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Intel Confirms 8th Gen Core on 14nm, Data Center First to New Nodes
- orik 10y agowow -- bad news. Intel already failed to get off of 14nm with Kaby Lake, and now they're pushing it back another cycle?
- kogepathic 10y agoI can't wait until AMD releases Ryzen in March. I haven't owned an AMD system since socket 939, but Ryzen pricing is leaking now, and it looks like it's going to significantly undercut Intel's current prices. [0] Let's hope this encourages Intel to discount their current and future chips. More competition is always good for the consumer. [0] http://m.hexus.net/tech/news/cpu/102322-uk-us-prices-amd-r7-ryzen-processors-spotted http://m.hexus.net/tech/news/cpu/102322-uk-us-prices-amd-r7-...
- samfisher83 10y agoLets hope the Ryzen is the real deal.I mean the i7-3610 is just as good as my i7-6700hq which was like 3 or 4 years ago. Without competition we are in trouble. I remember when Athlon64 came it made Intel come up with core2duo which was a quantum leap from p4.
- sqeaky 10y agoI agree with you that competition is important. I disagree that the improvements in generations of i7s are as minor as they superficially seem to be. For at least my task, compiling large amounts of C++, the difference between the different i7s is huge. I get a new expensive laptop every two years (and a cheaper machine for portability or other purposes each off year). I have a high end 1st, 2nd, 4th and 6th gen i7 each machine is measurably faster with the oldest machine taking almost 10 minutes and the newest taking just about 2 minutes to build the same codebase.
- dman 10y agoWhich is your latest i7 chip? Did you switch from hdd to ssd somewhere along the way? What are the core counts with each generation ?
- farresito 10y agoDo SSDs make any noticeable difference? I think I once read a post (maybe from Joel) where they bought SSDs and the difference in compilation time was negligible.
- sqeaky 10y agoThe newest machine has an I7 6700k. Every machine has a raid 1 of "high performance" SSDs. Most have Corsair force3 GTs. The 4th gen is an untrabook with room for only one SATA3 ssd, so I put a Mushkin M3 drive in in for the raid. The Newest machine some other SSD that is just slightly faster. The read speeds are something like this 1st gen -> 1.2GB/s, 2nd gen -> 1.2GB/s, 4th gen -> 1.1GB/s (the M3 drive slows it slightly), 6th gen -> 1.3GB/s. Each machine is faster than the previous by a wide margin, far more than the proportional speed difference from the slowest to the fastest. There is almost a whole minute between (3m to 2m) from the 4th to 6th. The first gen has 2 cores with hyperthreading (looks like 4 in gnome system monitor), the quad cores with hyperthreading where far out of my price range. All the rest, the 2nd, 4th and 6th gen have 4 cores and hyperthreading (looks like 8 in gnome system monitor). For reference each of these was around $1,600 plus or minus $200, except the 6th gen. The 6th also has an nVidia 980 (not the normal mobile version) and 4 total hard drives. The other two drives are large mechanical disks that I only mount when I am doing stuff with movies or other large offline data, I do not believe they have any impact on the benchmark. This machine cost $3,200 after all the crap I did to it.
- flamedoge 10y agoWithout competition we are in trouble - only because of monopoly pricing. competition or not, extracting more perf is non-trivial work.
- throwawaydbfif 10y agoMy overclocked 1st gen i5 is about half the speed of a brand new mid range processor. It's almost 7 years old and I still have no need to replace it. I've considered getting a new PC for SATA 600 and USB 3.0 more than I care that I could have a new machine that's only twice as fast.
- bhauer 10y agoAgreed. The stagnation in desktop single-core performance is taking a toll on my productivity as software continues to bloat. Yes, I have a massive number of cores in my desktop workstation, but most are idle at any given moment. With CPU-wasteful single-threaded software, there are far too many applications that routinely fail to keep up with my input. I know it's popular to advise new programmers to avoid concurrency because it's a "hard problem," but the wasted cores of my CPU keep screaming for something to do. They yell: "It's a shame so few people write multithreaded applications! Alas, back to sleep for me."
- AIMunchkin 10y agoWell, why don't you learn a concurrent language like Go, CUDA, or OpenCL and do something about that? From my vantage point, I remain amazed that people have fled concurrent programming in an age where the hardware for doing so has not only thrived, but which may also be the only path forward from here.
- Retric 10y agoI write multi threaded code, but many of the tools I use are not multi threaded.
- bhauer 10y agoI write plenty of multithreaded code of my own. What I am grieving is our CS education teaching new programmers that they should avoid concurrency because it's "too hard." I don't have time to make Thunderbird use more CPU cores so that its user interface doesn't block at times.
