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Intel Core i7-7700K Kaby Lake review: Is the desktop CPU dead?

247 points by legodt 10y ago

faragon 10y ago
For new PCs, Intel chips are amazing. However, e.g. updating a desktop PC with a 2.8GHz (3.46GHz turbo, 8MB L3 cache) Core i7 from 2009 with a decent enough video card it is not: spending 300-400 USD on a new CPU for just 30% performance increase it is non sense, in my opinion. Please, Intel: add more L3 cache to desktop PC CPUs, and put 6 core instead of 4, not just for the servers.
- nrjdhsbsid 10y ago
  They won't do this because people will stop buying their overpriced server chips. Desktop is hamstrung to their desires to keep server chips better, even if it means making desktop ones worse. They tried getting rid of ECC memory support but that wasn't enough to stop people from using consumer chips so now they're just keeping them a generation behind
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- mrmondo 10y ago
  +1 for more cache! (And ECC)
- pier25 10y ago
  Problem is you also need to upgrade your motherboard, memory, and probably your CPU cooler. And if you do that, you might as well just build a new computer with a current GPU.
  - r00fus 10y ago
    Sounds like a product designed to produce new sales. Funny that.
    - pier25 10y ago
      Who would have thought?
- blakes 10y ago
  Agreed, Intel is clearly hamstringing their desktop CPUs. Lack of eDRAM on almost all chips to me is inexcusable. They placed eDRAM on some desktop chips, and they performed fantastically. I think they are waiting to introduce that as standard in the future, as they are running out of features to introduce. Not to mention the hamstringing of PCIe lanes. I had to switch to Xeons because the lack of PCIe lanes is ridiculous to me.
  - seanp2k2 10y ago
    Their HEDT stuff has more PCI-E, except for the cheapest HEDT stuff which is still more expensive than the expensive mainstream stuff. Basically, spend $500+ on a CPU and $300+ on a mobo and Intel will give you more PCI-E lanes.
brokesouls16 10y ago
OK matt_cutts if u like doing this so much what about the wife and kids at home would you go there and say shit about them
tedsanders 10y ago
This is what the end of Moore's law looks like. You spend $12 billion in annual R&D (a total that's risen substantially over the past decade) and then someone accuses you of "not trying" because your chips aren't that much better than last year's models. 10 years from now, I expect that the death of Moore's law will have permeated much further into our cultural consciousness. Skeptics cried wolf for years, and they were wrong, but this time the wolf has finally arrived.
- drewrv 10y ago
  It was always a mistake to call it a law in the first place. People treat it like it's gravity or something.
  - delecti 10y ago
    I always interpret it as more along the lines of "Murphy's Law." It was a curiously persistent trend more than a precise mathematical construct.
- trhway 10y ago
  >This is what the end of Moore's law looks like. >You spend $12 billion in annual R&D (a total that's risen substantially over the past decade) and then someone accuses you of "not trying" because your chips aren't that much better than last year's models. it isn't the end of Moore's law. The things are in full accordance with the law - Intel does pack several times more transistors (and resulting cores) than several years ago into the same silicon area. What Intel accused of is using its de-facto monopoly - instead of selling you the new chip made with increased number of cores on the same silicon area, they cut that silicon area into more (due to Moore's law) smaller chips with the same number of cores and sell them at the same per core price point thus making it look like Moore's law isn't there anymore. Imagine if in 2000 the price per MHz was the same as in 1998. Back then the presence of competition (AMD mostly) prevented that from happening. Once/if AMD gets their game back on, the Moore's law will again become visible to consumer.
n0b0dythere 10y ago
I really hope AMD's Ryzen is pretty great when it comes out this year. Intel seems to be diddling about without competition these days, and we the consumer need AMD to pull a "K7 Athlon" again, which beat Intel to 1 ghz and was a great processor. Otherwise it seems everyone's going for more energy efficiency and mostly mobile (ARM) these days.
sedachv 10y ago
Another reason to pass on Kaby Lake is the hardware digital restrictions management built into the chip: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/11/netflix-4k-streaming-pc-kaby-lake-cpu-windows-10-edge-browser/ http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/11/netflix-4k-streaming-...
- niftich 10y ago
  For some people, this will instead be a reason to upgrade, given the popular content gated behind.
  - api 10y ago
    Couldn't this also allow you to have Yubikey-like secure enclave SSH and SSL keys?
    - niftich 10y ago
      Maybe [1]. [1] https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/204319-windows-10s-playready-3-0-mandates-hardware-drm-for-4k-playback https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/204319-windows-10s-playr...
  - rl3 10y ago
    I'm excited for it. Helps lessen the burn of waiting for the 6700K's successor only to find it's the same thing basically. Still, Netflix requiring DRM on 4K streams is idiotic. Big content sure does love shooting themselves in the foot.
    - sergiotapia 10y ago
      Cancelled Netflix because of this. Now I just go Usenet/Plex. Can't and won't look back.
    - lostlogin 10y ago
      It's weirdly user hostile when other things they do aren't. Their policy of allowing multiple streams from a single login allows password sharing which is great - it probably generates sales eventually but it doesn't seem that these two policies completely square with each other.
Retric 10y ago
So, as someone still using an OC'd 2600k from 2011 there is still little point in upgrading which feels crazy.
- agumonkey 10y ago
  The only reason to upgrade today is watts, either for heat or battery life. Oh and crypto I guess. Although Intel ME cancels all this.
- jccalhoun 10y ago
  I'm also using a 2600k (non-overclocked). I'm going to upgrade soon though. The main reason is I want to take advantage of things like usb 3 and an m.2 ssd. I also want to get a new video card and I'm using it as an excuse to build a new computer.
  - mattdotc 10y ago
    I was running a 2500K until this past July. Upgraded to Broadwell-E for the same reasons you mentioned (even though it was also regarded a flop). I'm using the "Samsung 950 PRO Series - 512GB PCIe NVMe - M.2 Internal SSD" and it is a beast. My old desktop was passed down to my wife, who was previously using my 3rd most recent desktop, a Core2 Duo (E6600 I think). The 2500K/2600K still has much life left in it for many tasks.
  - theandrewbailey 10y ago
    I'm waiting for AMD Ryzen so I can plan the move away from my 2600 (not K).
- mrmondo 10y ago
  Out of interest - what video decoding is missing from the 2* series that is present in the 4/6 series? Like are you missing out of h265 etc...?
  - vetinari 10y ago
    Nice comparison table here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_HD_and_Iris_Graphics#Hardware-accelerated_algorithms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_HD_and_Iris_Graphics#Har...
everyone 10y ago
Big photo of a motherboard.. What kind of monstrosity of a mobo is that? Please tell me all that shit on it is metal and has some sort of cooling purpose. It looks like a bunch of moulded plastic to make it 'look cool'.
- slantyyz 10y ago
  Short answer, it's a "gamer" board. Unfortunately, the path to the best hardware on PC is usually with gamer hardware, which means you end up with hardware with pointless bling attached.
  - legodt 10y ago
    Try buying a laptop for CAD rendering sometime. So many people where I work didn't want to settle for last gen speeds of "workstation" class (think, AMD firepro and Nvidia Quadro cards) and now pay the shame price of rainbow LEDs, red plastic, and gaudy keyboard fonts. Thanks user persona centered design!
    - slantyyz 10y ago
      Sadly, the PC companies are following the money. I guess it's mainly gamers who are forking out cash for high end hardware these days. The keyboard and mouse on my work desktop are gamer gear, as is my work laptop (my next one might even be an Alienware). And boy, do I hate their radioactive glowing.
      - legodt 10y ago
