylake seems rather lackluster.
- Nursie 11y ago
  Was looking at this earlier today as my machine is about 4 years old now. From what I can tell, moving from my i5-2400 (Sandy Bridge) to the i7 6700K (Skylake) would apparently buy me about a 70% performance boost. But then moving to a 4790K (Haswell) gets me a 69% boost. And I could get a 40% boost by buying a 3770K (Ivy Bridge), and then I wouldn't even need a new motherboard, RAM etc....
  - coldtea 11y ago
    Well, it's not exactly 1% difference between Haswell and Skylake. Where did you get that?
    - Nursie 11y ago
      Some crappy cpu comparison site ;) It's not clock-for-clock or anything like that, that was comparing the absolute top of the range desktop Haswell (4790K) to the one Skylake i7 released so far. Or rather comparing both against my i5 2400. I'm not exactly sure what to do now. I probably don't actually need a processor upgrade anyway, the graphics card is the more important part.
      - 11y ago
uxcn 11y ago
Will latencies for DDR4 modules come down over time, or is there some fundamental limitation to the standard? I'd be curious if anyone knows what Intel's long term plan for L4 eDRAM is.
- nitrogen 11y ago
  Are those absolute latency increases in nanoseconds, or just bigger numbers in clock cycles? The clock cycle counts will increase as effective clock rates increase, but the real latency in nanoseconds could still be the same or lower.
  - uxcn 11y ago
    Realized time might be the same or lower than DDR3, but I was more interested in the cycle counts (RAS, CAS, etc..). Latencies typically do increase as frequency increases, but better modules usually still support lower latencies. DDR4 uses a lower voltage, which is typically bad for latency, but I'm wondering if there's some other fundamental limitation to the standard.
mixmastamyk 11y ago
As I'm slaving over a hot laptop in the middle of summer, I have to ask. Will this generation allow for cooler machines? To be honest I write text files and email for a living. Can anyone recommend the coolest yet snappy laptops? With plenty of memory, min 16gb, "retina" display. Perhaps next year's Macbook with no fan is a candidate? Though I don't mind a fan. I have a "Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU Q 720 @ 1.60GHz" with "Madison [Mobility Radeon HD 5730 / 6570M]", which is a few years old. Looking for something new that has half the heat output, and is hopefully faster.

102 points by p1esk 11y ago

64GB! Sixty-four! For a desktop/laptop architecture! At 64GB (GiB?) main memory we're getting to the point where you could copy the entire working set of the OS to memory from disk on boot and then simply save to disk periodically. So long as you have a battery/UPS that'd work. Is that a crazy? I'm currently on 3rd gen, the i7-3537U. My dream machine would be 13/14" laptop w/ 1080p (though 4k-ish wouldn't hurt), Skylake i7, usb-c, hdmi out, 16GB RAM, 256 decent SSD. Have I forgotten anything?

