19 ms·

Intel Reveals Post-8th Gen. Core Architecture 10nm+ Ice Lake

326 points by bauta-steen 9y ago

nodesocket 9y ago
Is this Intel's response to AMD Threadripper and EPYC?
- wmf 9y ago
  No, that would be Cascade Lake-X and Cascade Lake-SP.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
nullnilvoid 9y ago
As a consumer, it's great to see competition picking up in the CPU market. Intel does not seem to be able to hold the edge in node process as tsmc and Samsung are matching intel. It has to resort to architecture design.
- wmf 9y ago
  Ice Lake has been delayed from 2017 to 2018, so I'm not sure what competition has to do with it.
  - spyhi 9y ago
    > it's rare these days for Intel to talk more than a generation ahead in CPU architectures. This, to me, looks like the PS2 vs Dreamcast move, where Sony blocked Dreamcast sales with PS2 hype. We've been waiting for 10nm for a while now, and now Intel is essentially confirming "yes, it's really coming this time" where they might not have otherwise--it's hard to not see that as a reaction to Threadripper. At least on the surface, increased competition has led to increased transparency, which is good for consumers...or at least I'm happy knowing I have the option to avoid a big, hot, power-hungry chip if I want to.
    - jerf 9y ago
      The Osborne effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect Although it has been deliberately deployed many times now, as you note one example of.
      - spyhi 9y ago
        Nice, I never knew what it was called. Thanks!
      - gfody 9y ago
        seems like Intel is willing to cannibalize Skylake-X to hurt Threadripper. I think that means Threadripper must be looming large at Intel.
        deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
        compuguy 9y ago
        Honestly The revision-x's are forgettable to begin with, unless you need that many cores (No ECC either).
      - raverbashing 9y ago
        And people keep falling for it See:Itanium Never compare an existing product to one that is not yet being sold. Never
        dom0 9y ago
        Itanium was such a strange ... event. A complete outlier, it is even from today's perspective not easy to see why it happened.
      - cm2187 9y ago
        Most people buying a laptop don't really care or know what generation of the CPU they have. Not convinced it hugely impacts sales
  - phire 9y ago
    We never had a date for Ice Lake. I think we only started hearing about it this year. It's Cannon Lake (Intel's first 10nm chip) which is supposed to come out this year.
- nodemochatea 9y ago
  Wow. Great comment.
- frik 9y ago
  Now that Intel got competition again with very competitive new AMD CPUs, Intel is releasing "new" CPU to the public that waited in their basement for some time. AMD CPUs are a lot faster than they hoped, so Intel has to skip one generation.
- kakwa_ 9y ago
  Well actually I think it's more a case of "increase in performance is becoming harder and harder, the technology leader (Intel) is slowly becoming stuck and the competition (AMD) is catching up". Everybody will be more or less at the same level as it requires huge investments to only get a marginal advantage. Apart from games, I would not be that afraid to install recent pieces of software (browser, office suit, os) on a 10 years old computer (2007 core 2 duo). But in 2007 I would not have thought for a minute that I could do the same on a 1997 computer (Pentium II), and installing 1997 software on a 1987 computer (80386), just no. Last time I replaced my CPU (i5-6500 in place of i5-2500), I only saw a marginal improvement. Even at my former job, I worked with some decent servers (32 to 48 cores, 128GB of RAMs) to build Linux masters from scratch (Gentoo based). The oldest server of the bunch (which is 5 years old now) is still the fastest to build a master from scratch, it has less cores but faster clock and even on parallel tasks like compiling stuff, clock is still a more determining factor than cores. There are still tons of things to improve in CPUs: power consumption, cost, embedded functionalities (SoC)... but performance improvements seem a huge cost for low gains adventure right now and for the foreseeable future.
  - std_throwaway 9y ago
    Gains in instructions-per-clock start to flatten out. And that's where the gains were coming from in the last years. Some time ago a paper was posted here that showed how even if you have an infinite amount of transistors, you will still be limited in the range of 3-10 instructions-per-clock for typical programs. Clock speeds seem to have leveled and IPC will only see another gain of 50-100%. Single threaded performance is close to the limit. What after that? Is this the end?
    - ido 9y ago
      When was the last time we saw a 50-100% performance gain in cars? airplanes? spacecraft? Was it the end of those industries? Welcome to mature technology.