        If you already live the glowing light life and aren't getting out anytime soon (and why would you? It's not like anyone else is selling high quality computer stuff like this), MSI has been putting out fantastic laptops in terms of performance to dollar recently AND they don't skimp on the port selection, something I love about my workstation type laptop. Some of my co-workers brought these in recently and it only furthers my endless disappointment that good hardware can't come in sensible a package.
coldcode 10y ago
This is why Apple will soon abandon Intel entirely, which is why Apple abandoned the PowerPC as well. Either you progress forwards or you get run over.
- s_kilk 10y ago
  If Intel can't do it, who can?
- legodt 10y ago
  Apple makes a damned good mobile chip, but it's still just a mobile chip and it plays by mobile rules. Do you think apple has the expertise to switch to desktop class chip design?
  - scarface74 10y ago
    Apple has made three processor transitions 68K -> PPC -> Intel. During each transition, the processor they were moving to was much faster than the previous processor. That's not the case for ARM vs Intel. A lot of the appeal of the Intel based Macs is the ability to run Windows at native speeds. That wouldn't be possible with ARM. Finally, Apple only sells 16-20 million Macs a year. I can't see it being worth the investment to switch to ARM and creating all of the auxiliary supporting hardware it gets to use by using standard PC hardware.
  - jsz0 10y ago
    PA Semi was developing workstation/server class POWER processors before they were purchased by Apple.
- tossedaway334 10y ago
  Nobody is even close to touching intel in its niche of high single chip preformance at reasonable power usage. PPC was way way behind when it got replaced.
  - bluthru 10y ago
    Sure, but I think we'll see MacBooks using Apple SoC's in the future: http://www.macrumors.com/2016/09/15/iphone-7-faster-than-macbook-air/ http://www.macrumors.com/2016/09/15/iphone-7-faster-than-mac...
mrmondo 10y ago
That title... while I'm not disagreeing with the intent or the message that has to be classed as clickbait. Like come on, that's one well of an optioned title for an article that links to an article with a completely different title. Just, you know - even without any research I'm quite confident that the company in question (intel) hasn't 'stopped trying', perhaps they've undervalued a product line or had a lacklustre release but I'm sure there's a lot of engineers 'trying', again, click bate titles - grr!
- zelon88 10y ago
  I disagree. With AMD no longer contentious, Intel has, quite literally, stopped trying. Look at Netburst era Intel vs modern Intel. Behind the 8-ball Intel can show you what Intel looks like when it's trying.
  - Jweb_Guru 10y ago
    Or maybe Intel is having trouble moving to 10nm and there's little it can do at this point? I have no idea why when it comes to Intel people feel the need to phrase engineering problems in moralistic terms (and conversely, when it comes to politics people often want to turn moralistic problems into engineering ones).
    - zelon88 10y ago
      If that were the case they wouldn't release a mediocre interim product that fails to significantly build-upon any existing performance and features of the existing product. If you do decide to build that mediocre chip, you don't price it like a top-shelf one. We're not talking about when Saab had to keep their new models secret to sell the rest of the old ones for survival. This is Intel. They control their market and have no competition. Selling crappier products than you're capable of is a moralistic problem. And it's one that the industry is complacent with. Just ask Apple. If all remaining Intel competition were to disappear tomorrow Intel wouldn't stop selling chips. They would just stop making them any better. Cost reduction is just business. If a business doesn't have to spend on research to stay afloat it shouldn't and it won't.
scarface74 10y ago
Completely off topic... For someone who doesn't follow Intel chip generations closely, the chart of the generations of Core I3/I5/I7 chips was informative. Two Observations: 1. Why doesn't Intel actually name the chips to make them clearer? 2. The poor Mac Mini that Apple is selling in 2017 uses 2013 era chips and is way overpriced. Edit: fixed typos
- MR4D 10y ago
  For #1, I would suggest the answer would not help sales....I think it would look like this (apologies to Apple's old "good, better, best" computer labeling): Server: expensive, more expensive, you can't afford it Desktop: nicely priced, expensive Mobile: nicely priced, expensive, pretty expensive Of course, if they made it that simple, then this would happen: Cheap server: buy ARM Cheap Desktop: buy an older PC Cheap mobile: ARM REALLY cheap mobile: buy last years' ARM For #2, the performance isn't really much different for most people. Running office and surfing the net probably are more limited by typing speed and internet connectivity than the speed of your CPU. I think most people pay those prices because they want the simplicity (either real or imagined) that Apple has over the other options.
  - scarface74 10y ago
    I will even go a step further. For most people, the Performance of a 2008 era Core 2 Duo 2.66Ghz would be enough for non gamers. I have an old business Dell laptop with those specs with 4Gb of RAM running a Plex Server and PlexConnect with Windows 10 and it feels fast enough when using it once you turn off all of the antivirus programs. I don't think I would be able to tell the difference between that and my Core I7 if I maxxed out the RAM to 8GB and added an SSD drive.
    - netule 10y ago
      You can get gently used 2013 T420 Thinkpads on eBay for around $150 with an i7 processor, NVIDIA dedicated graphics, and 4GB of RAM. For non-gaming, it's just not worth it to go anywhere beyond that.
supernovae 10y ago
I can't wait to see the AMD Ryzen CPUS. Time to upgrade my trusty Phenom II 955
- mrmondo 10y ago
  I'm such a pessimist with AMD CPUs, I just have bad memories of power hungry, hot running chips with lots of microcode bugs and problems with ACPI etc...
  - Alupis 10y ago
    > I just have bad memories of power hungry, hot running chips with lots of microcode bugs and problems with ACPI Sounds to me like the original Phenom series of CPU's. They were very power hungry and ran very hot (140+ Watts at stock clocks)... the newer cpu's are a bit better, although they still lag in performance. If AMD's Ryzen benchmarks are to be believed, that seems like it will change very soon though.
    - mrmondo 10y ago
      Could be interesting, we've been burnt badly by 2014 era AMD server CPUs that are gutless as crap and have so many microcode bugs it's a right PITA.
      - johansch 10y ago
        Around ~2008-2010 AMD server CPUs were quite competitive, iirc.
    - tormeh 10y ago
      I have an FX-8350 (similar multi-threaded best-case performance to i5-6600k) and I love it, but AMD's benchmarks are rarely to be believed.
      - Alupis 10y ago
        > but AMD's benchmarks are rarely to be believed I think that statement applies to all vendors, generally.
brokesouls16 10y ago
Well I'm pretty sure that the message from the following user says thank God that you can do to get back with a good idea like trying to help make re then laugh at people's pain and illnesses knowing this whole time you were doing it
bhouston 10y ago
What they are not mentioning is that the performance of the Intel Core i7-7700K is actually also identical to the Intel Core i7 4790K, which was launched in 2014 and is 3 generations old and is nothing more than an overclocked Intel Core i7 4770K which is from 2013. We basically haven't seen any improvements for this series of chips in years except for a bit of overclocking with 4970K and now 7770K.
- karyon 10y ago
  it seems to be 10% faster and use 15% less power, so that's something. source (german): https://www.computerbase.de/2017-01/intel-kaby-lake-test-core-i7-7700k-i5-7600k https://www.computerbase.de/2017-01/intel-kaby-lake-test-cor...
  - bhouston 10y ago
    It is only faster based on its higher clock speed. I overclock my 4790Ks to a base of 4.4GHz so I am already exceeding 7700K speeds based on 2013 technology. Yes at a higher power draw but it doesn't really add up to much cost.
    - randyrand 10y ago
      Yes but the later models can be clocked even higher. That's one of the benefits of a smaller lithography node - faster transistor switching times.
- Declanomous 10y ago
