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I've been really disappointed in Intel's desktop offerings. At the 300$ high end (quad core i7) desktop price point we have been at 4 cores for years. I would r

I've been really disappointed in Intel's desktop offerings. At the 300$ high end (quad core i7) desktop price point we have been at 4 cores for years. I would really like an option for more slower cores at that price point. I guess I kind of get why. Might be a socket compatibility and cost issue, the allocation of die space to a GPU, but it would nice to see some movement. Also probably zero demand outside of software developers, but I have to wonder if it is kind of chicken and egg problem. It's actually kind of funny if I recall on desktops more of the die is GPU than CPU.

deelowe 11y ago
Large core counts are the bread and butter of enterprise/cloud. I suspect Intel is binning those chips for their real customers (not desktop users). Probably has to do with wafer yields or something if I can hazard a guess.
- arielweisberg 11y ago
  I don't think so because it's not the same layout. Server's don't have GPUs and not the same GPUs when they have stuff for CUDA. They also don't use the same sockets or number of memory channels.
  - deelowe 11y ago
    I meant high core count CPUs (intel), not GPUs.
    - arielweisberg 11y ago
      The desktop chips and server chips are not the same chips. You can't bin a different chip as something else. Binning is the practice of taking identical silicon and separating it based on grade and functionality (disabling cores, turning off functionality etc.). Server CPUs don't even use the same sockets they are fundamentally different.
      - deelowe 11y ago
        I was talking about wafers, not dies, but it's all speculation regardless.
- sliverstorm 11y ago
  By now they probably have the yields. I'd guess it's just market segmentation. Harder to convince your server customers to fork out $4k for a 16-core chip when you're selling 16-core chips into desktops for $300.
  - deelowe 11y ago
    Actually, I suspect you're right. I was being a bit generous with my characterization. :-) Maintaining the status quo allows Intel to add significant margin to their enterprise solutions.
- seanp2k2 11y ago
  You can get a laptop with a Xeon these days, and dual socket workstations are plentiful. They're getting the 8+ core Xeons in many cases now: http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/p-series/p70/ http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/p-series/p70/ 36-core workstation based on Xeons: http://www.mediaworkstations.net/i-x2.html http://www.mediaworkstations.net/i-x2.html Makes your MBP look pretty cheesy when you could have something like that under your desk. Then again, for developing rails and angular apps, you don't actually need it, and the PCI-E SSD makes a bigger difference in practice (you can RAID 0 NVME SSDs in workstations too though).
creshal 11y ago
> but I have to wonder if it is kind of chicken and egg. I don't know. Low-end i3s have 4 virtual cores, i5s 4 physical cores – and most consumer software still makes little use of even two. I just downgraded a bunch of users from quadcore 55W i7-HQ to dualcore 15W i5-U CPUs (laptops) – they don't notice a performance difference, because Windows and Office and all the web app bullshit is still single threaded.
- vonmoltke 11y ago
  That seems like a workflow issue more than a threaded application issue. I can see that the majority of consumer and business workflows only involve running one or two applications at a time, but the extra cores and hardware threads can make a difference if you need to run multiple applications simultaneously. Office applications may be single-threaded, but if you need to open Word, Excel, and Powerpoint simultaneously they can each use a separate core. Similarly, you may need to run a web application at the same time as one or more Office applications. This sort of multiprocess parallelism still benefits from multiple cores. As for "Windows ... is still single threaded", I'm not sure what you are talking about. The concept of a thread is part of the OS implementation.
  - creshal 11y ago
    > I can see that the majority of consumer and business workflows only involve running one or two applications at a time, but the extra cores and hardware threads can make a difference if you need to run multiple applications simultaneously. If you need to run multiple applications simultaneously and they do sufficient amount of computations to generate noticeable load. > Office applications may be single-threaded, but if you need to open Word, Excel, and Powerpoint simultaneously they can each use a separate core. And idle. Unless you're actively editing a document, the applications are doing exactly nothing with their separate cores. And so far, our attempts to create four-armed employees able to write two concepts at the same time have hit some unexpected difficulties, so generally only one document is doing any CPU intensive work (and promptly hits 100% load for the single core it can use). Excel would be an exception, if we did any heavy processing in it – which we don't. We have real databases for that. (And Postgres does scale nicely on its Xeon servers.) > As for "Windows ... is still single threaded", I'm not sure what you are talking about. Windows Defender / Security Essentials is singlethreaded, throttling all I/O to 50 MB/s effectively on an i5-6200U (and inducing crippling latency). Windows Explorer is singlethreaded (or has very unfortunate locking), so a single stalling I/O request (spinning up disk/CD drive; SMB over WAN) hangs up the device's entire UI. Windows Update is singlethreaded, resulting in hour-long churn while computing applicable updates. And so on. While you get some noticeable improvements from using a dual core, and a few more from using a dual core with hyperthreading, a full quad-core (with or without HT) is just a waste of silicon for our Windows clients.