      - meric 9y ago
        > spacecraft Economically? I think this or last year.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
slededit 9y ago
At this point real compute happens on the GPU. I think we'll see a shift to major apps being driven by GPGPU. The CPU's performance has started matter less and less.
- jacquesm 9y ago
  That's just simply not true. The 'real computation' happening on GPUs is either very heavy floating point work or graphics related work, almost everything else is running on the CPU.
- davemp 9y ago
  What do you mean by major apps? Do you have some reason to believe that apps will suddenly become embarrassingly parallel? Major apps often don't even take full advantage of SIMD instructions on the CPU. As soon as you need a context switch, branching, or fast memory access your GPU is crap. GPUs are only good at _very_ specific workloads.
  - slededit 9y ago
    I used to believe that, until I started to get into cryptocoin mining. There were algorithms that were specifically designed to be GPU resistant and they all were ported and saw significant gains. It was that experience that pushed me to learn how to program these devices. The tooling isn't good enough yet, but there is no question in my mind practically everything will run on a GPU like processor in the future. The speedups are just too tremendous. Intel knows this, which is why they purposely limit PCIe bandwidth.
    - IntelMiner 9y ago
      "GPUs are only good at _very_ specific workloads." Let me detail you a completely specific workload citing my own personal experience over objective facts with citations Oh and let me also take a swipe at Intel again without any verifiable evidence
      - 9y ago
GuiA 9y ago
According to the table in the article: - 2011: 32nm - 2012: 22nm - 2014: 14nm - 2018?: 10nm I don't know much about foundry processes, but it seems that it's taking more and more time for lesser and lesser gains, right? At this rate, how long until we reach sub nanometer? What are the physical limits on these processes, and does it have any implications for end users? Will we be using 2nm CPUs for 50 years? Would love to hear the thinking of anyone educated on the topic. Edit: very intrigued by the sustained downvotes on this ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- spydum 9y ago
  widely assumed 5nm is the limit. I know i've seen others discuss some ideas around how close they can get, but i'm struggling to find the thread.. In any case, this may help: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_nanometer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_nanometer Found it.. http://semiengineering.com/will-7nm-and-5nm-really-happen/ http://semiengineering.com/will-7nm-and-5nm-really-happen/ and the HN discussion from several years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7920108 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7920108
  - SemiTom 9y ago
    also Is 7nm The Last Major Node? https://semiengineering.com/7nm-last-major-node/ https://semiengineering.com/7nm-last-major-node/
- jacquesm 9y ago
  The step from 14 to 10 nm is huge. Both from a technological perspective on the manufacturing side as well as on the effect it will have to the number of transistors on a die and the power consumption of those transistors. Remember that power consumption and the number of transistors are related to the surface area so there is a square factor in there. 14 nm ^2 = 196, 10 nm ^2 = 100, so that's almost a doubling of the number of transistors and approximately a halving of the power required per transistor for a given die area.
  - Osmium 9y ago
    While true, the same math holds for 22 nm^2 (484) to 14 nm^2 (196). Real world gains will never be as high as the math suggests, as you get into leakage currents etc.
GameOfTrolls 9y ago
AMD is taking their lunch.
JohnJamesRambo 9y ago
"Working purely on lithographic nomenclature, Intel has three processes on 14nm: 14, 14+, and 14++. As shown to everyone at Intel’s Technology Manufacturing Day a couple of months ago, these will be followed by a trio of 10nm processes: 10nm, 10nm+ (10+), and 10++" What imbecile thinks these are good names for the processes? Especially in an era where the consumer is already totally confused about current CPU offerings and rightfully views incremental CPU upgrades in a stalled Moore's Law world with suspicion already?
- tedunangst 9y ago
  They don't usually include process names in consumer targeted marketing material...
bhouston 9y ago
What will be the clock when single threaded? Can we get above 5GHz finally?
- zanny 9y ago