  >... the Intel Core i7 4790K, which was launched in 2014 and is 3 generations old and is nothing more than an overclocked Intel Core i7 4770K which is from 2013 The 4770k didn't support VT-d, whereas the 4790k did. The 7700k has a much faster bus speed, and supports up to 64 GB of DDR4 memory. I know these are small changes, but they make a difference. For instance, I have a 4790K because I wanted IOMMU (VT-d). I wanted an ITX build, but I went with micro-atx because I needed 4 dimms of ram to reach 32 GB. With a 7700k I could have an ITX build with IOMMU and 32 GB of ram. Here's the ARK comparison: https://ark.intel.com/compare/75123,80807,97129 https://ark.intel.com/compare/75123,80807,97129 I don't know if the 7700k actually supports VT-d, but I would guess it does. I wouldn't actually buy one until I knew it supported VT-d though.
alkonaut 10y ago
The reason there is diminishing returns is simply because intel doesn't have to try. Shrinking the process is terrifyingly expensive and difficult, yet they slowly are doing it. If intel has no competition, they tweak the product enough to give it a 2017 sticker and sell it at the same price. Because why not? Only more cores will save the performance trend. So if Intel had any competition in the enthusiast segment, the enthusiast i7's in the $350-500 range would have gone from 4C/8T to 6C/12T to 8C/16T in the years since Sandy Bridge.
- TsomArp 10y ago
  Also, for 99% of the users performance is good enough. People basically use PCs for browsing, email, word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, and some photo retouch.
  - pimeys 10y ago
    I think the PC gamers are a bit more than 1% of the users.
    - TsomArp 10y ago
      Lets say what? 10% of PCs sold are for high performance gaming? Any other number?
      - darpa_escapee 10y ago
        I would be very surprised if it was that high.
    - alkonaut 10y ago
      Perf is good enough for gamers too (in the sense that the next dollar spent should always be on the graphics card). The perf difference between my 2500K and my 6600K is not noticable.
      - drzaiusapelord 10y ago
MichaelBurge 10y ago
I wouldn't mind if they didn't give any better single-threaded CPU performance at all, if they gave more PCI Express lanes to run more GPUs and storage. 72 PCIe lanes can run 4 GPUs at x16, and an NVMe SSD at x8. I just built a server where half my GPUs have twice the bandwidth of the others.
mpweiher 10y ago
Hmm...sure puts all the criticism Apple got for not waiting for Kaby Lake for its MacBook Pros into perspective. We are in an effective post-Moore's law world, and have been for a couple of years. Yes, we can still put more transistors on the chip, but we are pretty much done with single core performance, at least until some really big breakthrough. On the other hand, as another poster pointed out, we really don't need all that much more performance, as most of the performance of current chips isn't actually put to good use, but instead squandered[1]. (My 1991 NeXT Cube with 25 MHz '40 was pretty much as good for word processing as anything I can get now, and you could easily go back further). Most of the things that go into squandering CPU don't parallelize well, so removing the bloat is actually starting to become cheaper again than trying to combat it with more silicon. And no, I am not just saying that to promote my upcoming book[2], I've actually been saying the same thing since before I started writing it. Interesting times. [1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/spending-moores-dividend/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/spendin... [2] https://www.amazon.com/MACOS-PERFORMANCE-TUNING-Developers-Library/dp/0321842847 https://www.amazon.com/MACOS-PERFORMANCE-TUNING-Developers-L...
- izacus 10y ago
  What do you mean by putting it into perspective? Those are desktop CPUs, which are separate from laptop CPUs. On laptops, Kaby Lake would give them the ability to add more RAM and IIRC even lower power consumption.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
    Apple didn't need to wait for Kaby Lake to be able to add more RAM, other laptops have 32GB. Lower power consumption wouldn't mean a lot when most peoples laptops are idle, or doing very little work, most of the time anyway. I guess these are some of the trade-offs Apple chose to roll with.
    - TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
      Oops, that was pretty wrong.
drej 10y ago
Not sure jabs at Intel are fully justified. I don't think they can be viewed only be Geekbench scores of their top of the line processor (excluding Xeons now). When you look at its admirable battle with ARM with their Atoms and the M line, the story is quite different. Stick computers and fanless laptops, both with x86 compatibility that ARM just does not have, by definition (yes, I know of Microsoft's latest wizardry in their Continuum dept.). So sure, we're hitting some performance limits, but power efficiency (and thus battery life and/or weight) and form factors are also important considerations and Intel is making progress there.
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  Yes. Intel's biggest concern the last several years has surely been preventing ARM from cannibalizing its PC marketshare, and trying to establish itself as a reasonable option for mobile devices. Corporate energies haven't exactly been focused on increasing desktop computing performance.
overcast 10y ago
For my Windows machine which is primarily gaming I only recently updated from an I7-920 to a Intel Xeon X5675 3.06GHz, for $95 used on ebay. These are NINE year old processors, that with a good video card still completely max out any game I throw at it with a resolution of 2500x1600. My development/main machine is a 2008 MacPro, which has no problems doing anything I need on there. I mean besides serious computations, what is my incentive to ever upgrade here? I'm basically waiting for entire system failure at this point for either.
- Fnoord 10y ago
  How is the power comparison?
  - overcast 10y ago
    Surely it's not as efficient, but not exactly a concern, especially for gaming machine on a handful of hours a week.
    - orbitingpluto 10y ago
      What he has done is quite difficult to do these days because of motherboard availability. In some cases an LGA1366 motherboard can cost more than original retail. It's insane. But the performance is great. But if you have an older first gen motherboard, you can get a 6 core Xeon for as little as $40 on eBay. Great upgrade. What's really insane is that you can get several 10 core LGA1567 E7 Xeons for $20 apiece. If you have a end-of-the-line recycler in your city that will custom pick stuff out of the pile for you, you can get a very scratched up electricity sucking "hog" for next to nothing.
- some-guy 10y ago
  Same here: I am still rocking my i7-860 from 2009 and have never felt the reason to upgrade.
- gpderetta 10y ago
  That thing has 6 cores, which is still uncommon for desktop cpus today, it easily and reliably overclock in the 4Ghz range. It supports loads of ram (including ECC), VT-d, has 48 PCIe lanes (2.0 though) and is dual socket enabled. You can get lower clocked models which are even cheaper and they still overclock to 4GHz. A motherboard supporting overclocking or dual sockets [1] might cost more than the cpu though (in fact they cost more now than when they were new). I own a X5670 myself. Although I bought a motherboard that supports overclocking, I have yet to bother. [1] Only the legendary EVGA SR-2 does both, and it still costs quite a bit.
dmix 10y ago
There are plenty of benefits to desktop over laptops that go beyond the CPU. From the article: > Elsewhere, there are the usual array of Asus enhancements, including its excellent 2X2 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac MU-MIMO Wi-Fi, SupremeFX Audio S1220 solution (featuring a ESS Hi-Fi Sabre DAC), Intel I219-V Gigabit Ethernet chip, dual M.2 SSD slots, and enthusiast-friendly features like dedicated water pump headers, PMW/DC support across all five fan headers, and SLI support Having a top of the line wifi card, a sound card with a DAC, and dual M.2 SSD ports, tons of cheap ram, etc, etc. Not to mention the video card potential. The only thing that makes these less appealing is those recent thunderbolt boxes for external video cards that also act as docks with DACs and USB-c ports.
Symmetry 10y ago
The most exciting thing about the release is probably the support for XPoint memory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_XPoint https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_XPoint
404ed 10y ago
