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Bringing Intel Xeon to notebook PCs
- rayiner 11y agoApple get me this in an MBP stat.
- derefr 11y agoWould Intel even be putting in features like "Thunderbolt 3 over USB-C" for anyone other than Apple?
- fmorel 11y agoMaybe we haven't had a Surface Pro 4 yet because it was waiting for this? I'm hoping there's a SP4 and that it uses Skylake.
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y agoThunderbolt is Intel's baby, of course they'd include it.
- danparsonson 11y agoI'll go ahead and ask the newbie question - what's the benefit? I can see how more cache and better multiprocessing would be important to a server but how does a Xeon improve a single user system? Do they have some other secret sauce? I'm assuming they're not expecting anyone to build a laptop with more than one of these in it?
- mkonecny 11y agoA ton of designers or developers are doing work with graphics or compiling on the go - both very CPU bottlenecked operations, and the Xeon is targeting this audience. Me personally I do a lot of Android development, and waiting 20 seconds to compile each time I make a change is a huge bottleneck.
- danparsonson 11y agoSure, but how does the Xeon improve over the i7 in that respect?
- mappu 11y agoE3s are basically i7s with different binning, e.g. there are E3s without the IGP ; so if an i7 part has yield issues with the IGP, it can be disabled, binned as a Xeon E3 and sold more cheaply than the equivalent i7. 2P/4P multi-cpu is the other major feature of Xeon which only appears in E5/E7.
- x0054 11y agoI am not an expert, but from what I know, Xeon based chips have a lot more PCI and other IO lanes. So you can for instance have a dedicated lane for each thunderbolt and USB 3 port on the laptop. With i7, you may have 2 thunderbolt ports, for instance, but those 2 ports will share the same 20Gbps lane to the chip. With Xeon you can, at least theoretically, connect each thunderbolt on its own lane. Edit: According to the Wikipedia the Skylake i7 and i5 suppose to have 20 PCIe lanes. [1] The Xeon E5 v3 Family has 40 PCIe lanes, so I am assuming same is going to be true for the Skylake version of the Xeon. You also have the possibility of 6 cores! I'll take that :) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylake_(microarchitecture) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylake_(microarchitecture)
- wmf 11y agoExcept this is a Xeon E3, which is the same chip as an i7 including the same limitations.
- x0054 11y agoOh :( That sucks. I was looking foreword to having multiple full speed Thunderbolts.
- jschwartzi 11y agoIntel makes LGA2011 i7s with up to 40 PCIe lanes. See, for instance, the Core i7 5930. The 5820 has 28 lanes. They're marketed as "high end desktop" chips, and they're socket-compatible with the Xeon.
- dogma1138 11y agoWhat are you going to use 40 pice lanes on a laptop for? Unless you are running 4 discrete graphic cards or an army of nvme ssd's you won't tap half of that...
- eropple 11y agoTwo 4K monitors?
- jlawer 11y agoThe big one is ECC memory.
- tacticus 11y agoThere really is no good reason intel keep removing this from the consumer cpus.
- dgemm 11y agoMarket segmentation.
- staunch 11y agoYou can segment on anything, if you want, the question is whether ECC should be a standard in all computers. It probably should be.
- lewisl9029 11y agoECC does come at a cost of raw performance though. From a marketing perspective it might not be a good idea to introduce a feature that would cause performance regressions in a new product.
- xioxox 11y agoWhat cost is there? This benchmark shows almost the same performance for ECC memory: http://www.techspot.com/article/845-ddr3-ram-vs-ecc-memory/ http://www.techspot.com/article/845-ddr3-ram-vs-ecc-memory/
- kjs3 11y agoThere are all sorts of things that "should" be standard on all computers, but until the average consumer (non-technical, not HN reading) starts saying "I got to get me some ECC memory" it's not going to be something Intel cares about.
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- lewisl9029 11y agoSupport for registered memory is another one. I learned this the hard way when I bought a 2x16GB registered DDR3 kit, and then finding out my i5 won't boot with it. It was next to impossible to find unbuffered memory with 16GB per module last time I checked.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- chefkoch 11y agoThis also means you need ECC memory.
- vardump 11y agoHe said registered. I don't think you can buy registered RAM that's not ECC. It's the type of ECC RAM you need for E5 & E7 Xeons - multiple physical CPUs. Many of these systems won't even boot with normal DDR3 sticks, ECC or otherwise. Must have registered DDR3 (and I suppose DDR4 now).
- kjs3 11y agoI vaguely remember you could buy non-ECC registered memory back in the SDRAM days for servers. It was before we really understood trans-gigabyte error rates.
- Freaky 11y agoYou typically don't get registered memory support on the basic single-socket Xeons. It's more a multi-socket thing.
