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Intel Launches 8th Generation CPUs, Starting with Kaby Lake Refresh
- Aardwolf 9y agoHow about some consumer desktop ones with ECC RAM support?
- mamon 9y agoNever gonna happen. ECC is "pro" feature for Intel, reserved for Xeons only. They have to justify high price of Xeons somehow.
- TazeTSchnitzel 9y agoEven AMD think of it as such. Ryzen doesn't have it disabled on the desktop, but AMD haven't validated it either.
- agumonkey 9y agoDidn't AMD employees confirm it a few times on the web already ?
- onli 9y agoECC is working with AMD if the motherboard supports it, but you can't always be sure that the motherboard does support it correctly. You need to rely on user reports/what the motherboard producer promises, instead of it being a default feature that always works. Still a lot more than what Intel offers in that space.
- agumonkey 9y agoThanks
- TazeTSchnitzel 9y agoI didn't say ECC doesn't work. It is enabled on Ryzen. But it's not something AMD go to the effort of validating to make sure it works properly and it doesn't get support. It's left in there as a footnote for enthusiasts.
- sborra 9y agoIf I'm not mistaken there are a few Pentiums and i3 chips that support ECC. For example the G4560.
- chx 9y agoYou mean server chips. The server Atoms also support ECC. For eg. https://ark.intel.com/products/97927/Intel-Atom-Processor-C3958-16M-Cache-up-to-2_0-GHz https://ark.intel.com/products/97927/Intel-Atom-Processor-C3...
- jpalomaki 9y agoWhat's the price difference between consumer (no ECC) and workstation (ECC support) (mobo+cpu+memory)?
- sliken 9y agoXeon E3-1230 varies by generation (v1 to v6 or so), but is typically slightly cheaper or slightly lower clocked then the top of the line i7. The motherboards are about another $50, and the dimms are another 25% or so more than non-ecc dimms.
- k_lander 9y agoWhy is ECC sought after on the desktop?
- bitL 9y agoSome people run >32GB RAM with long uptime and there the chance of a random bit-flip might not be acceptable. Imagine working on some Deep Learning model, training it for 30 consecutive days and then hitting a memory bug during computation.
- Synaesthesia 9y agoNot your everyday requirement, also ML is somewhat tolerant to small faults like that.
- bitL 9y agoDepends. If a bit is flipped in a dataset you are likely fine, if in code your computation might crash. If you use enterprise-grade software like ZFS filesystem that keeps a lot in memory, it's much better to have ECC and accept a bit slower memory access for a bit better protection.
- OoooooooO 9y agoZFS without ECC is pretty useless ...
- michaelmrose 9y agoZFS is no more vulnerable to corruption when running without ECC than any other file system. The developers of zfs suggest ECC because ECC is a worthwhile thing for those who care about their data. You should stop spreading misinformation.
- Retr0spectrum 9y agoRowhammer protection, for one thing.
- sundvor 9y agoOooh moving to a baseline of 4 cores; this means we'll see quad core Lenovo X1 Carbons / Ultrabooks soon. :) I for one am excited.
- throwaway613834 9y agoDo you happen to have any idea how long we'll have to wait for that? Might they be out in a month, or might it take a few more?
- sundvor 9y agoI'm guessing January next year with February availability, going by previous releases. (This is purely my own speculation, considering CES/previous releases.)
- throwaway613834 9y agoThanks! :) Do you think this would be the case for the first quad-core ultrabooks/notebooks as well, or just these particular Lenovo products would take that long? I haven't been keeping up with CPU releases so I don't recall how long it takes for them to reach the portable market...
- acous 9y agoThis article [1] contains some info: "Intel tells us that we should start seeing laptops using the new CPUs hit the market in September." [1] http://www.anandtech.com/show/11738/intel-launches-8th-generation-cpus-starting-with-kaby-lake-refresh-for-15w-mobile http://www.anandtech.com/show/11738/intel-launches-8th-gener...
- throwaway613834 9y agoOh, awesome, thanks!
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- throwaway613834 9y agoI remember seeing claims of 15-30% improved single-threaded performance. Does anyone know how legitimately I should take these? They sound way too good to be true...
- skummetmaelk 9y agoMaybe per watt?
- throwaway613834 9y agoThat's not the impression I got, but I'm not well-versed in the marketing terminology. Is that the impression you get from here? https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/05/intel-claims-30-performance-boost-for-8th-generation-processors/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/05/intel-claims-30-perf...