I really hope AMD's Ryzen is pretty great when it comes out this year. Intel seems to be diddling about without competition these days, and we the consumer need AMD to pull a "K7 Athlon" again, which beat Intel to 1 ghz and was a great processor. Otherwise it seems everyone's going for more energy efficiency and mostly mobile (ARM) these days.
jpalomaki 10y ago
While Intel does not have so much competition on desktop which is stuck to x86, I would assume they would get some pressure on the server side if they really stopped trying.
stagger87 10y ago
I was kind of hoping they would sneak in AVX-512 finally. It was supposed to be on some earlier chips (Haswell? Skylake?) but hasn't been discussed since for these consumer chips. Wonder why? Seems like one avenue for performance improvements.
cletus 10y ago
Couldn't this be because Katy Lake was the previously unplanned third iteration of Intel's 14nm process? Most Kaby Lake benchmarks I've seen have been barely marginally better than Skylake. We're really waiting for 10nm at this point.
ChuckMcM 10y ago
Best of times, worst of times. I asked a friend that if they could "fix" or "improve" any feature of a modern microprocessor what would it be, and they struggled to come up with anything. It it interesting though that a "nominal" desktop computer these days consists of a nominally sequential processing unit (albeit with multiple cores) and a large parallel processing unit in the GPU with lighter weight cores. The "painful" part isn't the computation any more its getting multi-gigabyte data sets into and out of DRAM or moving them around in DRAM. You can finesse some of that by adding more and more cache on chip but you end up with the 'buffer bloat' problem where you're caches are fighting each other. If you pick the 16 bytes per computation figure that is sometime bandied about then your 4.2Ghz average computation bandwidth wants something like 67 GB/second of main memory bandwidth. I suspect that is why IBM spent a lot of time on upping the memory bandwidth in Power8, it does no good to have CPU cycles stalled waiting for memory. Looking at the existing Intel line up, they have specialized instructions for some pretty oblique programming tasks, they have tweaked their pipeline and register pool to minimize bubbles in the pipeline path pretty effectively, and they have I/O channels that can out perform much of the gear out there. So what do you improve go after next?
- kev009 10y ago
  I was hoping someone else would comment about the opera playing out as it were. IBM has tooled POWER8 and POWER9 to where the industry is heading.. all flash, post-NAND, accelerators, it's geared for buzzwords like big data, machine learning but also traditional RDBMS and high throughput computing. Contrasting POWER to Xeon is pretty interesting, and I think IBM will have a good few years. Historically, that kind of thing reengages Intel who come back with vengeance.
- TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
  That still assumes you have the usual Von Neumann architecture. But that's not the only option, and for some tasks it's an active handicap. Entire application classes are still CPU/RAM bound. What we have no is one of those plateaus the industry gets stuck at every so often. It's very similar to the 8-bit days, in that it seems to be enough for most of the things user do already, if you don't mind grinding along. But it's very much not enough for many things users might be doing, but can't - including domestic robotics, non-trivial NLP, VR (although I have doubts about that, unless someone invents less clunky hardware), and pretty much any AI-enhanced application. Current versions of many of those run on the modern equivalent of a mainframe - i.e. one or more servers in a remote data center. There are huge gains in usefulness to be made with AI that is personal, domestic and/or office-aware, always-on, and local.
socialist_coder 10y ago
I want to upgrade solely for the additional pcie lanes. If you haven't seen how fast a new m.2 nvme ssd is, you are missing out. It's like the same speed boost we saw from the first spinning disk to ssd upgrade, again with sata ssd to nvme. It's crazy fast.
- monochromatic 10y ago
  In benchmarks or in real world usage?
  - zlynx 10y ago
    Large MMO binary game patches complete faster on my Intel 750 NVMe drive. This is a lot of small random access reads and writes. So that is one real world gain.
  - codebook 10y ago
    Definitely in benchmark.
    - monochromatic 10y ago
      I'm not sure I care then. My old Samsung 840 Pro is fast enough that it's rarely if ever the weak link.
  - jjaredsimpson 10y ago
    benchmarks. the perception of performance is almost entirely related to latency at low queue depths. You cant tell the difference between 100 us and 1 ms.
stolk 10y ago
Once the next generation (CannonLake) is out, AVX-512 will be available. With that, the SIMD width will be doubled, and AVX-512 optimized code could possibly double in performance as well, as long as the memory can keep up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVX-512 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVX-512
alfalfasprout 10y ago
Honestly, the biggest improvements left in CPU performance comes from massively increasing the caches. I don't want more cores. I want a freaking massive L3 cache. I want direct access to insanely fast SSD's. For anything that isn't purely focused on floating point performance (where throwing a bunch of GPUs at the problem is fine) memory and storage are now bottlenecks that can still give us several order of magnitude improvements in performance. Then there's the smart move of integrating FGPAs on-die and connecting them with insanely fast buses. Now we can do cool things like process data coming in via a 40GBe link on a single on-die FPGA and perform business logic on the CPU with data that the FPGA writes to memory. OR write an FPGA accelerator for a function. Single core performance may not get better... but we still have huge places to make improvements that will require some changes in how we run code.
sengork 10y ago
For those who are looking for a more in depth and technical + real world power user review of this CPU, I highly recommend seeing Techreport's latest published article: http://techreport.com/review/31179/intel-core-i7-7700k-kaby-lake-cpu-reviewed http://techreport.com/review/31179/intel-core-i7-7700k-kaby-...
luckydude 10y ago
So this is surely self serving, but... Intel used BitKeeper for their chip dev process for a long time, and during that time the chips got faster with each release. More than a decade of chips were developed under BitKeeper and we saw perf improvements with every chip. They moved to Git and ever since then performance hasn't really moved. The Atom people were the first to move and the mainstream processors followed. I said it was self serving, so rain all over me, but I do wonder if there is anything there. I know we helped them move pretty fast a while back.
- grzm 10y ago
  If it's anything other than coincidence, I think it's more likely that the cause would be related to why they migrated from BitKeeper to git, rather than the change in tools itself.
  - luckydude 10y ago
    I really don't know. As a butthurt BitKeeper guy I would love for it to be SCM reasons. I mostly think that had nothing to do with it but when I look at the data, I wonder. We spent a lot of time helping them with their problems, all stuff that nobody in the Git world steps up to do (like submodules that actually work). All that help may not have made a difference. On the other hand, it went way beyond just SCM stuff, I debugged their various filer problems (that they blamed on BK and I'm happy to say not a single one had anything to do with BK, BK just exposed that the filer was buggy). I like to think our help did make a difference but I really don't know. What I do know is we did whatever Intel wanted for over a decade and they used to have BitKeeper in ever powerpoint they wrote about new processor development. But they have a culture of tools have to be free so I guess they get what they pay for.
    - B1FF_PSUVM 10y ago
      The "toxic culture" is much wider than you realize ... until it bites you. Then it's too late. But good luck to you, you did good and played fair, AFAIK.
nailer 10y ago
Site flagged for malvertising: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C1UMvNHXUAEXojJ.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C1UMvNHXUAEXojJ.jpg A sad day for Ars.
rphlx 10y ago
ITT: People bitching/moaning about a 5GHz ~$90 high-IPC core being disappoint, when in fact it is an engineering marvel.