  We have been over 5ghz for a decade, it just takes ln2 to do it. We aren't going to see ludicrously high clock rates for the foreseeable future. There are a lot of compounding factors as to why, but the biggest ones are the pressure for efficiency driving designs that aren't dumping higher and higher voltage to get frequency, the diminishing returns on voltage vs frequency (see Ryzen, where a 20% improvement in clocks costs about a 50% increase in power draw across all skews, and similar situations happen with Intel). That being said, a 4ghz Skylake core crushes a 4ghz Core 2 core. Depending on your benchmark used it can perform anywhere from 80% to upwards of 170% faster per clock. You don't get as dramatic year over year improvements increasing the the per cycle performance, but innovations leading up to ~2004 (or 06 for the multicore boon) were just stuffing power hungrier and hotter transistors on smaller dies.
  - dom0 9y ago
    > We have been over 5ghz for a decade, it just takes ln2 to do it. Non-x86 systems went over 5 GHz on air many years ago, e.g. IBM POWER.
  - floatboth 9y ago
    Delidded Kaby Lake also sometimes does 5GHz on air IIRC
  - bhouston 9y ago
    > That being said, a 4ghz Skylake core crushes a 4ghz Core 2 core. Core 2 Duos were slower per clock than Pentium 4s, I think by quite a bit. It was a real set back for performance when they came out.
    - YSFEJ4SWJUVU6 9y ago
      That can't obviously be true except for some certainly specific workloads. Core 2 was the breakthrough that left AMD in the dust from which it still hasn't recovered to parity. Even if I can't recall the numbers, I fail to remember how the very energy-intensive (high clocked) Pentium 4 could have been faster per clock. Are you sure you're not thinking of the Pentium 3 to 4 change? After all, Core architecture had more in common with P3, didn't it?
verroq 9y ago
Anyone else get redirected to malware?
- sjtrny 9y ago
  Yes! I thought it was my DNS or something. It only happens on mobile.
  - mappu 9y ago
    Anandtech have great content, but their advertising can be... aggressive. I assume you have an adblocker on desktop but not on mobile?
    - msh 9y ago
      They have fallen a long way since Adnan ran the site...
      - Skunkleton 9y ago
        Adnan is the guy who may or may not have killed his girlfriend in the 90's. You are thinking Anand. As in AnandTech. And even without Mr. Shimpi AnandTech is still one of the best sources for in-depth reviews of hardware.
        hossbeast 9y ago
        This is a reference to the Serial podcast, for anyone wondering. Recommended (both seasons).
        msh 9y ago
        You are right about the name, I blame autocorrect. I think especially their phone and tablet reviews have gone down a lot. Fx no deep dive into the newer iPhones and iPads.
        PaulKeeble 9y ago
        They have fallen behind in CPU and GPU testing methodology especially around games. Their testing of databases was pretty awful (it fit in memory) and a variety of other obvious limitations to their testing I would argue they are not only worse than they were when Anand ran the show but now significantly worse than a lot of the places they compete with. Pcper is a significantly more capable review site these days.
readams 9y ago
They used to go Process, Architecture, Process, Architecture, which was styled as Tick, Tock. Recently they switched to Process, Architecture, More Architecture. I like to call it Tick, Tock, Clunk.
turblety 9y ago
I wonder if this one will come with free backdoors and spyware installed, thanks to the wonderful Intel Management Engine (Intel ME) backdoor. [1][2][3] Intel (and AMT) keep pushing more and more proprietary code that can not be read, changed or removed. No one knows exactly what it does and it has built in screen and key recording. It's my advice and the advice of privacy advocates that no one should purchase or use any processor made by Intel or AMD until they address these serious issues. 1. https://libreboot.org/faq.html#intel https://libreboot.org/faq.html#intel 2. https://puri.sm/learn/intel-me/ https://puri.sm/learn/intel-me/ 3. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14708575 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14708575
- andy_ppp 9y ago
  Does anyone here know someone who works on these various management engines? It'd be interesting to see if the security services were involved or if they really were back dooring all computers right? My guess is it's definitely possible but it would have been popped by foreign agencies by now too and there would have been a leak of tools to exploit such devices? I guess maybe it's very tempting to be able to hack any device though so knowing the NSA they are probably for doing this, fuck the consequences?
  - turblety 9y ago
    There was this floating around a while ago: https://i.redd.it/id88hvysu3ny.png https://i.redd.it/id88hvysu3ny.png
    - nowherecat 9y ago