- onli 9y agoI might miss something in that article, but this 15-30% performance increase when pitting a dual core against a quad core is pretty bad. I don't see the mention of single thread performance. It talks about overall benchmark performance.
- throwaway613834 9y agoI'm pretty sure they mean single-threaded, but I've seen different numbers floating around. Here I see between 11-29% depending on the model: https://videocardz.com/72112/intel-claims-i7-8700k-to-be-11-faster-than-7700k https://videocardz.com/72112/intel-claims-i7-8700k-to-be-11-...
- onli 9y agoOkay. Well, you should wait for benchmarks. If like in the anandtech article mentioned the clock rate gets decreased, and that would be very normal when adding more cores, then a single thread performance increase is very unlikely. In the last launch Intel did not get close to those numbers, and that was without a core increase. Also, there seems to be some confusion whether those processors now are a kaby lake refresh or the new coffee lake architecture. The videocardz article mentions Coffee Lake (and some other news articles call those processors that as well), but the anandtech article defines them as a Kaby Lake Refresh. A new architecture would make a single thread performance increase more likely.
- mrmondo 9y agoGood to see lower power usage but the one thing I still feel is missing is widespread support for ECC on the desk(lap)top.
- tammer 9y agoCurious what your use case is that entails ECC? Are you currently being held back without it?
- madez 9y agoIs the lack of a secure door to your property something that would hold you back? I doubt that. Still, secure doors are important.
- varjag 9y agoDo you have blast doors installed home? Anyway, not sure how exactly ECC relates to security. Is there any specific attack vector where it helps?
- baq 9y agorowhammer, though it apparently can work around ecc.
- madez 9y agoA blast door protects against explosions – a very unlikely scenario, that will happen to practically nobody. ECC protects against bit flips in RAM which happen significantly often ( https://www.cnet.com/news/google-computer-memory-flakier-than-expected/ https://www.cnet.com/news/google-computer-memory-flakier-tha... ) Your comparison is inadequate.
- copx 9y agoIntegrity of your data. Without ECC data in memory can become corrupted at any point. It's usually just a single bit but say you are working with images, do you care if a single pixel changes its RGB value because of a memory error? A character in the metadata? I do. Unfortunately there is a hardware cartel which deliberately limits ECC to enterprise / server products so that they can inflate the price / their profit margin. ECC RAM is more expensive to manufacture than non-ECC RAM but the price difference would be fairly minimal if ECC RAM were used everywhere - as it should.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Zekio 9y agoWait isn't 7th gen already essentially a refresh of 6th gen?
- Synaesthesia 9y agoYeah Intel are not following the tick-tock pattern anymore, they are having more revisions on the same node, and some of the revisions are more slight. Anandtech had an article on it a while back.
- stephens_chris 9y agoCorrect. About a year and a half ago, Intel announced they were ditching tick-tock for a three step model of process-architecture-optimization.
- vladimir-y 9y agoSure, but this time AMD made Intel to show a real progress with 8 cores ULV CPU (yes to show, as I guess Intel had it ready-made, but was not going to present it for the time being). Before this year Intel didn't have to show the real progress as there was almost monopoly on the CPU market.
- vladimir-y 9y ago> with 8 cores ULV CPU 4 cores obviously
- tachion 9y agoI wonder how companies like Apple, that have quite stagnant and stable release cycles (compared to other brands) will handle that situation. Does it mean their customers will have to sit on 'old' CPU's again for another generation or two? Latest MacBooks were released ~80 days ago and their release cycle is ~300 days on average. Obviously I wonder, because I was about to order a new Apple machine for myself and now I'm not sure if I shouldn't (the same problem over and over again) just wait a bit longer.
- nik736 9y agoI don't think the regular MacBook have those chips. These are the ones for the 13-inch MBP entry level models.
- tachion 9y agoI thought of MacBook as of 'MacBook family' and not as 'The MacBook 12"'. To be more precise, when I said I wanted to buy a new machine, I was thinking about The MBPR 15".
- twoodfin 9y agoConsidering how recently the Apple Kaby Lake bump was, and that the 8th generation Coffee Lake parts for the "real" Touch Bar Pros won't be released for several months, I'd be shocked if this wasn't one of the better times to buy.