bchociej 11y ago
It's interesting and sad that this is the way it is. I'd get way more benefit from another core than another GHz. I'm sure it's not just developers in this boat, but I too am pessimistic about the size of that market. Would software developers change their approach to coding if 32-core chips started to show up in consumer machines? I'd like to think so, but then again, I figured everything would be multithreaded by now.
- brianwawok 11y ago
  What apps honestly scale past 4 cores? Dev stuff does. Movie encoding stuff does. For surfing and facebooking and photoshopping??? Seems not that useful. (Which is sad because I want 16 core CPUs, but may be a long time because that isn't so useful for normal people)
raverbashing 11y ago
More cores = more silicon (expensive) You can turn hyperthreading on if possible There's probably a narrow set of workloads that would benefit from more slower cores than 4 faster ones
- maaku 11y ago
  make -j
  - raverbashing 11y ago
    Hopefully with an SSD but I'd guess it's still IO bound
    - maaku 11y ago
      Depends on the language I'm sure. Compiling C++ is definitely not I/O bound. I have a 14-core build system that achieves approx linear scaling speedup over my dual core laptop.
    - JoshTriplett 11y ago
      Not at all; I've seen parallel builds remain CPU-bound on 72-way and 144-way systems. The biggest bottleneck tends to be linking steps and other serialized items. (And those are getting better too; gcc's current linker supports parallelization using -j, integrated with make.)
- arielweisberg 11y ago
  They are already shipping the silicon. There is as much real estate in the GPU as in the CPU. They could drop the GPU and have 8 cores in the same diameter. There are a legion of other issues with that many cores, but die space isn't one of them.
jdietrich 11y ago
>I would really like an option for more slower cores at that price point. AMD tried exactly that with the Bulldozer architecture, which was a dismal failure. Desktop workloads are frequently bottlenecked on one or two cores.
- Zardoz84 11y ago
  Well, my old FX4100 keeps being competitive.
vegabook 11y ago
Hello Xeon D 8 core 16 thread, 2.1 GHz base clock, 2.8 turbo, latest tick, latest tock, supports up to 128 gig ram so double the i7, mini itx boards @ 800 dollars including processor. No GPU though. Nice thing is, it does ECC ram. Oh and, 10Gbe. Awesome product. Not for gamers but superb for devs IMO. Throw in a gtx980 for display/compute, 1TB ssd, plus said 128 gig ecc ddr4 @ 1200 dollars, and you can do top-of-range mac pro class power for a third of the price. IE around 3.5k dollars before monitor for a very serious little rig. And if you're creative there are some stunning gamer cases for the mini itx form factor.
- arielweisberg 11y ago
  Oh that is pretty reasonable.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- jrockway 11y ago
  Where do I buy a Xeon D? The ARK lists them all as sold in "TRAY" form which in my experience means "not for you".
  - vegabook 11y ago
    check out newegg. They come from Supermicro, Gigabyte, and I think Asus does a line too. They're pretty new so I think only Supermicro is currently listed but they come from at least 4 manufacturers now in Mini ITX form - so fitting hundreds of consumer-class (and often awesome - this is the sweet spot for gamers) small form factor cases. Google "Xeon D Mini ITX". Make sure you get the 8C/16T version not the 4/8 version. You want the 1540 or 1541 versions, not 152x. Supermicro is proper server-class stuff - no messin' around - the others will be slightly cheaper but they're more sporadically available at mo. Also check if you need 10GbE - that costs about 100 dollars more. Still, all will work perfectly as a desktop in a mini-ITX case, and that is a nice small form factor. We're not talking about a huge ugly hunk of box here. This is going to be "build your own" btw but anybody who's used a philips screwdriver can do this. Here in UK I have the total mentioned above at just over 2200 GBP including PSU and a cute Corsair case (http://is.gd/0pfKhg http://is.gd/0pfKhg) so we're talking 3300ish dollars leaving 200 left for a pro mech KB and mouse. For the ram I had Crucial supply me for 780 british pounds (1200 USD ish) for 128 GB of 2400Mhz DDR4 ECC DIMMs (4 x 32 - there are only 4 slots so don't do 8 x 16), which works with these boards. As I said total including RAM about 2200 pounds so 3300 dollars. Or if you don't need 128GB start off with 64, say, but stick with the 32GB DIMMs so you can upgrade later. http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&DEPA=0&Order=BESTMATCH&Description=supermicro+xeon+d&N=-1&isNodeId=1 http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&DE...
pveierland 11y ago
I recently built a new machine with the i7-5820K Haswell-E 6-Core CPU which sells for $350. It requires an LGA2011 socket motherboard which costs a little more than an LGA1151, but it can easily be overclocked to ~4 GHz and compares well against the i7-6700K Skylake 4-Core CPU in benchmarks. https://www.cpubenchmark.net/common_cpus.html https://www.cpubenchmark.net/common_cpus.html
sbierwagen 11y ago
Get a dual socket motherboard, then, and run two CPUs. I remember back in the day when SMP was the mark of a Real Programmer with a Real Computer. You kids today and your multicore processors! Fie!!