rbinv 11y ago
The next MacBook Pros should have Skylake processors in them. Might feature USB-C, too. Although the i7 might be exclusive to the 15-inch model.
- melling 11y ago
  I would hope everyone would feature USB-C with their Skylake processors. There's no reason not to.
- igravious 11y ago
  Dell's XPS[1] range should eventually get a refresh also, but Dell seems to have a habit of launching laptops juuust before Intel does a refresh which is myopic or careless or I don't know what. Looking at those benchmarks[2] the Skylake i5 is no slouch but I just have an aversion to the i5 for no rational reason whatsoever. Seems to be clocked lower and doesn't have hyper-threading. If you're going to get the top of the line CPU and chipset you may as well go for the i7 rather than the i5. is my thinking. I guess the i5 exists to create mid-range gear -- pair an i7 with a dedicated GPU, i5 uses integrated; i7 gets a retina panel w/ touch, i5 gets 1080p and no touch; i7 gets more RAM, i5 gets less; and so on. [1] http://www.dell.com/ie/p/xps-13-9343-laptop/pd http://www.dell.com/ie/p/xps-13-9343-laptop/pd [2] http://anandtech.com/show/9483/intel-skylake-review-6700k-6600k-ddr4-ddr3-ipc-6th-generation/19 http://anandtech.com/show/9483/intel-skylake-review-6700k-66...
  - abrowne 11y ago
    The mobile i5, at least he dual-core U-series, do have hyper-threading.
  - toyg 11y ago
    Dell probably does that so that they can quickly benefit from the following price drop. Most of their market will not even know what the latest processor is, anyway.
agumonkey 11y ago
Until we have persistent memory. 3D X-point is a pragmatic step in the direction. It would be weird to reorganize a system around lots of RAM and persistent dram/flash hybrid.
jkot 11y ago
My 4 years old mid range CPU and motherboard supports 32GB. Linux does copy-to-ram for at least decade (Slax, Knoppix...). > My dream machine would be 13/14" laptop Toshiba Portege Z30 supports 16GB RAM, in theory it handles 32GB RAM. I am waiting for new version with Skylike and retina.
- choudanu4 11y ago
  Amen, for linux's copy-to-ram! I use the Slitaz distribution on my old Compaq computer from 1999, and wow! Even with only 384 MB of RAM, the system is blazing fast, all thanks to copy-to-ram!
cm3 11y ago
I would say it's very sad that we have only 64GB. We should be allowed to install at least 128GB or 256GB in consumer grade mainboards. Similarly for a developer workstation one has to choose a Xeon to get more cores, but a smaller GPU and twice as many cpu cores in the non-Xeon line would be great because enthusiasts don't use the iGPU anyway. Developers don't need a fast GPU unless they really need one and then any iGPU is too little too slow so most chips should have more cores in place of bigger iGPUs. It's true that your office clerk workflow doesn't benefit from more cores due to legacy software, but software developer workflows benefit a lot when building code or running virtual machines or running (modern) concurrent applications. It's very very sad indeed that AMD is the only x86 vendor who puts more cores on consumer chips. Let's hope Zen will force a change.
- lagadu 11y ago
  Well, they're described as being "enthusiast" chips but the core i7 line does have 6 and 8 core versions: the 5820/5930 and the 5960 respectively.
- nharada 11y ago
  Don't people use GPUs all the time now because of Netflix and movie streaming? My old laptop's GPU would always kick in when I played something in 1080p.
  - soylentcola 11y ago
    I believe that streaming video can make use of GPU acceleration for decoding (to take some load off of your CPU).
- RogerL 11y ago
  We are not consumers. Intel would be foolish to optimize their consumer chips for us. If you want a workstation class machine you buy a Xeon. Adding memory channels is not free, and with 4 channels you get 64GB given current DDR4 capacity.
rsi_oww 11y ago
> 64GB! Sixty-four! For a desktop/laptop architecture! and still no ECC support, sigh
- Osmium 11y ago
  > and still no ECC support, sigh Are there any technical reasons not to have ECC by default, or is it just market segmentation?
  - lmz 11y ago
    Market segmentation. Core i{5,7} with ECC support is sold as Xeon E3.
    - miahi 11y ago
      For a while some of the Xeon E3s were the thing to buy, as they were sold at lower prices than the equivalent i7 CPUs (Xeons with 4 cores+HT and lots of cache were sold at the same price as the quad or dual+HT i5s), but this was "fixed" and now the cheap Xeons are crippled (no HT anymore).
    - caycep 11y ago
      What about motherboard support? I can't usually find any motherboard with ECC support that also has decent onboard sound...
      - hga 11y ago
        Don't know about the quality of the support†, or what "decent" onboard sound is, but Supermicro sells a bunch of boards that support 1 or 2 Xeons (and generally also support consumer chips), ECC and have onboard sound. E.g. for the low, low price of $289 this board http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813182967 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813182... will support two processors, up to a half terabyte of memory, and has a Realtek ALC888 for 7.1 channels of sound. †I'm using a one processor chip X9SAE to type this with, with HDMI output with sound included to my receiver and then monitor.
tarikjn 11y ago
I have to admit, at the moment, the one thing that fills my laptop memory the most frequently are browser tabs. There has got to be a better way -- and I know there are solutions, but their UX have failed me so far. Hardware advances are nice, but software/UX still has a long way to go.
- coldtea 11y ago
  >There has got to be a better way Sure: don't open so many tabs.
vbezhenar 11y ago
> 64GB! Sixty-four! For a desktop/laptop architecture! At 64GB (GiB?) main memory we're getting to the point where you could copy the entire working set of the OS to memory from disk on boot and then simply save to disk periodically. So long as you have a battery/UPS that'd work. Is that a crazy? That would be very unreliable, would cause huge loading times, huge powerdown times. Also modern OS uses free memory as a disk cache, so you are already getting all speed benefits. So basically you might just do find / -type f -exec cat {} > /dev/null \; to fill your disk cache if you have enough memory.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
mkl 11y ago
A 64GB maximum is seriously disappointing - I upgraded my 3 year old pc to its 32GB maximum a few months ago and right now it's using all that plus 27GB of swap. I could easily and usefully use much more.
seiji 11y ago
we're getting to the point where you could copy the entire working set of the OS to memory I've run diskless, boot-from-network systems with 2 to 4 GB RAM with the entire OS+data+servers in memory. If you know your exact sizes, you don't need giant RAM. As far as desktop or interactive systems go, in 2009 I made a desktop with 24 GB RAM which essentially never read from the disk after everything got cached appropriately. save to disk periodically. That's what your kernel does. There's a long history of flushing dirty pages back to disk. My dream machine would be It looks like you want a MacBook Pro from 3 years ago?