      Well, this seems quite a bit unsubstantial. If an Intel Employee in that position wanted to leak some real info, i would assume it would be accompanied by something that gives the information some credibility.
      - badwolf 9y ago
        You mean an anonymous post on 4chan about Obama spying on Trump isn't super credible? Color me shocked...
bitL 9y ago
In retrospective, Intel should have bought NVidia when they had the chance; GPUs is the only area making huge progress year to year now.
- ZenoArrow 9y ago
  Intel didn't buy NVIDIA, but they did buy Altera, and there's plenty of room for growth with FPGAs.
  - bitL 9y ago
    Aren't FPGAs mainly for design phase and the real crunching in the industry done on ASICs? At least whole automotive industry works that way - FPGAs to design/test stuff, ASICs for production and making money.
    - davemp 9y ago
      Nope, plently of people do heavy computing with FPGAs. The speedup between FPGA -> ASIC is not that dramatic. Their real advantage is power draw and ammortized cost. FPGAs also have to initialize when powering up.
    - bertjk 9y ago
      It mostly depends on how many you are planning to sell. For a given performance/functionality, FPGAs cost more per chip than ASICs. But ASICs come with a much greater upfront fixed cost.
    - cr0sh 9y ago
      Note the FP of FPGA - "field programmable". What this means is that to implement the hardware the FPGA represents, you have to "program" it; this is typically done in one of only a couple HLLs (VHDL and Verilog, known as Hardware Descriptor Languages or HDLs). At one time, Xilinx (Altera's competitor) made an FPGA which could be programmed "on the fly" very quickly; it (well, many thousands) were used for an interesting machine, of which only a few examples survive (the whole thing at the time was surreal, if you followed it - it seemed like a scam more than anything, but real hardware was shipped). This machine was called the CAM-Brain machine, and was the creation of researcher Hugo de Garis (who is retired, and is a seemingly strange fellow in the AI community - but not as strange as Mentifex): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_de_Garis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_de_Garis http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=591856 http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=591856 https://profhugodegaris.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/arj-rev2.pdf https://profhugodegaris.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/arj-rev2... I encourage you to research this machine, and Mr de Garis, as the whole thing is fascinating (and I will also say, from a design perspective, the shipped CAM-Brain Machine was one of the "sexiest" looking boxen since the early Crays). CAM-Brain meant "cellular automata machine brain" - it was basically an effort to evolve a neural network using CA and FPGA; the CA would evolve the HDL which described the hardware representation of the NN, which would then be dumped to the FPGA for processing. The process (from what I understand) was iterative. I don't believe the "kitten" ever went past much more than some early 3D models (maybe some CAD, too) and a software simulator. At least, that's what you can still find out there today (images of the simulator running on Windows NT, iirc). The effort was noble, but it didn't work for more than simple things. I think it was part of the "evolve-a-brain" NN dead end, which seemed to hold out some promise at the time. That's just a bit of background, but it shows how Intel and FPGAs can be used for building hardware to represent neural networks (a GPU/TPU is not a neural network - it is merely a processor for the software representation of the neural network). Whether that's their intention, or something else (maybe something like Transmeta tried?) - only they know.
majidazimi 9y ago
Hmmm. It seems Atom/Electron devs need to work hard to slow down new generation processors...
- mariusmg 9y ago
  Don't worry, i'm sure they'll do it....
- iplaw 9y ago
  I will say that, despite its many shortcomings and after I was able to overcome the netbook-induced Atom stigmas, I really do like the Atom for small-business NAS applications.
  - will_hughes 9y ago
    Pretty sure the comment was about the Atom and Electron editor / framework. https://atom.io/ https://atom.io/ https://electron.atom.io/ https://electron.atom.io/
    - reitanqild 9y ago
      Yes but I too read it twice before I got it.
- bhouston 9y ago
  VSCode isn't similarly slow. Weird.
  - jshap70 9y ago
    microsoft put in a lot of work into how vscode buffers the html its displaying for the file, and it runs very well because of it. It is actually a very cool setup; if you get a chance do an element inspection of the monaco in-browser editor, as it uses the same method. the same can not be said for atom, however.
- bhauer 9y ago