- lsc 11y agoyeah, none of the E3 xeons, to my knowledge (and I own, let me see. more than five, less than ten) - none of them support registered memory. They do support unbuffered ECC, which is pretty great, but at least the v2 units I've got are limited to 32gb ram, which stinks.
- Sanddancer 11y agoOddly enough, one of the biggest benefits is going to be in the gpu. If you're doing 3d design, you're not going to be able to get support for Autocad, Solidworks, etc unless you have a supported platform. One of the benefits of Xeon graphics is the extensive testing done on the chips to the point where you can use the integrated graphics in CAD software. Up until now, if you wanted a mobile workstation to do cad, you had to get one with a mobile firepro or quadro, even if your needs were relatively modest.
- happycube 11y agoWill this have AVX512...?
- thrownaway2424 11y agoA very good question. Impossible to answer until it shows up on Ark, but Ark currently does not list any kind of "v5" Xeon CPU, nor any notebook CPU bearing the Xeon branding, so all we have is this blog.
- twotwotwo 11y agoI'm curious too. They talked about it appearing in "Skylake server", and this is branded as Skylake server, so maybe not impossible.
- Sanddancer 11y agoUnfortunately, I'm kinda really doubting it. Gut instinct is saying that the AVX-512 thing is Intel trying to keep companies doing high end data crunching buying their many-cored xeons. Given the performance boost that the features are going to give, it's not inconceivable that Intel doesn't want people buying their cheap quad core chips instead of a pair of their more expensive 8+ core Xeons.
- vardump 11y agoThey'll also need to drop some to developer systems. Then again, I'll probably get a brand new workstation when new AVX-512 Skylake Xeons arrive. Intel SDE emulator is goes only so far...
- nextos 11y agoI think this is related to a Lenovo leak: http://i.imgur.com/7ZorPrq.jpg http://i.imgur.com/7ZorPrq.jpg http://i.imgur.com/AnP4eVU.jpg http://i.imgur.com/AnP4eVU.jpg
- SamReidHughes 11y agoThat looks like a 17" Thinkpad! Probably only has one screen though.
- nextos 11y agoYes, it looks good. Aside, we started emailing Lenovo 2 years ago, when they ruined the touchpad & keyboard, to express our discontent. Seems that they will finally get back on track: http://blog.lenovo.com/en/blog/retro-thinkpad-survey-4-miscellaneous/ http://blog.lenovo.com/en/blog/retro-thinkpad-survey-4-misce... They might even support Coreboot. This is good. As a developer, I hate bad quality hardware. Apple is good quality, but some stuff is too consumer oriented: glossy screens and fragile alu+glass. And since Tiger I dislike their software.
- walterbell 11y agoWhat makes you think they could support Coreboot? That would be a huge differentiator, but would need unpredecented Intel cooperation.
- nextos 11y agoAt least there's huge pressure from the community. Who knows. Thousands of people requested it in the survey. It's hard to tell, but I think Lenovo might be steering in the right direction after realising techie users are a very good niche.
- odiroot 11y agoTouchpad I completely agree but why keyboard? For me it finally feels great to write -- low profile keys with great separation. I personally feel clumsy on most desktop keyboard because of their sloped keys.
- protomyth 11y agoI would love for a Xeon in a Mac Book Pro (or in my dreams a Mac mini server), but I worry they will put it in the next Mac Pro.
- TheWeirdStuff 11y agoThey currently run Xeons, so that probably won't change.
- protomyth 11y agoApple has this weird history of using laptop CPUs to make their machines smaller or thinner. I'm hoping they update the Mac Pro soon, but I can see them letting it continue to languish (no updates since December 19, 2013) or coming up with a smaller form factor (thus using this CPU). I do wonder how these CPUs would do as processors for blades?
- frozenport 11y agoWould be more impressed if this was the Xeon that can be used in a dual socket configurations.
- brianwawok 11y agoFor laptop? Xenon has server chips with 20 cores. That seems a bigger upgrade than just two standard 4 core i7s for the really crazy parallel workload. Not awesome for many workloads of course.
- hamza001 11y agohttp://googler700.blogspot.com/ http://googler700.blogspot.com/
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y agoIt's Skylake-based, so we won't see this for at least two years, and that's assuming Intel isn't forced to delay again.
- wmf 11y agoDesktop Skylake was released a few days ago and the mobile version is rumored to be coming in less than two months. http://www.cpu-world.com/news_2015/2015052101_Launch_schedule_of_Intel_Skylake_processors.html http://www.cpu-world.com/news_2015/2015052101_Launch_schedul...
- LeoNatan25 11y agoI am assuming he means the Skylake E/EP variants, but this is a Xeon E3.
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago...somehow I confused Skylake and Cannonlake. My bad.
- roflchoppa 11y agoXeon in my phone plz.
- kjs3 11y agoI like being able to make calls longer than 8 minutes.