devmoat 11y ago

Anyone know if Skylake comes with SGX extensions?

bitL 11y ago
Yes, that was one of the main points of architecture overhaul.

norea-armozel 11y ago

I can't see myself retiring by i5-3570k since it's not a sufficient bump in performance for me (even with DDR4 quad channel). So, I'll have to wait and see what Intel does with its iGPU technology. If the iGPU technology gets as good as a gtx 970 (or r9 290x) then I might buy one of their next generation CPUs when they come to market. :/

Nursie 11y ago
From what I've read, the Skylake GPU capability is a step backwards from the Broadwell ones, though it may be that's because the audience for the two chips released so far is considered to be gaming enthusiasts, who will probably have one or more discrete cards anyway.
- norea-armozel 11y ago
  Yeah, it just seems like only AMD understands that you have to marry the GPU with the CPU aspects of the processors now. And I don't know if AMD can keep it up at this rate considering some of the projections hint at a potential default around 2020.

bitL 11y ago

Pros: - 64GB for desktop (finally!) - 26 PCIe lanes (i.e. multiple fast M.2 PCIe NVMe, making 5k/4k RAW video previewing possible in real-time) OK: - very small performance increase comparing to Haswell two generations ago (Broadwell?) - DDR4 performance matches XMP DDR3 performance; to see any difference you need to use quad channel configuration - SGX, the jury is out on this one (double-edged sword, could improve security but also turn into a complete malware mess due to enclave isolation and inability to detect running encrypted botnets once they gain ring 0) Cons: - power consumption is up (!?) - no AVX-512 for desktop

iaskwhy 11y ago
I don't know much about this but, regarding DD4, the article says on page 7: "upgrading to DDR4 doesn’t degrade performance from your high end DRAM kit, and you get the added benefit of future upgrades, faster speeds, lower power consumption due to the lower voltage and higher density modules." So maybe it balances out the power consumption?
pdkl95 11y ago
SGX is terrifying. Botnets are not the main problem. Windows (N+1) using SGX to make it hard/impossible to remove the spyware (and other junk)[1] is the problem. As an example, take a "trusted" environment[2] and add SGX as a way of keeping end users out of the TEE. While it is still early, SGX may be a key battlefield in the War On General Purpose Computing. [1] e.g. the stuff discussed recently https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9976298 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9976298 [2] http://i.imgur.com/rjbzWyB.jpg http://i.imgur.com/rjbzWyB.jpg
- yk 11y ago
  Is Doctorow's 28c3 keynote so well known, that a link is not necessary anymore? http://boingboing.net/2011/12/27/the-coming-war-on-general-purp.html http://boingboing.net/2011/12/27/the-coming-war-on-general-p...
- userbinator 11y ago
  Very terrifying indeed. IMHO these days there is far too much freedom being traded away for security, and users are gradually conditioned toward it. The thinking is almost like "How about we put everyone in prison, because some percentage of them will become criminals anyway?" Back then it was relatively easy to patch your OS --- even if it was proprietary and closed-source --- to make it behave how you wanted to, if you knew what to change (see all the Windows customising forums for an example, and the whole cracking community.) You didn't have to give up proprietary software completely and move to something like Linux. Now it's become much harder, and I feel that the middle ground between fully open-source and fully closed has mostly disappeared as the two communities are gradually distancing from each other. http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html

snake117 11y ago

So I'm planning on building a new gaming rig because my current PC is still running Sandy Bridge. Would you guys recommend Skylake? I found this MoBo + CPU + Memory package on Newegg for $500: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=19-117-601 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=19-117-601 From my understanding, the i5 CPUs are great for gaming and i7 is great for running multiple applications at the same time. I appreciate any help, thanks!