326 points by bauta-steen 9y ago

nodesocket 9y ago

Is this Intel's response to AMD Threadripper and EPYC?

wmf 9y ago
No, that would be Cascade Lake-X and Cascade Lake-SP.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

nullnilvoid 9y ago

As a consumer, it's great to see competition picking up in the CPU market. Intel does not seem to be able to hold the edge in node process as tsmc and Samsung are matching intel. It has to resort to architecture design.

wmf 9y ago
Ice Lake has been delayed from 2017 to 2018, so I'm not sure what competition has to do with it.
- spyhi 9y ago
  > it's rare these days for Intel to talk more than a generation ahead in CPU architectures. This, to me, looks like the PS2 vs Dreamcast move, where Sony blocked Dreamcast sales with PS2 hype. We've been waiting for 10nm for a while now, and now Intel is essentially confirming "yes, it's really coming this time" where they might not have otherwise--it's hard to not see that as a reaction to Threadripper. At least on the surface, increased competition has led to increased transparency, which is good for consumers...or at least I'm happy knowing I have the option to avoid a big, hot, power-hungry chip if I want to.
  - jerf 9y ago
    The Osborne effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect Although it has been deliberately deployed many times now, as you note one example of.
    - spyhi 9y ago
      Nice, I never knew what it was called. Thanks!
    - gfody 9y ago
      seems like Intel is willing to cannibalize Skylake-X to hurt Threadripper. I think that means Threadripper must be looming large at Intel.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      - compuguy 9y ago
        Honestly The revision-x's are forgettable to begin with, unless you need that many cores (No ECC either).
    - raverbashing 9y ago
      And people keep falling for it See:Itanium Never compare an existing product to one that is not yet being sold. Never
      - dom0 9y ago
        Itanium was such a strange ... event. A complete outlier, it is even from today's perspective not easy to see why it happened.
    - cm2187 9y ago
      Most people buying a laptop don't really care or know what generation of the CPU they have. Not convinced it hugely impacts sales
- phire 9y ago
  We never had a date for Ice Lake. I think we only started hearing about it this year. It's Cannon Lake (Intel's first 10nm chip) which is supposed to come out this year.
nodemochatea 9y ago
Wow. Great comment.
frik 9y ago
Now that Intel got competition again with very competitive new AMD CPUs, Intel is releasing "new" CPU to the public that waited in their basement for some time. AMD CPUs are a lot faster than they hoped, so Intel has to skip one generation.
kakwa_ 9y ago
Well actually I think it's more a case of "increase in performance is becoming harder and harder, the technology leader (Intel) is slowly becoming stuck and the competition (AMD) is catching up". Everybody will be more or less at the same level as it requires huge investments to only get a marginal advantage. Apart from games, I would not be that afraid to install recent pieces of software (browser, office suit, os) on a 10 years old computer (2007 core 2 duo). But in 2007 I would not have thought for a minute that I could do the same on a 1997 computer (Pentium II), and installing 1997 software on a 1987 computer (80386), just no. Last time I replaced my CPU (i5-6500 in place of i5-2500), I only saw a marginal improvement. Even at my former job, I worked with some decent servers (32 to 48 cores, 128GB of RAMs) to build Linux masters from scratch (Gentoo based). The oldest server of the bunch (which is 5 years old now) is still the fastest to build a master from scratch, it has less cores but faster clock and even on parallel tasks like compiling stuff, clock is still a more determining factor than cores. There are still tons of things to improve in CPUs: power consumption, cost, embedded functionalities (SoC)... but performance improvements seem a huge cost for low gains adventure right now and for the foreseeable future.
- std_throwaway 9y ago
  Gains in instructions-per-clock start to flatten out. And that's where the gains were coming from in the last years. Some time ago a paper was posted here that showed how even if you have an infinite amount of transistors, you will still be limited in the range of 3-10 instructions-per-clock for typical programs. Clock speeds seem to have leveled and IPC will only see another gain of 50-100%. Single threaded performance is close to the limit. What after that? Is this the end?
  - ido 9y ago
    When was the last time we saw a 50-100% performance gain in cars? airplanes? spacecraft? Was it the end of those industries? Welcome to mature technology.
    - meric 9y ago
      > spacecraft Economically? I think this or last year.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

slededit 9y ago

At this point real compute happens on the GPU. I think we'll see a shift to major apps being driven by GPGPU. The CPU's performance has started matter less and less.