- adrianN 10y agoThat never happened to me and my machine is nearly ten years old. You must be a really heavy Thunderbird user.
- pcwalton 10y agoGo isn't comparable to CUDA or OpenCL in terms of parallelism, which is what matters here. Go doesn't even have SIMD available without writing assembly.
- pharrington 10y agoFrom my understanding, they're going to go straight from 14nm to 7nm after they finish Fab 42 (however long that takes). https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/02/08/remarks-president-trump-and-intel-ceo-brian-krzanich-us-jobs https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/02/08/remar...
- wmf 10y agoThat would be a disaster since 7nm won't be available until 2020 or so. (Also, the White House is probably not a great source for semiconductor roadmaps.)
- pharrington 10y agoIs a direct statement from Brian Krzanich less authoritative than a press release? e: Though yes, it wasn't reasonable for me to read having no 10nm plans into his statement.
- wmf 10y agoIt's kind of odd that AnandTech doesn't mention Coffee Lake. These rumors have been going around for months.
- throw2016 10y agoThe $64 G4560 making the i3 redundant, Kabylake X, and now this. This seems like a meltdown at Intel. I think there is a real risk if AMD deliver superb performance and value with Zen, Intel will lose a little bit of the shine and a lot of consumers will not perceive them as innovative anymore. The sheer number of skus itself shows Intel has been on a bit of a downward spiral towards becoming something of a 'marketing company'. Kabylake has negligible to no gains over skylake making it a pure branding exercise. Risky move for reputation. Time to focus on innovation and value.
- deepnotderp 10y agoEUV pushbacks from Applied Materials and ASML have pushed 10nm back quite a bit. I honestly don't see Moore's law progressing beyond 3nm, maybe even stopping at 7nm or 10nm.
- luhn 10y agoWell, Moore's law is already dead. Intel missed the mark last year. As far as shrinking transistors further, isn't 7nm the physical limit? Edit: I'm mistaken. Transistors as small as 1nm have been developed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_nanometer#Technology_demos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_nanometer#Technology_demos
- Analemma_ 10y agoWhen transistors stop shrinking- whether that's at 10, 5 or 7nm- the limit is going to be economic, not physical. Intel probably could make a chip with 1nm transistors; the question is whether it would ever deliver a positive ROI, since - the R&D and the fabs would probably cost a zillion dollars, in a shrinking market for high-performance CPUs - yields would probably be very low, even as the process matured - this problem is becoming more and more pronounced with the latest generations - the advantages over the current chips would not be great; note svantana's comment about diminishing returns with the most recent process shrink
- curiousgal 10y ago>a shrinking market for high-performance CPUs It is??
- AnimalMuppet 10y agoWell, for chips that are, say, twice as fast as the best current chips for three times the money, I suspect that the market is in fact shrinking, because for most people, current chips are good enough. There's still plenty of people who want more speed badly enough to pay for it, but my impression is that there aren't as many as there used to be.
- dogma1138 10y agoThe focus in this thread appears to be on the wrong thing. Intel has introduced a new process here for die interconnects http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/foundry/emib.html http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/foundry/emib.html This can be very interesting especially if this can be expanded to other products. TSVs increase the pricing of certain products by a substantial margin and have pretty high failure rates, they also increase the internal resistance of components and can cause thermal issues. HBM and 3Dxpoint built on EMIB can reduce the price of these components substantially, it can also make it viable again to split the dies of the IGP and the CPU allowing Intel have SKUs with different IGP configuration including EDRAM/SRAM without having to have multiple die designs.
- wmf 10y agoI don't think the cost of multiple die designs is significant for Intel since they amortize it over very high volume. (For example, they updated the Celeron/Pentium/i3 line to Kaby Lake even though customers probably won't even notice.) EMIB looks like it would always be more expensive than a single die or MCM so I don't see the benefit for consumer chips.
- dogma1138 10y agoEMIB allows you to integrate dies that are built using different processes which means that you don't have to wait for all of your processes to align. If you can't produce reliable SRAM at 10nm no problem, if you want to integrate FPGAs that are build using a different process no problem, you want to scale up the same basic core design of 4 core clusters again just make the same small dies and interpose them based on market demands. This will allow Intel to sell Xeon SoCs/CPU's with 128 to 256 core which isn't viable if you put them all on the same die, it also means that they don't have to disable cores for different SKU's now if they want to make a 10 core CPU they just put 10 cores and not 12 with 2 of them disabled. People also overlook the cost of the masks, a set of master masks cost a lot of money even their copies cost a small fortune and as we go into more and more intensive processes as far as radiation goes the lifespan of these masks shrinks in an ever increasing pace.