- stephens_chris 9y agoAfter seeing those internal emails from Microsoft regarding the failures they had on the Surface products caused by problems in the then-recently launched Skylake chips, my guess is Apple is just fine on their delayed release schedule.
- sliken 9y agoEr, if you read those closely you'll realize that it was microsoft's fault and they were trying to blame skylake. No other manufacturer had problems like microsoft with the same chips.
- vladimirralev 9y agoStill LPDDR3 with 16GB RAM limitation. What an embarrassment, all phone SoC today use LPDDR4(x) and technically support more RAM than the desktop Intel CPUs.
- jrs95 9y agoDoes anyone know if Ryzen will support LPDDR4 in it's mobile chips? I tried Googling around for it but couldn't get an obvious yes or no. Seems sort of unlikely, but if they do support it a lot sooner than Intel, that would be a big win for AMD. Even more unlikely would be a Ryzen powered MacBook Pro with 32GB of LPDDR4 RAM...but I'd be willing to pay a lot of money for that. I know Apple tends to prioritize single core performance on their own chips, but almost all of the desktop software their pro users are using would run better on Ryzen than on Intel's current offerings. Plus, with Intel's Iris Pro gone, Ryzen might allow them to have better integrated graphics, and bring back a 15" model with no dGPU.
- compuguy 9y agoWait, they aren't making chips with Iris Pro graphics anymore? That seems like an odd decision.
- matwood 9y agoThat's a bummer. The upside is that I will continue to have no reason to upgrade my current MBP.
- nik736 9y agoIsn't it better to have more powerful single thread performance for developing in single threaded languages? Looks like a step backwards than? Double the core count and more l3 cache sounds good, even though they crippled the base clock speed.
- makapuf 9y agoAt this time I think there shouldn't be single threaded languages (I'm not sure which ones you're thinking about since it's mostly about libs and OS primitives). Even Python is multithreaded (even if the GIL makes it better to just use multiprocess), I'd say if you're after 10% improvements - the level those kind of CPU upgrades can offer on single thread, you'd better change languages if you're stuck to single thread. If your problem is difficult to parallelize, well that's another story.
- TorKlingberg 9y agoEven if the language supports threads, that doesn't mean your application magically parallel. No language will give you free parallelism. Besides, most software you run was written by somebody else.
- makapuf 9y agosure, that was my point about the problem being parallel or not. Of course the program make use of it and be multithreaded and cpu-bound or not. That was not the point. The OP talked about "developing in multi-threaded languages", which is 1) about new developments 2) about language being multithreaded or not. I believe we both say it shouldn't be a problem of language as in 2017.
- Filligree 9y agoThey lowered the base clock speed, yes. That's the minimum clock you can count on, assuming a correctly designed laptop, even if all four cores are going flat out. In practice, the clock is set to limit power usage and thermal load. A better-cooled system will automatically run faster (not really applicable to laptops), and if you're only using a single thread then you'll see the same clock rate you did before, or a bit above.
- chx 9y agoThe Turbo/base ratio is getting interesting. The previous generation saw a 1.6x Turbo max but this generation now sees 2.2x -- a clear testimony how the four cores, alas, are for show. Obviously there will be a little improvement but I wouldn't expect earth shattering results.
- bhouston 9y agoYou get four cores at less than half speed. Sort of think, can you just get 2 cores at 4/5th speed and it would be able the same? Very strange scaling this chip has.
- nfriedly 9y ago> Intel’s big aim with the new processors is, as always, to tackle the growing market of 3-5+ year old devices still being used today, quoting better performance, a better user experience, longer battery life, and fundamentally new experiences when using newer hardware. Two years ago Intel quoted 300 million units fit into this 3-5+ year window; now that number is 450 million. Yep, Intel's problem is that most folks don't need a new CPU, especially for a computer that's always plugged in. I'm refurbishing a 6-year-old system with a Pentium E5800 for a friend, and initially it felt dog slow. However, once I swapped the mechanical hard drive with a solid state disk, it instantly feat like a zippy little machine. It already had enough processing power for everything they wanted (browsing, office, youtube, etc.)