247 points by legodt 10y ago

For new PCs, Intel chips are amazing. However, e.g. updating a desktop PC with a 2.8GHz (3.46GHz turbo, 8MB L3 cache) Core i7 from 2009 with a decent enough video card it is not: spending 300-400 USD on a new CPU for just 30% performance increase it is non sense, in my opinion. Please, Intel: add more L3 cache to desktop PC CPUs, and put 6 core instead of 4, not just for the servers.

nrjdhsbsid 10y ago
They won't do this because people will stop buying their overpriced server chips. Desktop is hamstrung to their desires to keep server chips better, even if it means making desktop ones worse. They tried getting rid of ECC memory support but that wasn't enough to stop people from using consumer chips so now they're just keeping them a generation behind
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
mrmondo 10y ago
+1 for more cache! (And ECC)
pier25 10y ago
Problem is you also need to upgrade your motherboard, memory, and probably your CPU cooler. And if you do that, you might as well just build a new computer with a current GPU.
- r00fus 10y ago
  Sounds like a product designed to produce new sales. Funny that.
  - pier25 10y ago
    Who would have thought?
blakes 10y ago
Agreed, Intel is clearly hamstringing their desktop CPUs. Lack of eDRAM on almost all chips to me is inexcusable. They placed eDRAM on some desktop chips, and they performed fantastically. I think they are waiting to introduce that as standard in the future, as they are running out of features to introduce. Not to mention the hamstringing of PCIe lanes. I had to switch to Xeons because the lack of PCIe lanes is ridiculous to me.
- seanp2k2 10y ago
  Their HEDT stuff has more PCI-E, except for the cheapest HEDT stuff which is still more expensive than the expensive mainstream stuff. Basically, spend $500+ on a CPU and $300+ on a mobo and Intel will give you more PCI-E lanes.

brokesouls16 10y ago

OK matt_cutts if u like doing this so much what about the wife and kids at home would you go there and say shit about them

tedsanders 10y ago

This is what the end of Moore's law looks like. You spend $12 billion in annual R&D (a total that's risen substantially over the past decade) and then someone accuses you of "not trying" because your chips aren't that much better than last year's models. 10 years from now, I expect that the death of Moore's law will have permeated much further into our cultural consciousness. Skeptics cried wolf for years, and they were wrong, but this time the wolf has finally arrived.

drewrv 10y ago
It was always a mistake to call it a law in the first place. People treat it like it's gravity or something.
- delecti 10y ago
  I always interpret it as more along the lines of "Murphy's Law." It was a curiously persistent trend more than a precise mathematical construct.
trhway 10y ago
>This is what the end of Moore's law looks like. >You spend $12 billion in annual R&D (a total that's risen substantially over the past decade) and then someone accuses you of "not trying" because your chips aren't that much better than last year's models. it isn't the end of Moore's law. The things are in full accordance with the law - Intel does pack several times more transistors (and resulting cores) than several years ago into the same silicon area. What Intel accused of is using its de-facto monopoly - instead of selling you the new chip made with increased number of cores on the same silicon area, they cut that silicon area into more (due to Moore's law) smaller chips with the same number of cores and sell them at the same per core price point thus making it look like Moore's law isn't there anymore. Imagine if in 2000 the price per MHz was the same as in 1998. Back then the presence of competition (AMD mostly) prevented that from happening. Once/if AMD gets their game back on, the Moore's law will again become visible to consumer.

n0b0dythere 10y ago

I really hope AMD's Ryzen is pretty great when it comes out this year. Intel seems to be diddling about without competition these days, and we the consumer need AMD to pull a "K7 Athlon" again, which beat Intel to 1 ghz and was a great processor. Otherwise it seems everyone's going for more energy efficiency and mostly mobile (ARM) these days.

sedachv 10y ago

Another reason to pass on Kaby Lake is the hardware digital restrictions management built into the chip: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/11/netflix-4k-streaming-pc-kaby-lake-cpu-windows-10-edge-browser/ http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/11/netflix-4k-streaming-...

niftich 10y ago
For some people, this will instead be a reason to upgrade, given the popular content gated behind.
- api 10y ago
  Couldn't this also allow you to have Yubikey-like secure enclave SSH and SSL keys?
  - niftich 10y ago
    Maybe [1]. [1] https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/204319-windows-10s-playready-3-0-mandates-hardware-drm-for-4k-playback https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/204319-windows-10s-playr...
- rl3 10y ago
  I'm excited for it. Helps lessen the burn of waiting for the 6700K's successor only to find it's the same thing basically. Still, Netflix requiring DRM on 4K streams is idiotic. Big content sure does love shooting themselves in the foot.
  - sergiotapia 10y ago
    Cancelled Netflix because of this. Now I just go Usenet/Plex. Can't and won't look back.
  - lostlogin 10y ago
    It's weirdly user hostile when other things they do aren't. Their policy of allowing multiple streams from a single login allows password sharing which is great - it probably generates sales eventually but it doesn't seem that these two policies completely square with each other.

Retric 10y ago

So, as someone still using an OC'd 2600k from 2011 there is still little point in upgrading which feels crazy.

agumonkey 10y ago
The only reason to upgrade today is watts, either for heat or battery life. Oh and crypto I guess. Although Intel ME cancels all this.
jccalhoun 10y ago
I'm also using a 2600k (non-overclocked). I'm going to upgrade soon though. The main reason is I want to take advantage of things like usb 3 and an m.2 ssd. I also want to get a new video card and I'm using it as an excuse to build a new computer.
- mattdotc 10y ago
  I was running a 2500K until this past July. Upgraded to Broadwell-E for the same reasons you mentioned (even though it was also regarded a flop). I'm using the "Samsung 950 PRO Series - 512GB PCIe NVMe - M.2 Internal SSD" and it is a beast. My old desktop was passed down to my wife, who was previously using my 3rd most recent desktop, a Core2 Duo (E6600 I think). The 2500K/2600K still has much life left in it for many tasks.
- theandrewbailey 10y ago
  I'm waiting for AMD Ryzen so I can plan the move away from my 2600 (not K).
mrmondo 10y ago
Out of interest - what video decoding is missing from the 2* series that is present in the 4/6 series? Like are you missing out of h265 etc...?
- vetinari 10y ago
  Nice comparison table here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_HD_and_Iris_Graphics#Hardware-accelerated_algorithms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_HD_and_Iris_Graphics#Har...

everyone 10y ago

Big photo of a motherboard.. What kind of monstrosity of a mobo is that? Please tell me all that shit on it is metal and has some sort of cooling purpose. It looks like a bunch of moulded plastic to make it 'look cool'.

