19 ms·
Intel brings a six-core i9 CPU to laptops
- KillerRabbitt 9y agoBased on the slides, do some processors lack virtualization support?
- sebazzz 9y agoMust be a mistake. Other than video rendering, virtualization is a good task for a multi-core processor.
- JonathonW 9y ago“vPro” in this context is probably Intel AMT (Intel uses the “vPro” branding to cover several unrelated technologies)... but Intel’s used virtualization capabilities (specifically VT-d and VT-x) as a point of product line segmentation before, so its not that far-fetched that they might omit something, especially if they’re concerned about cannibalizing server-class processor sales.
- randyrand 9y agomight want to discourage server use.
- Carioca 9y agoThe only technologies they lack are related to remote management, as joathonW said: https://ark.intel.com/products/134903/Intel-Core-i9-8950HK-Processor-12M-Cache-up-to-4_60-GHz https://ark.intel.com/products/134903/Intel-Core-i9-8950HK-P...
- Carioca 9y agoHow they currently define vPro: Intel® vPro™ Technology is a set of security and manageability capabilities built into the processor aimed at addressing four critical areas of IT security: 1) Threat management, including protection from rootkits, viruses, and malware 2) Identity and web site access point protection 3) Confidential personal and business data protection 4) Remote and local monitoring, remediation, and repair of PCs and workstations
- paulie_a 9y agoDoes it still come with the intel rootkit?
- TwoNineA 9y agoGood is competition. Began the Core Wars have.
- astrodust 9y agoFinally the regular i7 has moved beyond four cores. It only took ten years.
- paulie_a 9y agoAMD had an octocore that still crushes most of intels stuff and it's been out for 8 years now.
- olympus 9y agoExcept it didn't crush most of Intel's stuff. It had more physical cores but lost in actual performance. That's why Ryzen was such a big deal, it's the first time AMD has been able to compete with Intel since the Athlon days.
- Zardoz84 9y agoWell, my modest FX8350E keeps working very fine.
- olympus 9y agoBulldozer and Piledriver worked fine, but never came close to "crushing" Intel's offerings. They were a decent option for specific workloads that only cared about parallel performance on a budget. If you cared at all about single threaded performance or had a few extra bucks, it was/is worth it to buy a comparable Intel offering for the entire lifecycle of Bulldozer and Piledriver.
- IntelMiner 9y ago"Working" is still a long shot from "crushing" however
- bhouston 9y agoThe Intel Core i7 laptop series also features 6 core CPUs: Core i7-8850H Core i7-8750H Core i7-8700T Just not clocked as high as the i9. I wonder if any of these 6 core laptop CPUs will have the AMD integrated graphics - it appears not at this moment. I was looking forward to that on an upgrade to my Dell XPS 15. Who is getting the AMD integrated graphics CPUs then? Apple? I really wanted one in my Dell as I was hoping it would be faster and more power efficient than the NVIDIA 1050/1050 Ti.
- kikimaru 9y agoThe model numbers you're looking for are iX-8xxxG. Dell are doing preorders on XPS15 2-in-1; HP doing same on the 15" Spectre x360.
- rsynnott 9y ago> Who is getting the AMD integrated graphics CPUs then? Apple? Doesn't really fit Apple's line. The 13" probably doesn't have the thermal headroom for it at all, and it's not an improvement on the discrete AMD stuff already used in the 15" MBP. Might work for a low-end 15" MBP, but it's not like it's a particularly cheap part, anyway.
- fxxxit 9y agoThe AMD integrated chips has 100W TDP (up from this 45W) so not really in the same league
- dis-sys 9y ago11 years after the first quad core laptop hitting the US market. Well done Intel! https://www.cnet.com/news/first-quad-core-laptop-hits-u-s/ https://www.cnet.com/news/first-quad-core-laptop-hits-u-s/
- puppetmaster400 9y agoClosing the barn after the horse leaves.
- coldtea 9y agoBecause there was some contract that cores have to be increased before some end date? If anything, most cores are underutilized in laptops even today...
- jacquesc 9y agoWhy does it matter if some people are underutilizing cores on their laptop? Mine are constantly pegged (developer running a lot of different heavy processes) and I'd appreciate the ability to pay more for an upgrade. There are many others like me.
- coldtea 9y agoNot many enough (or not paying high enough), or there would be a market. Instead, the major market pressure was on power efficiency. (My cores are pegged too -- I run DAWs and NLEs -- but me and you are irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, if there are not enough of us. And that's not determined by counting us, but by the emergence of a market).