jacquesm 9y ago
That's just simply not true. The 'real computation' happening on GPUs is either very heavy floating point work or graphics related work, almost everything else is running on the CPU.
davemp 9y ago
What do you mean by major apps? Do you have some reason to believe that apps will suddenly become embarrassingly parallel? Major apps often don't even take full advantage of SIMD instructions on the CPU. As soon as you need a context switch, branching, or fast memory access your GPU is crap. GPUs are only good at _very_ specific workloads.
- slededit 9y ago
  I used to believe that, until I started to get into cryptocoin mining. There were algorithms that were specifically designed to be GPU resistant and they all were ported and saw significant gains. It was that experience that pushed me to learn how to program these devices. The tooling isn't good enough yet, but there is no question in my mind practically everything will run on a GPU like processor in the future. The speedups are just too tremendous. Intel knows this, which is why they purposely limit PCIe bandwidth.
  - IntelMiner 9y ago
    "GPUs are only good at _very_ specific workloads." Let me detail you a completely specific workload citing my own personal experience over objective facts with citations Oh and let me also take a swipe at Intel again without any verifiable evidence
    - 9y ago

GuiA 9y ago

According to the table in the article: - 2011: 32nm - 2012: 22nm - 2014: 14nm - 2018?: 10nm I don't know much about foundry processes, but it seems that it's taking more and more time for lesser and lesser gains, right? At this rate, how long until we reach sub nanometer? What are the physical limits on these processes, and does it have any implications for end users? Will we be using 2nm CPUs for 50 years? Would love to hear the thinking of anyone educated on the topic. Edit: very intrigued by the sustained downvotes on this ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

spydum 9y ago
widely assumed 5nm is the limit. I know i've seen others discuss some ideas around how close they can get, but i'm struggling to find the thread.. In any case, this may help: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_nanometer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_nanometer Found it.. http://semiengineering.com/will-7nm-and-5nm-really-happen/ http://semiengineering.com/will-7nm-and-5nm-really-happen/ and the HN discussion from several years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7920108 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7920108
- SemiTom 9y ago
  also Is 7nm The Last Major Node? https://semiengineering.com/7nm-last-major-node/ https://semiengineering.com/7nm-last-major-node/
jacquesm 9y ago
The step from 14 to 10 nm is huge. Both from a technological perspective on the manufacturing side as well as on the effect it will have to the number of transistors on a die and the power consumption of those transistors. Remember that power consumption and the number of transistors are related to the surface area so there is a square factor in there. 14 nm ^2 = 196, 10 nm ^2 = 100, so that's almost a doubling of the number of transistors and approximately a halving of the power required per transistor for a given die area.
- Osmium 9y ago
  While true, the same math holds for 22 nm^2 (484) to 14 nm^2 (196). Real world gains will never be as high as the math suggests, as you get into leakage currents etc.

GameOfTrolls 9y ago

AMD is taking their lunch.

JohnJamesRambo 9y ago

"Working purely on lithographic nomenclature, Intel has three processes on 14nm: 14, 14+, and 14++. As shown to everyone at Intel’s Technology Manufacturing Day a couple of months ago, these will be followed by a trio of 10nm processes: 10nm, 10nm+ (10+), and 10++" What imbecile thinks these are good names for the processes? Especially in an era where the consumer is already totally confused about current CPU offerings and rightfully views incremental CPU upgrades in a stalled Moore's Law world with suspicion already?

tedunangst 9y ago
They don't usually include process names in consumer targeted marketing material...

bhouston 9y ago

What will be the clock when single threaded? Can we get above 5GHz finally?

