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These last few years Intel was much working much more on bring power consumption down than ... anything else? The performance changed little: http://www.hardocp
by chx 10y ago
These last few years Intel was much working much more on bring power consumption down than ... anything else? The performance changed little: http://www.hardocp.com/article/2017/01/13/kaby_lake_7700k_vs_sandy_bridge_2600k_ipc_review/4 http://www.hardocp.com/article/2017/01/13/kaby_lake_7700k_vs... 20%? But now the 15W U series mobile chips deliver the same performance as 35W M chips in the Sandy/Ivy Bridge era which is quite impressive.
This, of course, leads to a tremendous advantage in server CPUs -- if you have capable cores at a lower wattage, you can add more of them. Hence the 14 core E5-2690V4 @ 135W at 2.6Ghz vs 8 core E5-2690 @ 135W at 2.9GHz. So in just four generations from Sandy Bridge to Broadwell, no TDP change, roughly the same or a bit better single thread execution but almost double the core count. If you are willing to drop a tiny bit your base clock further and your TDP higher, perhaps 10% less single thread performance, you can get a hulk of a 24 core E7-8890V4 at 165W. And that's where the big profit is -- currently.
Now some unfounded nonsense: what if Intel is not pulling these crazy prices out of their sorry behind but there's in fact some reality behind them? It just bothers me that the price of the 24 core chip is so close to the 6*6 times of a 4 core chip. It could be a coincidence.
- Matthias247 10y agoI think you sum it up quite good: The thing that Intel did mostly was putting more cores on the chips. However that happenend only for the server lines. With Sandybridge and before the top desktop and server chips were nearly identical, now there's a huge difference. Which also means that during the last years the performance of desktop CPUs increased barely. That might be ok from the point of view that normal users would mostly not benefit from more than 4 cores. However assuming that developing and manufacturing the top-end model of each generation costs roughtly the same the new generation desktop models should probably be a lot cheapter than they are currently sold for.
- barrkel 10y agoThere's been a fork in CPU design goals. Before, the fastest chip was the goal. Now, we have fast single-threaded vs high parallel throughput - and while there's a spectrum between them, the extremes matter, it's not a case of a Goldilocks solution. Consumer loads are mostly limited by single threaded performance, though software is increasingly written for more cores. Best choice for a consumer used to be dual core, now it's probably quad core with thermal limited boosting on less parallel workloads. It's only prosumers doing lots of transcoding or rendering, or CPU intensive VMs, that typically benefit from increasing cores above 4. Whereas the server space prizes throughput and much of its workload is trivially parallelizable. On the server, higher single core speed mostly just decreases latency for small tasks; if you're happy with the latency, you can get more cores working on shared memory and potentially get big wins in perf. There are diminishing returns though, scaling up boxes is expensive and unless it's being forced by software licensing or architectural models, things like Hadoop and Spark for spreading the load across a whole cluster are increasingly attractive. This helps solve the I/O throughput problem too.
- digi_owl 10y agoYou also had the whole thing AMD seemed to be attempting with their first gen APU design, shifting the floating point workload over to GPGPUs rather than use a dedicated floating point unit.
- olegkikin 10y agoServer CPUs are often used in workstations, which are pretty much desktops.
- rch 10y agoI just speced a new laptop with a Xeon E3-1505M v6.
- chx 10y agoXeon E3 desktop or mobile is just i5/i7 with ECC support. Your CPU falls square between i7 7820HQ and 7920HQ frequency wise (and 100 MHz at 3GHz is a negligible difference) and aside from ECC there's no difference: https://ark.intel.com/compare/97462,97496,97463 https://ark.intel.com/compare/97462,97496,97463 The big difference is in the E5/E7 chips.
- grndzro 10y agoExcept AMD's CMT implementation blows Intel's outta the water. If intel needs 20% more cores to match the MT perf on the high end then it really isn't an advantage.
- Symmetry 10y agoThe Clustering MultiThreading (CMT) part of AMD's recent Bulldozer generation seems to have worked very nicely by itself. But the cache heirarchy of the chip was quite poor and it's not clear whether using CMT led to the cache problems they were having or not. In the end Bulldozer used CMT and performed poorly. Now, AMD have abandoned CMT in favor of the Simultaneous MultiThreading (SMT) that Intel uses in Zen and this chip looks like it's going to be performing quite well. So without more details than we're ever going to be privy to it looks like CMT was a dead end.
- therealmarv 10y agoHm, wished we also jumped from 2 to 4 cores on U processors. Then we we should have finally a big jump for consumer notebooks. My U Core i7 from 2013 is still one of the better ones in 2017 when looking at raw CPU benchmarks which makes me think: What happened the last 4 years? 16% increasement only when comparing to top i7 U processors from 2017?!
- DrNuke 10y agoMainstream market moved to smartphones & tablets, so the effort.
- therealmarv 10y agoThat's true if I look at the raw CPU benchmarks of ARM chips... there it is normal to have each year 40-60% jumps which is crazy.
- Joeri 10y agoBut intel isn't doing smartphone cpu's, so again: what happened?
- dagw 10y ago1-2 years ago they where though, but for whatever reason they never managed to break into that market.
- detaro 10y agoWith the -U types, technology gains have been invested in lowering TDP, making for smaller and longer running laptops. E.g. with my last laptop change, I went from a 35W TDP i7-M to a 15W TDP i7-U, while still gaining some performance. Laptops with 35W/45W CPUs still exist, but they use e.g. the quadcore i7-6700HQ.
- jon-wood 10y agoVery much this. I replaced an old 6700HQ laptop with the latest 7500U and battery life is worlds better. My previous machine was lucky to go three hours, and that was intentionally throttling the CPU, while my new machine can go 4-5 hours pushing it hard, or all day if I'm not doing anything intensive.