deelowe 11y ago

Large core counts are the bread and butter of enterprise/cloud. I suspect Intel is binning those chips for their real customers (not desktop users). Probably has to do with wafer yields or something if I can hazard a guess.

arielweisberg 11y ago
I don't think so because it's not the same layout. Server's don't have GPUs and not the same GPUs when they have stuff for CUDA. They also don't use the same sockets or number of memory channels.
- deelowe 11y ago
  I meant high core count CPUs (intel), not GPUs.
  - arielweisberg 11y ago
    The desktop chips and server chips are not the same chips. You can't bin a different chip as something else. Binning is the practice of taking identical silicon and separating it based on grade and functionality (disabling cores, turning off functionality etc.). Server CPUs don't even use the same sockets they are fundamentally different.
    - deelowe 11y ago
      I was talking about wafers, not dies, but it's all speculation regardless.
sliverstorm 11y ago
By now they probably have the yields. I'd guess it's just market segmentation. Harder to convince your server customers to fork out $4k for a 16-core chip when you're selling 16-core chips into desktops for $300.
- deelowe 11y ago
  Actually, I suspect you're right. I was being a bit generous with my characterization. :-) Maintaining the status quo allows Intel to add significant margin to their enterprise solutions.
seanp2k2 11y ago
You can get a laptop with a Xeon these days, and dual socket workstations are plentiful. They're getting the 8+ core Xeons in many cases now: http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/p-series/p70/ http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/p-series/p70/ 36-core workstation based on Xeons: http://www.mediaworkstations.net/i-x2.html http://www.mediaworkstations.net/i-x2.html Makes your MBP look pretty cheesy when you could have something like that under your desk. Then again, for developing rails and angular apps, you don't actually need it, and the PCI-E SSD makes a bigger difference in practice (you can RAID 0 NVME SSDs in workstations too though).

