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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 a
by 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 agoIce 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 agoThe 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 agoNice, I never knew what it was called. Thanks!
- gfody 9y agoseems 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 agoHonestly The revision-x's are forgettable to begin with, unless you need that many cores (No ECC either).
- raverbashing 9y agoAnd people keep falling for it See:Itanium Never compare an existing product to one that is not yet being sold. Never
- dom0 9y agoItanium was such a strange ... event. A complete outlier, it is even from today's perspective not easy to see why it happened.
- cm2187 9y agoMost people buying a laptop don't really care or know what generation of the CPU they have. Not convinced it hugely impacts sales
- noir_lord 9y agoI didn't wait even though I'm excited for what Ryzen mobile chips might bring and frankly an i7-7700HQ is enough for a laptop, if I need more grunt than that I'll switch to a desktop.
- jerf 9y agoIt's the bulk enterprise purchases that they're worried about, not individuals. That may include bulk purchases to build laptops, but it's probably more datacenters and high-performance computing they're worried about.
- ngold 9y agoI like that idea. It would mean intel had to show its hand a bit early with large promises in the near future. I admit i am a bit nostalgic for the crazy days of cpu clockspeed doubling every year. Then the early Gpu wars.
- mtgx 9y agoThe most obvious/shameless situation like this was when they "launched" their Core i9 processors.
- phire 9y agoWe 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 agoWow. Great comment.
- frik 9y agoNow 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 agoWell 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 agoGains 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?