zanny 9y ago
We have been over 5ghz for a decade, it just takes ln2 to do it. We aren't going to see ludicrously high clock rates for the foreseeable future. There are a lot of compounding factors as to why, but the biggest ones are the pressure for efficiency driving designs that aren't dumping higher and higher voltage to get frequency, the diminishing returns on voltage vs frequency (see Ryzen, where a 20% improvement in clocks costs about a 50% increase in power draw across all skews, and similar situations happen with Intel). That being said, a 4ghz Skylake core crushes a 4ghz Core 2 core. Depending on your benchmark used it can perform anywhere from 80% to upwards of 170% faster per clock. You don't get as dramatic year over year improvements increasing the the per cycle performance, but innovations leading up to ~2004 (or 06 for the multicore boon) were just stuffing power hungrier and hotter transistors on smaller dies.
- dom0 9y ago
  > We have been over 5ghz for a decade, it just takes ln2 to do it. Non-x86 systems went over 5 GHz on air many years ago, e.g. IBM POWER.
- floatboth 9y ago
  Delidded Kaby Lake also sometimes does 5GHz on air IIRC
- bhouston 9y ago
  > That being said, a 4ghz Skylake core crushes a 4ghz Core 2 core. Core 2 Duos were slower per clock than Pentium 4s, I think by quite a bit. It was a real set back for performance when they came out.
  - YSFEJ4SWJUVU6 9y ago
    That can't obviously be true except for some certainly specific workloads. Core 2 was the breakthrough that left AMD in the dust from which it still hasn't recovered to parity. Even if I can't recall the numbers, I fail to remember how the very energy-intensive (high clocked) Pentium 4 could have been faster per clock. Are you sure you're not thinking of the Pentium 3 to 4 change? After all, Core architecture had more in common with P3, didn't it?

verroq 9y ago

Anyone else get redirected to malware?

sjtrny 9y ago
Yes! I thought it was my DNS or something. It only happens on mobile.
- mappu 9y ago
  Anandtech have great content, but their advertising can be... aggressive. I assume you have an adblocker on desktop but not on mobile?
  - msh 9y ago
    They have fallen a long way since Adnan ran the site...
    - Skunkleton 9y ago
      Adnan is the guy who may or may not have killed his girlfriend in the 90's. You are thinking Anand. As in AnandTech. And even without Mr. Shimpi AnandTech is still one of the best sources for in-depth reviews of hardware.
      - hossbeast 9y ago
        This is a reference to the Serial podcast, for anyone wondering. Recommended (both seasons).
      - msh 9y ago
        You are right about the name, I blame autocorrect. I think especially their phone and tablet reviews have gone down a lot. Fx no deep dive into the newer iPhones and iPads.
      - PaulKeeble 9y ago
        They have fallen behind in CPU and GPU testing methodology especially around games. Their testing of databases was pretty awful (it fit in memory) and a variety of other obvious limitations to their testing I would argue they are not only worse than they were when Anand ran the show but now significantly worse than a lot of the places they compete with. Pcper is a significantly more capable review site these days.

readams 9y ago

They used to go Process, Architecture, Process, Architecture, which was styled as Tick, Tock. Recently they switched to Process, Architecture, More Architecture. I like to call it Tick, Tock, Clunk.

turblety 9y ago

I wonder if this one will come with free backdoors and spyware installed, thanks to the wonderful Intel Management Engine (Intel ME) backdoor. [1][2][3] Intel (and AMT) keep pushing more and more proprietary code that can not be read, changed or removed. No one knows exactly what it does and it has built in screen and key recording. It's my advice and the advice of privacy advocates that no one should purchase or use any processor made by Intel or AMD until they address these serious issues. 1. https://libreboot.org/faq.html#intel https://libreboot.org/faq.html#intel 2. https://puri.sm/learn/intel-me/ https://puri.sm/learn/intel-me/ 3. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14708575 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14708575

andy_ppp 9y ago
Does anyone here know someone who works on these various management engines? It'd be interesting to see if the security services were involved or if they really were back dooring all computers right? My guess is it's definitely possible but it would have been popped by foreign agencies by now too and there would have been a leak of tools to exploit such devices? I guess maybe it's very tempting to be able to hack any device though so knowing the NSA they are probably for doing this, fuck the consequences?
- turblety 9y ago
  There was this floating around a while ago: https://i.redd.it/id88hvysu3ny.png https://i.redd.it/id88hvysu3ny.png
  - nowherecat 9y ago
    Well, this seems quite a bit unsubstantial. If an Intel Employee in that position wanted to leak some real info, i would assume it would be accompanied by something that gives the information some credibility.
    - badwolf 9y ago
      You mean an anonymous post on 4chan about Obama spying on Trump isn't super credible? Color me shocked...

bitL 9y ago

In retrospective, Intel should have bought NVidia when they had the chance; GPUs is the only area making huge progress year to year now.