slantyyz 10y ago
Short answer, it's a "gamer" board. Unfortunately, the path to the best hardware on PC is usually with gamer hardware, which means you end up with hardware with pointless bling attached.
- legodt 10y ago
  Try buying a laptop for CAD rendering sometime. So many people where I work didn't want to settle for last gen speeds of "workstation" class (think, AMD firepro and Nvidia Quadro cards) and now pay the shame price of rainbow LEDs, red plastic, and gaudy keyboard fonts. Thanks user persona centered design!
  - slantyyz 10y ago
    Sadly, the PC companies are following the money. I guess it's mainly gamers who are forking out cash for high end hardware these days. The keyboard and mouse on my work desktop are gamer gear, as is my work laptop (my next one might even be an Alienware). And boy, do I hate their radioactive glowing.
    - legodt 10y ago
      If you already live the glowing light life and aren't getting out anytime soon (and why would you? It's not like anyone else is selling high quality computer stuff like this), MSI has been putting out fantastic laptops in terms of performance to dollar recently AND they don't skimp on the port selection, something I love about my workstation type laptop. Some of my co-workers brought these in recently and it only furthers my endless disappointment that good hardware can't come in sensible a package.

coldcode 10y ago

This is why Apple will soon abandon Intel entirely, which is why Apple abandoned the PowerPC as well. Either you progress forwards or you get run over.

s_kilk 10y ago
If Intel can't do it, who can?
legodt 10y ago
Apple makes a damned good mobile chip, but it's still just a mobile chip and it plays by mobile rules. Do you think apple has the expertise to switch to desktop class chip design?
- scarface74 10y ago
  Apple has made three processor transitions 68K -> PPC -> Intel. During each transition, the processor they were moving to was much faster than the previous processor. That's not the case for ARM vs Intel. A lot of the appeal of the Intel based Macs is the ability to run Windows at native speeds. That wouldn't be possible with ARM. Finally, Apple only sells 16-20 million Macs a year. I can't see it being worth the investment to switch to ARM and creating all of the auxiliary supporting hardware it gets to use by using standard PC hardware.
- jsz0 10y ago
  PA Semi was developing workstation/server class POWER processors before they were purchased by Apple.
tossedaway334 10y ago
Nobody is even close to touching intel in its niche of high single chip preformance at reasonable power usage. PPC was way way behind when it got replaced.
- bluthru 10y ago
  Sure, but I think we'll see MacBooks using Apple SoC's in the future: http://www.macrumors.com/2016/09/15/iphone-7-faster-than-macbook-air/ http://www.macrumors.com/2016/09/15/iphone-7-faster-than-mac...

mrmondo 10y ago

That title... while I'm not disagreeing with the intent or the message that has to be classed as clickbait. Like come on, that's one well of an optioned title for an article that links to an article with a completely different title. Just, you know - even without any research I'm quite confident that the company in question (intel) hasn't 'stopped trying', perhaps they've undervalued a product line or had a lacklustre release but I'm sure there's a lot of engineers 'trying', again, click bate titles - grr!

zelon88 10y ago
I disagree. With AMD no longer contentious, Intel has, quite literally, stopped trying. Look at Netburst era Intel vs modern Intel. Behind the 8-ball Intel can show you what Intel looks like when it's trying.
- Jweb_Guru 10y ago
  Or maybe Intel is having trouble moving to 10nm and there's little it can do at this point? I have no idea why when it comes to Intel people feel the need to phrase engineering problems in moralistic terms (and conversely, when it comes to politics people often want to turn moralistic problems into engineering ones).
  - zelon88 10y ago
    If that were the case they wouldn't release a mediocre interim product that fails to significantly build-upon any existing performance and features of the existing product. If you do decide to build that mediocre chip, you don't price it like a top-shelf one. We're not talking about when Saab had to keep their new models secret to sell the rest of the old ones for survival. This is Intel. They control their market and have no competition. Selling crappier products than you're capable of is a moralistic problem. And it's one that the industry is complacent with. Just ask Apple. If all remaining Intel competition were to disappear tomorrow Intel wouldn't stop selling chips. They would just stop making them any better. Cost reduction is just business. If a business doesn't have to spend on research to stay afloat it shouldn't and it won't.

scarface74 10y ago

Completely off topic... For someone who doesn't follow Intel chip generations closely, the chart of the generations of Core I3/I5/I7 chips was informative. Two Observations: 1. Why doesn't Intel actually name the chips to make them clearer? 2. The poor Mac Mini that Apple is selling in 2017 uses 2013 era chips and is way overpriced. Edit: fixed typos

MR4D 10y ago
For #1, I would suggest the answer would not help sales....I think it would look like this (apologies to Apple's old "good, better, best" computer labeling): Server: expensive, more expensive, you can't afford it Desktop: nicely priced, expensive Mobile: nicely priced, expensive, pretty expensive Of course, if they made it that simple, then this would happen: Cheap server: buy ARM Cheap Desktop: buy an older PC Cheap mobile: ARM REALLY cheap mobile: buy last years' ARM For #2, the performance isn't really much different for most people. Running office and surfing the net probably are more limited by typing speed and internet connectivity than the speed of your CPU. I think most people pay those prices because they want the simplicity (either real or imagined) that Apple has over the other options.
- scarface74 10y ago
  I will even go a step further. For most people, the Performance of a 2008 era Core 2 Duo 2.66Ghz would be enough for non gamers. I have an old business Dell laptop with those specs with 4Gb of RAM running a Plex Server and PlexConnect with Windows 10 and it feels fast enough when using it once you turn off all of the antivirus programs. I don't think I would be able to tell the difference between that and my Core I7 if I maxxed out the RAM to 8GB and added an SSD drive.
  - netule 10y ago
    You can get gently used 2013 T420 Thinkpads on eBay for around $150 with an i7 processor, NVIDIA dedicated graphics, and 4GB of RAM. For non-gaming, it's just not worth it to go anywhere beyond that.

supernovae 10y ago

I can't wait to see the AMD Ryzen CPUS. Time to upgrade my trusty Phenom II 955

mrmondo 10y ago
I'm such a pessimist with AMD CPUs, I just have bad memories of power hungry, hot running chips with lots of microcode bugs and problems with ACPI etc...
- Alupis 10y ago
  > I just have bad memories of power hungry, hot running chips with lots of microcode bugs and problems with ACPI Sounds to me like the original Phenom series of CPU's. They were very power hungry and ran very hot (140+ Watts at stock clocks)... the newer cpu's are a bit better, although they still lag in performance. If AMD's Ryzen benchmarks are to be believed, that seems like it will change very soon though.
  - mrmondo 10y ago
    Could be interesting, we've been burnt badly by 2014 era AMD server CPUs that are gutless as crap and have so many microcode bugs it's a right PITA.
    - johansch 10y ago
      Around ~2008-2010 AMD server CPUs were quite competitive, iirc.
  - tormeh 10y ago
    I have an FX-8350 (similar multi-threaded best-case performance to i5-6600k) and I love it, but AMD's benchmarks are rarely to be believed.
    - Alupis 10y ago
      > but AMD's benchmarks are rarely to be believed I think that statement applies to all vendors, generally.

brokesouls16 10y ago

Well I'm pretty sure that the message from the following user says thank God that you can do to get back with a good idea like trying to help make re then laugh at people's pain and illnesses knowing this whole time you were doing it

bhouston 10y ago

What they are not mentioning is that the performance of the Intel Core i7-7700K is actually also identical to the Intel Core i7 4790K, which was launched in 2014 and is 3 generations old and is nothing more than an overclocked Intel Core i7 4770K which is from 2013. We basically haven't seen any improvements for this series of chips in years except for a bit of overclocking with 4970K and now 7770K.