wlesieutre 11y ago
The i5 is fine for running multiple applications at once. The i7 adds hyperthreading, which allows each core to act like two virtual cores to run parallelized calculations more quickly, but in some cases it actually comes out slower than with hyperthreading turned off. The only way to know for sure is testing, but games are almost certainly not optimized for this. For a gaming rig, I wouldn't bother.
talmand 11y ago
I'm about to build a new rig as well and was waiting on Skylake to see if I wanted to jump in. After seeing the reviews and price points, I'm going to pass and go with Haswell. The pros do not justify the price premium to me. Right now the difference for me is around $150, which I'd rather sink into the video card. Also, I've read that the Skylake CPUs don't come with a cooling solution, you have to buy your own third-party cooling solution which adds to the cost. I know many people think the stock cooling sucks, which it does for overclocking. But if you don't overclock, the best reason for a third-party cooling solution is to reduce noise. Currently I'm planning on an i5 as I've never seen an advantage to having an i7 for gaming. An i5 and a good video card is all you need.
- kenrikm 11y ago
  I can recommend the i5 4460 which is about ~$180. It's a locked 4690k for about $60 less but honestly is able to play even the most demanding games on Ultra settings (Witcher 3 / GTA 5) if pared with a good GPU. I would advise picking up a Z97 Motherboard to go with it so if you do want to upgrade the processor in a few years you have a path to the higher end of the Haswell line.

kenrikm 11y ago

CPUs seemed to hit their sweet spot around 2010 and have not made a huge amount of practical progress since. Up until about 2 weeks ago my gaming PC was running a i5 750 a processor released back in 2009 and still able to run all but the most demanding games on max settings GTA5 being the exclusion. Even my video cards (GTX660ti in SLI) are on older side having been released back in 2012/2013?. Recently My PSU Blew and took the motherboard with it so I purchased a i5 4460/Z97 Combo for about $300 from Amazon which clears up the bottleneck in GTA5. This CPU is already a year old but I'm glad to see it's within 1-2FPS of the new chips in most games. Most likely won't even need to look at upgrading for another 5 years. I think to some extent intel is backing themselves into a corner with this release, their last generation was so good (i5 4690k or 4460) that Skylake seems rather lackluster.

Nursie 11y ago
Was looking at this earlier today as my machine is about 4 years old now. From what I can tell, moving from my i5-2400 (Sandy Bridge) to the i7 6700K (Skylake) would apparently buy me about a 70% performance boost. But then moving to a 4790K (Haswell) gets me a 69% boost. And I could get a 40% boost by buying a 3770K (Ivy Bridge), and then I wouldn't even need a new motherboard, RAM etc....
- coldtea 11y ago
  Well, it's not exactly 1% difference between Haswell and Skylake. Where did you get that?
  - Nursie 11y ago
    Some crappy cpu comparison site ;) It's not clock-for-clock or anything like that, that was comparing the absolute top of the range desktop Haswell (4790K) to the one Skylake i7 released so far. Or rather comparing both against my i5 2400. I'm not exactly sure what to do now. I probably don't actually need a processor upgrade anyway, the graphics card is the more important part.
    - 11y ago

uxcn 11y ago

Will latencies for DDR4 modules come down over time, or is there some fundamental limitation to the standard? I'd be curious if anyone knows what Intel's long term plan for L4 eDRAM is.

nitrogen 11y ago
Are those absolute latency increases in nanoseconds, or just bigger numbers in clock cycles? The clock cycle counts will increase as effective clock rates increase, but the real latency in nanoseconds could still be the same or lower.
- uxcn 11y ago
  Realized time might be the same or lower than DDR3, but I was more interested in the cycle counts (RAS, CAS, etc..). Latencies typically do increase as frequency increases, but better modules usually still support lower latencies. DDR4 uses a lower voltage, which is typically bad for latency, but I'm wondering if there's some other fundamental limitation to the standard.

mixmastamyk 11y ago

As I'm slaving over a hot laptop in the middle of summer, I have to ask. Will this generation allow for cooler machines? To be honest I write text files and email for a living. Can anyone recommend the coolest yet snappy laptops? With plenty of memory, min 16gb, "retina" display. Perhaps next year's Macbook with no fan is a candidate? Though I don't mind a fan. I have a "Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU Q 720 @ 1.60GHz" with "Madison [Mobility Radeon HD 5730 / 6570M]", which is a few years old. Looking for something new that has half the heat output, and is hopefully faster.