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Cores come at a power cost. This is why Intel has been hesitant to move to consumer 8 or 16 core CPUs. There's a lot of pushback on using this much power and se

Cores come at a power cost. This is why Intel has been hesitant to move to consumer 8 or 16 core CPUs. There's a lot of pushback on using this much power and serious environmental concerns. Intel's engineering has been focused on power savings, so they've actually been going the opposite way for years now on the consumer end. This is also why you won't been seeing these 16c chips on non-specialist Dells and HPs. They'll be high-end workstations and servers only. Joe Consumer or Joe Officeworker doesn't need 16 cores. 6-8c comes in at a more modest power profile, so we'll probably see the industry standardize on 6-8c for a while. I think Intel is now forced to move toward 6-8c now, which may be questionable move for most consumer loads, but if everyone stays under 100w for consumer CPUs I think it'll be okay. I don't want the performance race to be driven by AMD's ideas that burning 200+w for a CPU is reasonable. Outside of specialist applications, its not.

mtgx 9y ago
The main reason they've been doing that is because it's been much easier to lower power consumption per core than increase performance per core. This way they could still claim "significant improvements" year over year. It's also a way better strategy to make "better server chips", because it means you can add more cores.
- drzaiusapelord 9y ago
  That's assuming there's no trivial single-core advancements possible at this fab size, which there might not be. The run up to Ryzen had a lot of AMD types cheering about "lazy" intel getting beat but Ryzen's per core performance is on par with a 2600k from 2011 and is consistently edged out by a 7700k at the same, or below, pricing. Also Intel's gains have been modest, but very real outside of power savings. CPU passmark benchmark: 2600k (2011) : 8484 7700k (2016): 12196 Both are 4 cores so its a one-to-one comparison. A ~30% increase per core is pretty impressive this late in the Moore's law game. If it wasn't then we'd see Ryzen doing much better per core, but its not. My workloads cannot make effective use of 8 cores so its academic that I can buy a 8c chip now. It would literally be downgrade from my intel for me.

mtgx 9y ago

The main reason they've been doing that is because it's been much easier to lower power consumption per core than increase performance per core. This way they could still claim "significant improvements" year over year. It's also a way better strategy to make "better server chips", because it means you can add more cores.

drzaiusapelord 9y ago
That's assuming there's no trivial single-core advancements possible at this fab size, which there might not be. The run up to Ryzen had a lot of AMD types cheering about "lazy" intel getting beat but Ryzen's per core performance is on par with a 2600k from 2011 and is consistently edged out by a 7700k at the same, or below, pricing. Also Intel's gains have been modest, but very real outside of power savings. CPU passmark benchmark: 2600k (2011) : 8484 7700k (2016): 12196 Both are 4 cores so its a one-to-one comparison. A ~30% increase per core is pretty impressive this late in the Moore's law game. If it wasn't then we'd see Ryzen doing much better per core, but its not. My workloads cannot make effective use of 8 cores so its academic that I can buy a 8c chip now. It would literally be downgrade from my intel for me.