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I 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 Sa

I 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 ago
There'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 ago
  You 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 ago
Server CPUs are often used in workstations, which are pretty much desktops.
- rch 10y ago
  I just speced a new laptop with a Xeon E3-1505M v6.
  - chx 10y ago
    Xeon 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.

barrkel 10y ago

There'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 ago
You 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 ago

Server CPUs are often used in workstations, which are pretty much desktops.

rch 10y ago
I just speced a new laptop with a Xeon E3-1505M v6.
- chx 10y ago
  Xeon 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.