- jjjsdf87777 9y agoThe big grief I have with "general computing" platforms is their insistence of sticking with the traditional form factor. ATX, ITX, PCI-, DDR ...outdated, overboard, clunky designs for most people. Take a Mac Mini-like design, and make modules that can stack or otherwise attach to expand capabilities. IMO, this is what Apple should do and be done with the whole "But Mac Pro users ...!" A project Ara-like desktop, both its size and modularity, would probably offer more than enough computing power for most users (browsing, office, youtube).
- stamps 9y agoLike the HP Elite Slice? http://www8.hp.com/us/en/campaigns/elite-slice/overview.html http://www8.hp.com/us/en/campaigns/elite-slice/overview.html
- jjjsdf87777 9y agoYeah. But from a vendor that people want to do business with.
- pjc50 9y agoCute! Shame the pricing is "elite" too. Slice >£1000 inc tax: http://store.hp.com/UKStore/Merch/Offer.aspx?p=b-pc-hp-elite-slice#products http://store.hp.com/UKStore/Merch/Offer.aspx?p=b-pc-hp-elite... Comparable spec small PC £520: http://www.misco.co.uk/product/2688486/HP-280-G2-SFF-Desktop-PC-Intel-Core-i5-6500-8GB-RAM-256GB-SSD-Slim-SATA-DVD-Writer-Windows-10-Pro-Desktop-PC http://www.misco.co.uk/product/2688486/HP-280-G2-SFF-Desktop...
- samstave 9y agoWhat does the term "lake" represent in these family of CPUs? Apparently asking this makes me an idiot to some... while I'll admit to simply laziness... I assume that it would tie a technology together as a code name for this family of procs, but in the case of "lake" they use it in multiple differing technologies... So was curious if it meant something else non-obvious to me.
- mkbnnh 9y agoAre you an idiot?
- tedunangst 9y agoSimilar microarch.
- wmf 9y agoIt doesn't mean anything; Intel has a bunch of unrelated products that all have lake codenames.
- happycube 9y agoJust not in time for back to school - good for intel's margins, bad for all the students stuck with dual core lie5's/7's.
- ksec 9y agoI wonder how many Programmers here using Macbook Pro need an Iris Graphics? Compared to this newest UHD 620 ( Which really is just HD 620 with HDMI 2.2 support ), the Skylake Iris Graphics is rougly 50% to 60% faster. But with Kaby Lake Refresh you get Quad Core instead of Dual Core. I wonder how many would prefer to have a Quad Core Macbook Pro 13" instead. * These 15W parts can be TDP Config up to 25W. Which Fits the Macbook Pro uses.
- jjawssd 9y agoIntegrated graphics are great for the power savings but a 2015 Macbook Pro can not drive a 4K display higher than 24 frames per second.
- xcasex 9y agoaaand with linux, baytrail is still an issue, even though 4+ intel engineers are working on cracking that nut.
- ManyEthers 9y agoJust my two cents but I would still expect them to annouce coffee lake today. If you look at the marketing material they talk about VR and have a picture of a desktop monitor when referring to editing. I dont see how notebooks can provide you an "immersive VR experience".
- Outrageous 9y agoDo you guys think they will wait until January 2018 to release the t480 series? I was torn between the t470p and t470 because of the quad core and finally decided on the t470 for the battery life and size (no t470s/x1 carbon because I already have 1tb 2.5" ssd)
- zachruss92 9y agoI'm kind of disappointed in this. While they are upping the core count, the overall clock speed is being decreased across the board. This means that single threaded processes will theoretically perform slower (I know it still turbos up). Honestly, I just upgraded to Ryzen from a 3770k and. My 3770k ran all cores at 4.2GHz (overclocked, obviously) and the only reason I updated was becasue I wanted to upgrade to NVMe and DDR4. That was 4 years old and I had no CPU-bound performance issues. I really think Intel needs to start innovating more rather than being complacent or AMD is actually going to steal the show. Super happy for the competition though!
- vith 9y ago> I know it still turbos up Is the base clock relevant in any interesting situation? As far as I know it's just telling you what to expect if you disable Turbo Boost in the BIOS. The frequency at idle should be lower through SpeedStep, and the frequency during load should be higher through Turbo Boost. If there are thermal limits preventing the maximum turbo frequency from being reached at all times, I still wouldn't expect the average frequency to be related to the base clock. It should be more or less bound by how insufficient the cooling system is. I think even the instantaneous clocks can fall somewhere between the various listed frequencies under throttling conditions. Also note that the max turbo frequency is different depending on how many cores are loaded.