- tvmalsv 11y agoI think I read somewhere that the Skylake chips will have support for the new xpoint 3d memory. I would be surprised if it became commercially available this soon, but it would be great to have a MBP with the new xeon and xpoint memory instead of the SSD. The xpoint memory is supposed to be as much as 1,000x faster than SSD while drawing less power and having a lot more write-cycles.
- szatkus 11y agoI remember article about Skylake's support for NVRAM (Non-volatile RAM) some time ago on HN. So it could be possible.
- stefantalpalaru 11y agoWhy would you need special support for it in the CPU?
- vardump 11y agoMemory latency is high, it's preferable to do transfers to and from CPU L3 cache.
- vardump 11y agoSkylake has some specialized NVM storage instructions, like PCOMMIT. Earlier HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8565119 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8565119 So you might be right.
- jmspring 11y agoInteresting discussion on the thread, re memory type, ECC, etc. but fundamental question is -- how does this benefit consumers?
- coldtea 11y agoThey get fucking faster chips, made for server workloads, and with safer memory modules.
- miahi 11y agoIt would be interesting to know if the number of CPU types we have right now is because of hardware issues (binning) or just plain market segmentation. Because many of the features could be enabled in software/firmware, I think they could just do a "custom" CPU where you just license whatever features you use. Do you want ECC and AVX-512 on your i7? Do you need a GPU on your Xeon? Just pay $50 (or whatever) for the key to enable these features.
- gtirloni 11y agoThen they have to worry about licensing and avoiding hacks, two problems they don't have today.
- Osmium 11y agoAny chance of getting > 4 cores in a notebook with one of these chips? Would love a 6-core or 8-core MacBook Pro, even if it had to be run at lower frequency or aggressively throttled while on battery.
- louwrentius 11y agoIf this also means ECC memory in laptops, that's friggin' amazing. I sometimes dream of a world where consumer equipment has ECC memory. Some say: total overkill. I say: the stats on servers are so that you are probably hit multiple times a year with bit-flips in memory. You'll never know because it's not registered anywhere. But those apps hanging, this strange crash, a corrupted document. All these small things. Servers aren't desktops/laptops, but I do wonder.
- Freaky 11y agoAbsolutely. Memory errors are insidious because they can look like just about anything - driver bugs, software bugs, disk errors, power issues, media blips, or even nothing at all, just some silent bit of data corruption you don't even notice. It's easy to dismiss the risk when you have no idea how big it is. It's eye-opening once you've managed a few machines with ECC and seen first hand how common correction events are.
- vardump 11y agoAbout time! Workstations equipped with ECC just don't crash or do occasional weird things. ECC helps against all kind of unquantifiable weirdness and unexplainable bugs. I'll be first in line to buy a laptop with ECC. Extra stability is worth it.
- chx 11y agoOh my god if this would power the retro ThinkPad: classic keyboard, ECC memory, hi-res screen, Thunderbolt, powerful CPU... All the good stuff :)
- lsc 11y agowith the old keyboard? It sounds like someone figured out how to get me to spend more than two grand on a laptop.
- chx 11y agoYeah, seems Lenovo after releasing three generations of laptops every ThinkPad fan hated finally gets to its senses. http://blog.lenovo.com/en/blog/retro-thinkpad-time-machine/ http://blog.lenovo.com/en/blog/retro-thinkpad-time-machine/
- mst 11y agoI so want one of those but for the record my X61 worked fine for me and I love my Tablet 2.
- zupa-hu 11y agoOMG I desperately want a powerful portable PC!!! I'd even buy a big ugly "notebook" without battery. Who needs a battery? There's our phone for the go. These days I'm playing with the idea of syncing a VM between my notebook and a powerful desktop PC for at desk use. Anyone tried it? Would it work? Virtualbox, maybe Docker?
- simcop2387 11y agoI actually have done a lot of that with one of the gigantic gaming laptops. an Alienware M18X r2 in my case. I'd love to have gotten ECC ram in it but that's the only real issue I have with it. Weighs about 20ish lbs (9kg for you non-yanks). But I've run database clusters with qemu/libvirt to learn how to set them up, but my main use of that kind of setup has been to test builds of software on other operating systems.
- zupa-hu 11y ago17 lbs, wow! :D Interesting, thanks for the input!
- simcop2387 11y agoIt's been a really interesting laptop for a lot of stuff. 3 internal 2.5" bays, you can convert the optical bay into a 4th. An mSATA bay for flash, and an express card slot that can take any pci-e 1x compatible card (pretty much everything) with the right enclosure. 2x graphics card slots with adequate cooling for everything. it's definitely a beast but i bought it entirely for that purpose. it's been great for doing CAD (though i plan on making it better) for 3d printing and also for being able to keep it up to date (aside from cpu and ram, those are already maxed out for its generation).