karyon 10y ago
it seems to be 10% faster and use 15% less power, so that's something. source (german): https://www.computerbase.de/2017-01/intel-kaby-lake-test-core-i7-7700k-i5-7600k https://www.computerbase.de/2017-01/intel-kaby-lake-test-cor...
- bhouston 10y ago
  It is only faster based on its higher clock speed. I overclock my 4790Ks to a base of 4.4GHz so I am already exceeding 7700K speeds based on 2013 technology. Yes at a higher power draw but it doesn't really add up to much cost.
  - randyrand 10y ago
    Yes but the later models can be clocked even higher. That's one of the benefits of a smaller lithography node - faster transistor switching times.
Declanomous 10y ago
>... the Intel Core i7 4790K, which was launched in 2014 and is 3 generations old and is nothing more than an overclocked Intel Core i7 4770K which is from 2013 The 4770k didn't support VT-d, whereas the 4790k did. The 7700k has a much faster bus speed, and supports up to 64 GB of DDR4 memory. I know these are small changes, but they make a difference. For instance, I have a 4790K because I wanted IOMMU (VT-d). I wanted an ITX build, but I went with micro-atx because I needed 4 dimms of ram to reach 32 GB. With a 7700k I could have an ITX build with IOMMU and 32 GB of ram. Here's the ARK comparison: https://ark.intel.com/compare/75123,80807,97129 https://ark.intel.com/compare/75123,80807,97129 I don't know if the 7700k actually supports VT-d, but I would guess it does. I wouldn't actually buy one until I knew it supported VT-d though.

alkonaut 10y ago

The reason there is diminishing returns is simply because intel doesn't have to try. Shrinking the process is terrifyingly expensive and difficult, yet they slowly are doing it. If intel has no competition, they tweak the product enough to give it a 2017 sticker and sell it at the same price. Because why not? Only more cores will save the performance trend. So if Intel had any competition in the enthusiast segment, the enthusiast i7's in the $350-500 range would have gone from 4C/8T to 6C/12T to 8C/16T in the years since Sandy Bridge.

TsomArp 10y ago
Also, for 99% of the users performance is good enough. People basically use PCs for browsing, email, word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, and some photo retouch.
- pimeys 10y ago
  I think the PC gamers are a bit more than 1% of the users.
  - TsomArp 10y ago
    Lets say what? 10% of PCs sold are for high performance gaming? Any other number?
    - darpa_escapee 10y ago
      I would be very surprised if it was that high.
  - alkonaut 10y ago
    Perf is good enough for gamers too (in the sense that the next dollar spent should always be on the graphics card). The perf difference between my 2500K and my 6600K is not noticable.
    - drzaiusapelord 10y ago

MichaelBurge 10y ago

I wouldn't mind if they didn't give any better single-threaded CPU performance at all, if they gave more PCI Express lanes to run more GPUs and storage. 72 PCIe lanes can run 4 GPUs at x16, and an NVMe SSD at x8. I just built a server where half my GPUs have twice the bandwidth of the others.

mpweiher 10y ago

Hmm...sure puts all the criticism Apple got for not waiting for Kaby Lake for its MacBook Pros into perspective. We are in an effective post-Moore's law world, and have been for a couple of years. Yes, we can still put more transistors on the chip, but we are pretty much done with single core performance, at least until some really big breakthrough. On the other hand, as another poster pointed out, we really don't need all that much more performance, as most of the performance of current chips isn't actually put to good use, but instead squandered[1]. (My 1991 NeXT Cube with 25 MHz '40 was pretty much as good for word processing as anything I can get now, and you could easily go back further). Most of the things that go into squandering CPU don't parallelize well, so removing the bloat is actually starting to become cheaper again than trying to combat it with more silicon. And no, I am not just saying that to promote my upcoming book[2], I've actually been saying the same thing since before I started writing it. Interesting times. [1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/spending-moores-dividend/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/spendin... [2] https://www.amazon.com/MACOS-PERFORMANCE-TUNING-Developers-Library/dp/0321842847 https://www.amazon.com/MACOS-PERFORMANCE-TUNING-Developers-L...

izacus 10y ago
What do you mean by putting it into perspective? Those are desktop CPUs, which are separate from laptop CPUs. On laptops, Kaby Lake would give them the ability to add more RAM and IIRC even lower power consumption.
- TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
  Apple didn't need to wait for Kaby Lake to be able to add more RAM, other laptops have 32GB. Lower power consumption wouldn't mean a lot when most peoples laptops are idle, or doing very little work, most of the time anyway. I guess these are some of the trade-offs Apple chose to roll with.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
    Oops, that was pretty wrong.

drej 10y ago

Not sure jabs at Intel are fully justified. I don't think they can be viewed only be Geekbench scores of their top of the line processor (excluding Xeons now). When you look at its admirable battle with ARM with their Atoms and the M line, the story is quite different. Stick computers and fanless laptops, both with x86 compatibility that ARM just does not have, by definition (yes, I know of Microsoft's latest wizardry in their Continuum dept.). So sure, we're hitting some performance limits, but power efficiency (and thus battery life and/or weight) and form factors are also important considerations and Intel is making progress there.

cookiecaper 10y ago
Yes. Intel's biggest concern the last several years has surely been preventing ARM from cannibalizing its PC marketshare, and trying to establish itself as a reasonable option for mobile devices. Corporate energies haven't exactly been focused on increasing desktop computing performance.

overcast 10y ago

For my Windows machine which is primarily gaming I only recently updated from an I7-920 to a Intel Xeon X5675 3.06GHz, for $95 used on ebay. These are NINE year old processors, that with a good video card still completely max out any game I throw at it with a resolution of 2500x1600. My development/main machine is a 2008 MacPro, which has no problems doing anything I need on there. I mean besides serious computations, what is my incentive to ever upgrade here? I'm basically waiting for entire system failure at this point for either.

Fnoord 10y ago
How is the power comparison?
- overcast 10y ago
  Surely it's not as efficient, but not exactly a concern, especially for gaming machine on a handful of hours a week.
  - orbitingpluto 10y ago
    What he has done is quite difficult to do these days because of motherboard availability. In some cases an LGA1366 motherboard can cost more than original retail. It's insane. But the performance is great. But if you have an older first gen motherboard, you can get a 6 core Xeon for as little as $40 on eBay. Great upgrade. What's really insane is that you can get several 10 core LGA1567 E7 Xeons for $20 apiece. If you have a end-of-the-line recycler in your city that will custom pick stuff out of the pile for you, you can get a very scratched up electricity sucking "hog" for next to nothing.
some-guy 10y ago
Same here: I am still rocking my i7-860 from 2009 and have never felt the reason to upgrade.
gpderetta 10y ago
That thing has 6 cores, which is still uncommon for desktop cpus today, it easily and reliably overclock in the 4Ghz range. It supports loads of ram (including ECC), VT-d, has 48 PCIe lanes (2.0 though) and is dual socket enabled. You can get lower clocked models which are even cheaper and they still overclock to 4GHz. A motherboard supporting overclocking or dual sockets [1] might cost more than the cpu though (in fact they cost more now than when they were new). I own a X5670 myself. Although I bought a motherboard that supports overclocking, I have yet to bother. [1] Only the legendary EVGA SR-2 does both, and it still costs quite a bit.

dmix 10y ago

There are plenty of benefits to desktop over laptops that go beyond the CPU. From the article: > Elsewhere, there are the usual array of Asus enhancements, including its excellent 2X2 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac MU-MIMO Wi-Fi, SupremeFX Audio S1220 solution (featuring a ESS Hi-Fi Sabre DAC), Intel I219-V Gigabit Ethernet chip, dual M.2 SSD slots, and enthusiast-friendly features like dedicated water pump headers, PMW/DC support across all five fan headers, and SLI support Having a top of the line wifi card, a sound card with a DAC, and dual M.2 SSD ports, tons of cheap ram, etc, etc. Not to mention the video card potential. The only thing that makes these less appealing is those recent thunderbolt boxes for external video cards that also act as docks with DACs and USB-c ports.