creshal 11y ago

> but I have to wonder if it is kind of chicken and egg. I don't know. Low-end i3s have 4 virtual cores, i5s 4 physical cores – and most consumer software still makes little use of even two. I just downgraded a bunch of users from quadcore 55W i7-HQ to dualcore 15W i5-U CPUs (laptops) – they don't notice a performance difference, because Windows and Office and all the web app bullshit is still single threaded.

vonmoltke 11y ago
That seems like a workflow issue more than a threaded application issue. I can see that the majority of consumer and business workflows only involve running one or two applications at a time, but the extra cores and hardware threads can make a difference if you need to run multiple applications simultaneously. Office applications may be single-threaded, but if you need to open Word, Excel, and Powerpoint simultaneously they can each use a separate core. Similarly, you may need to run a web application at the same time as one or more Office applications. This sort of multiprocess parallelism still benefits from multiple cores. As for "Windows ... is still single threaded", I'm not sure what you are talking about. The concept of a thread is part of the OS implementation.
- creshal 11y ago
  > I can see that the majority of consumer and business workflows only involve running one or two applications at a time, but the extra cores and hardware threads can make a difference if you need to run multiple applications simultaneously. If you need to run multiple applications simultaneously and they do sufficient amount of computations to generate noticeable load. > Office applications may be single-threaded, but if you need to open Word, Excel, and Powerpoint simultaneously they can each use a separate core. And idle. Unless you're actively editing a document, the applications are doing exactly nothing with their separate cores. And so far, our attempts to create four-armed employees able to write two concepts at the same time have hit some unexpected difficulties, so generally only one document is doing any CPU intensive work (and promptly hits 100% load for the single core it can use). Excel would be an exception, if we did any heavy processing in it – which we don't. We have real databases for that. (And Postgres does scale nicely on its Xeon servers.) > As for "Windows ... is still single threaded", I'm not sure what you are talking about. Windows Defender / Security Essentials is singlethreaded, throttling all I/O to 50 MB/s effectively on an i5-6200U (and inducing crippling latency). Windows Explorer is singlethreaded (or has very unfortunate locking), so a single stalling I/O request (spinning up disk/CD drive; SMB over WAN) hangs up the device's entire UI. Windows Update is singlethreaded, resulting in hour-long churn while computing applicable updates. And so on. While you get some noticeable improvements from using a dual core, and a few more from using a dual core with hyperthreading, a full quad-core (with or without HT) is just a waste of silicon for our Windows clients.

bchociej 11y ago

It's interesting and sad that this is the way it is. I'd get way more benefit from another core than another GHz. I'm sure it's not just developers in this boat, but I too am pessimistic about the size of that market. Would software developers change their approach to coding if 32-core chips started to show up in consumer machines? I'd like to think so, but then again, I figured everything would be multithreaded by now.

brianwawok 11y ago
What apps honestly scale past 4 cores? Dev stuff does. Movie encoding stuff does. For surfing and facebooking and photoshopping??? Seems not that useful. (Which is sad because I want 16 core CPUs, but may be a long time because that isn't so useful for normal people)

raverbashing 11y ago

More cores = more silicon (expensive) You can turn hyperthreading on if possible There's probably a narrow set of workloads that would benefit from more slower cores than 4 faster ones

maaku 11y ago
make -j
- raverbashing 11y ago
  Hopefully with an SSD but I'd guess it's still IO bound
  - maaku 11y ago
    Depends on the language I'm sure. Compiling C++ is definitely not I/O bound. I have a 14-core build system that achieves approx linear scaling speedup over my dual core laptop.
  - JoshTriplett 11y ago
    Not at all; I've seen parallel builds remain CPU-bound on 72-way and 144-way systems. The biggest bottleneck tends to be linking steps and other serialized items. (And those are getting better too; gcc's current linker supports parallelization using -j, integrated with make.)
arielweisberg 11y ago
They are already shipping the silicon. There is as much real estate in the GPU as in the CPU. They could drop the GPU and have 8 cores in the same diameter. There are a legion of other issues with that many cores, but die space isn't one of them.