ZenoArrow 9y ago
Intel didn't buy NVIDIA, but they did buy Altera, and there's plenty of room for growth with FPGAs.
- bitL 9y ago
  Aren't FPGAs mainly for design phase and the real crunching in the industry done on ASICs? At least whole automotive industry works that way - FPGAs to design/test stuff, ASICs for production and making money.
  - davemp 9y ago
    Nope, plently of people do heavy computing with FPGAs. The speedup between FPGA -> ASIC is not that dramatic. Their real advantage is power draw and ammortized cost. FPGAs also have to initialize when powering up.
  - bertjk 9y ago
    It mostly depends on how many you are planning to sell. For a given performance/functionality, FPGAs cost more per chip than ASICs. But ASICs come with a much greater upfront fixed cost.
  - cr0sh 9y ago
    Note the FP of FPGA - "field programmable". What this means is that to implement the hardware the FPGA represents, you have to "program" it; this is typically done in one of only a couple HLLs (VHDL and Verilog, known as Hardware Descriptor Languages or HDLs). At one time, Xilinx (Altera's competitor) made an FPGA which could be programmed "on the fly" very quickly; it (well, many thousands) were used for an interesting machine, of which only a few examples survive (the whole thing at the time was surreal, if you followed it - it seemed like a scam more than anything, but real hardware was shipped). This machine was called the CAM-Brain machine, and was the creation of researcher Hugo de Garis (who is retired, and is a seemingly strange fellow in the AI community - but not as strange as Mentifex): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_de_Garis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_de_Garis http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=591856 http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=591856 https://profhugodegaris.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/arj-rev2.pdf https://profhugodegaris.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/arj-rev2... I encourage you to research this machine, and Mr de Garis, as the whole thing is fascinating (and I will also say, from a design perspective, the shipped CAM-Brain Machine was one of the "sexiest" looking boxen since the early Crays). CAM-Brain meant "cellular automata machine brain" - it was basically an effort to evolve a neural network using CA and FPGA; the CA would evolve the HDL which described the hardware representation of the NN, which would then be dumped to the FPGA for processing. The process (from what I understand) was iterative. I don't believe the "kitten" ever went past much more than some early 3D models (maybe some CAD, too) and a software simulator. At least, that's what you can still find out there today (images of the simulator running on Windows NT, iirc). The effort was noble, but it didn't work for more than simple things. I think it was part of the "evolve-a-brain" NN dead end, which seemed to hold out some promise at the time. That's just a bit of background, but it shows how Intel and FPGAs can be used for building hardware to represent neural networks (a GPU/TPU is not a neural network - it is merely a processor for the software representation of the neural network). Whether that's their intention, or something else (maybe something like Transmeta tried?) - only they know.

majidazimi 9y ago

Hmmm. It seems Atom/Electron devs need to work hard to slow down new generation processors...

mariusmg 9y ago
Don't worry, i'm sure they'll do it....
iplaw 9y ago
I will say that, despite its many shortcomings and after I was able to overcome the netbook-induced Atom stigmas, I really do like the Atom for small-business NAS applications.
- will_hughes 9y ago
  Pretty sure the comment was about the Atom and Electron editor / framework. https://atom.io/ https://atom.io/ https://electron.atom.io/ https://electron.atom.io/
  - reitanqild 9y ago
    Yes but I too read it twice before I got it.
bhouston 9y ago
VSCode isn't similarly slow. Weird.
- jshap70 9y ago
  microsoft put in a lot of work into how vscode buffers the html its displaying for the file, and it runs very well because of it. It is actually a very cool setup; if you get a chance do an element inspection of the monaco in-browser editor, as it uses the same method. the same can not be said for atom, however.
bhauer 9y ago