Symmetry 10y ago

The most exciting thing about the release is probably the support for XPoint memory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_XPoint https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_XPoint

404ed 10y ago

jpalomaki 10y ago

While Intel does not have so much competition on desktop which is stuck to x86, I would assume they would get some pressure on the server side if they really stopped trying.

stagger87 10y ago

I was kind of hoping they would sneak in AVX-512 finally. It was supposed to be on some earlier chips (Haswell? Skylake?) but hasn't been discussed since for these consumer chips. Wonder why? Seems like one avenue for performance improvements.

cletus 10y ago

Couldn't this be because Katy Lake was the previously unplanned third iteration of Intel's 14nm process? Most Kaby Lake benchmarks I've seen have been barely marginally better than Skylake. We're really waiting for 10nm at this point.

ChuckMcM 10y ago

Best of times, worst of times. I asked a friend that if they could "fix" or "improve" any feature of a modern microprocessor what would it be, and they struggled to come up with anything. It it interesting though that a "nominal" desktop computer these days consists of a nominally sequential processing unit (albeit with multiple cores) and a large parallel processing unit in the GPU with lighter weight cores. The "painful" part isn't the computation any more its getting multi-gigabyte data sets into and out of DRAM or moving them around in DRAM. You can finesse some of that by adding more and more cache on chip but you end up with the 'buffer bloat' problem where you're caches are fighting each other. If you pick the 16 bytes per computation figure that is sometime bandied about then your 4.2Ghz average computation bandwidth wants something like 67 GB/second of main memory bandwidth. I suspect that is why IBM spent a lot of time on upping the memory bandwidth in Power8, it does no good to have CPU cycles stalled waiting for memory. Looking at the existing Intel line up, they have specialized instructions for some pretty oblique programming tasks, they have tweaked their pipeline and register pool to minimize bubbles in the pipeline path pretty effectively, and they have I/O channels that can out perform much of the gear out there. So what do you improve go after next?

kev009 10y ago
I was hoping someone else would comment about the opera playing out as it were. IBM has tooled POWER8 and POWER9 to where the industry is heading.. all flash, post-NAND, accelerators, it's geared for buzzwords like big data, machine learning but also traditional RDBMS and high throughput computing. Contrasting POWER to Xeon is pretty interesting, and I think IBM will have a good few years. Historically, that kind of thing reengages Intel who come back with vengeance.
TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
That still assumes you have the usual Von Neumann architecture. But that's not the only option, and for some tasks it's an active handicap. Entire application classes are still CPU/RAM bound. What we have no is one of those plateaus the industry gets stuck at every so often. It's very similar to the 8-bit days, in that it seems to be enough for most of the things user do already, if you don't mind grinding along. But it's very much not enough for many things users might be doing, but can't - including domestic robotics, non-trivial NLP, VR (although I have doubts about that, unless someone invents less clunky hardware), and pretty much any AI-enhanced application. Current versions of many of those run on the modern equivalent of a mainframe - i.e. one or more servers in a remote data center. There are huge gains in usefulness to be made with AI that is personal, domestic and/or office-aware, always-on, and local.

socialist_coder 10y ago

I want to upgrade solely for the additional pcie lanes. If you haven't seen how fast a new m.2 nvme ssd is, you are missing out. It's like the same speed boost we saw from the first spinning disk to ssd upgrade, again with sata ssd to nvme. It's crazy fast.

monochromatic 10y ago
In benchmarks or in real world usage?
- zlynx 10y ago
  Large MMO binary game patches complete faster on my Intel 750 NVMe drive. This is a lot of small random access reads and writes. So that is one real world gain.
- codebook 10y ago
  Definitely in benchmark.
  - monochromatic 10y ago
    I'm not sure I care then. My old Samsung 840 Pro is fast enough that it's rarely if ever the weak link.
- jjaredsimpson 10y ago
  benchmarks. the perception of performance is almost entirely related to latency at low queue depths. You cant tell the difference between 100 us and 1 ms.

stolk 10y ago

Once the next generation (CannonLake) is out, AVX-512 will be available. With that, the SIMD width will be doubled, and AVX-512 optimized code could possibly double in performance as well, as long as the memory can keep up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVX-512 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVX-512

alfalfasprout 10y ago

Honestly, the biggest improvements left in CPU performance comes from massively increasing the caches. I don't want more cores. I want a freaking massive L3 cache. I want direct access to insanely fast SSD's. For anything that isn't purely focused on floating point performance (where throwing a bunch of GPUs at the problem is fine) memory and storage are now bottlenecks that can still give us several order of magnitude improvements in performance. Then there's the smart move of integrating FGPAs on-die and connecting them with insanely fast buses. Now we can do cool things like process data coming in via a 40GBe link on a single on-die FPGA and perform business logic on the CPU with data that the FPGA writes to memory. OR write an FPGA accelerator for a function. Single core performance may not get better... but we still have huge places to make improvements that will require some changes in how we run code.

sengork 10y ago

For those who are looking for a more in depth and technical + real world power user review of this CPU, I highly recommend seeing Techreport's latest published article: http://techreport.com/review/31179/intel-core-i7-7700k-kaby-lake-cpu-reviewed http://techreport.com/review/31179/intel-core-i7-7700k-kaby-...

luckydude 10y ago

So this is surely self serving, but... Intel used BitKeeper for their chip dev process for a long time, and during that time the chips got faster with each release. More than a decade of chips were developed under BitKeeper and we saw perf improvements with every chip. They moved to Git and ever since then performance hasn't really moved. The Atom people were the first to move and the mainstream processors followed. I said it was self serving, so rain all over me, but I do wonder if there is anything there. I know we helped them move pretty fast a while back.

grzm 10y ago
If it's anything other than coincidence, I think it's more likely that the cause would be related to why they migrated from BitKeeper to git, rather than the change in tools itself.
- luckydude 10y ago
  I really don't know. As a butthurt BitKeeper guy I would love for it to be SCM reasons. I mostly think that had nothing to do with it but when I look at the data, I wonder. We spent a lot of time helping them with their problems, all stuff that nobody in the Git world steps up to do (like submodules that actually work). All that help may not have made a difference. On the other hand, it went way beyond just SCM stuff, I debugged their various filer problems (that they blamed on BK and I'm happy to say not a single one had anything to do with BK, BK just exposed that the filer was buggy). I like to think our help did make a difference but I really don't know. What I do know is we did whatever Intel wanted for over a decade and they used to have BitKeeper in ever powerpoint they wrote about new processor development. But they have a culture of tools have to be free so I guess they get what they pay for.
  - B1FF_PSUVM 10y ago
    The "toxic culture" is much wider than you realize ... until it bites you. Then it's too late. But good luck to you, you did good and played fair, AFAIK.

nailer 10y ago

Site flagged for malvertising: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C1UMvNHXUAEXojJ.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C1UMvNHXUAEXojJ.jpg A sad day for Ars.

rphlx 10y ago

ITT: People bitching/moaning about a 5GHz ~$90 high-IPC core being disappoint, when in fact it is an engineering marvel.