jdietrich 11y ago

>I would really like an option for more slower cores at that price point. AMD tried exactly that with the Bulldozer architecture, which was a dismal failure. Desktop workloads are frequently bottlenecked on one or two cores.

Zardoz84 11y ago
Well, my old FX4100 keeps being competitive.

vegabook 11y ago

Hello Xeon D 8 core 16 thread, 2.1 GHz base clock, 2.8 turbo, latest tick, latest tock, supports up to 128 gig ram so double the i7, mini itx boards @ 800 dollars including processor. No GPU though. Nice thing is, it does ECC ram. Oh and, 10Gbe. Awesome product. Not for gamers but superb for devs IMO. Throw in a gtx980 for display/compute, 1TB ssd, plus said 128 gig ecc ddr4 @ 1200 dollars, and you can do top-of-range mac pro class power for a third of the price. IE around 3.5k dollars before monitor for a very serious little rig. And if you're creative there are some stunning gamer cases for the mini itx form factor.

arielweisberg 11y ago
Oh that is pretty reasonable.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
jrockway 11y ago
Where do I buy a Xeon D? The ARK lists them all as sold in "TRAY" form which in my experience means "not for you".
- vegabook 11y ago
  check out newegg. They come from Supermicro, Gigabyte, and I think Asus does a line too. They're pretty new so I think only Supermicro is currently listed but they come from at least 4 manufacturers now in Mini ITX form - so fitting hundreds of consumer-class (and often awesome - this is the sweet spot for gamers) small form factor cases. Google "Xeon D Mini ITX". Make sure you get the 8C/16T version not the 4/8 version. You want the 1540 or 1541 versions, not 152x. Supermicro is proper server-class stuff - no messin' around - the others will be slightly cheaper but they're more sporadically available at mo. Also check if you need 10GbE - that costs about 100 dollars more. Still, all will work perfectly as a desktop in a mini-ITX case, and that is a nice small form factor. We're not talking about a huge ugly hunk of box here. This is going to be "build your own" btw but anybody who's used a philips screwdriver can do this. Here in UK I have the total mentioned above at just over 2200 GBP including PSU and a cute Corsair case (http://is.gd/0pfKhg http://is.gd/0pfKhg) so we're talking 3300ish dollars leaving 200 left for a pro mech KB and mouse. For the ram I had Crucial supply me for 780 british pounds (1200 USD ish) for 128 GB of 2400Mhz DDR4 ECC DIMMs (4 x 32 - there are only 4 slots so don't do 8 x 16), which works with these boards. As I said total including RAM about 2200 pounds so 3300 dollars. Or if you don't need 128GB start off with 64, say, but stick with the 32GB DIMMs so you can upgrade later. http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&DEPA=0&Order=BESTMATCH&Description=supermicro+xeon+d&N=-1&isNodeId=1 http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&DE...

pveierland 11y ago

I recently built a new machine with the i7-5820K Haswell-E 6-Core CPU which sells for $350. It requires an LGA2011 socket motherboard which costs a little more than an LGA1151, but it can easily be overclocked to ~4 GHz and compares well against the i7-6700K Skylake 4-Core CPU in benchmarks. https://www.cpubenchmark.net/common_cpus.html https://www.cpubenchmark.net/common_cpus.html

sbierwagen 11y ago

Get a dual socket motherboard, then, and run two CPUs. I remember back in the day when SMP was the mark of a Real Programmer with a Real Computer. You kids today and your multicore processors! Fie!!