- jpalomaki 9y agoIntel press release: https://newsroom.intel.com/news/intel-core-i9-processor-comes-mobile-best-gaming-creation-laptop-processor-intel-ever-built/ https://newsroom.intel.com/news/intel-core-i9-processor-come...
- StillBored 9y agoSo, the laptop processor has a higher turbo frequency than the desktop parts? Sigh, the same old intel, they accuse others of selling desktop parts as server cores, but they are the ones that don't have a proper desktop lineup. Rather their focusing entirely on power/thermal constrained mobile parts, and then packing as many as possible into a server part. Desktop users get whatever random dies are left over. At least the new "workstation" series xeon's acknowledge that there are users for which single threaded desktop performance is still important.
- coldtea 9y ago>Rather their focusing entirely on power/thermal constrained mobile parts So where the market is? Sounds like smart for a for-profit. If anything, one could accuse them that they didn't do that enough (e.g. missed on the mobile phone market), not that they did it.
- sigi45 9y agoturbo frequency is not everything. Every benchmark i know from intel desktop cpu versus mobile cpu is the same: desktop wins by big margins. I'm guessing that the mobile version does have less execution units.
- hajile 9y agoIt's several things. Desktops dissipate more heat, so sustained clocks are possible. Max Turbo is theoretical in most laptops. A decent example of this phenomenon is the m5 vs m7. Though the much is theoretical faster by double digits, in practice the clocks that those systems can sustain are identical (so save $100 by getting the m5). Let's compare a 8550u and 8700k. The desktop has a base clock of 3.7 instead of 1.8. it has 12mb cache instead of 8mb. Twice the bus speed. Faster supported memory and more bandwidth. Desktop also has 16 pcie Lanes vs 4 (both can access more via the chipset, but then there's that bus bandwidth issue). Instruction and feature support is almost identical (except some things like vpro). Sustained clocks, bandwidth, and more cache make a huge difference.
- 9y ago
- KeitIG 9y agoI don't really understand the demand for this, does not having an i9 defeat the purpose of laptops (working without a power source)? I usually buy laptops with i5 processors which is the perfect trade-off between performances and battery life.
- dragontamer 9y ago> I usually buy laptops with i5 processors which is the perfect trade-off between performances and battery life That's not... how that works. The "U" indicates a low-power part, while the "H" indicates a higher power part. For example, the i7-8650U (the U is the important bit) uses 15W TDP: https://ark.intel.com/products/124968/Intel-Core-i7-8650U-Processor-8M-Cache-up-to-4_20-GHz https://ark.intel.com/products/124968/Intel-Core-i7-8650U-Pr... The i5-8400H uses 45W TDP: https://ark.intel.com/products/134877/Intel-Core-i5-8400H-Processor-8M-Cache-up-to-4_20-GHz https://ark.intel.com/products/134877/Intel-Core-i5-8400H-Pr... So the i7-8650U will have better power-usage than the i5. Heck, due to binning and Turbo (the "race to idle"), the i7-8650U likely will have better power-usage all around than the equivalent i5-U class. The i3 / i5 / i7 is just a marketing trick by Intel. The "important" bit is the U, or H on the end of the chip number, telling you whether its a low-power, mid-power, or high-power version. The "U" chips tend to be around 2GHz base, while the "H" chips turbo to 4.5+ GHz and are almost desktop class power-usage.
- KeitIG 9y agoInteresting, I didn't know this, thank you.
- bussierem 9y agoI'm going to second the first comment here - thank you so much for this! I never realized the significance of the model numbers!
- dragontamer 9y agoYeah, marketing is tricky because there's so many model numbers and configurations. The most important tidbit about "TDP" is that its "THERMAL design power", not actual power draw. So strictly speaking, TDP measures the size of the heatsink needed to keep the CPU functional. This means that different chips, even with the same TDP, offer grossly different power consumption rates. Besides, every chip's actual power draw is slightly different, even chips of the same design (see "binning" and "silicon lottery"). ----------- When you understand how chips are made, then you see why things get complicated. Its a well known fact that the entire AMD Zen series uses only two die designs: Zeppelin, and a 2nd design with the iGPU. That's right, the singular "Zeppelin" design covers AMD EPYC, AMD Ryzen3, 5, 7, and Threadripper (1900X, 1920X, 1950X). How?? The difference between the dies is in "binning". If one or two cores are broken because of manufacturing defects, AMD sells it as a Ryzen 5 (6-core model) instead of the Ryzen7 (8-core model). Very broken designs (3 or 4 broken cores) are sold as a Ryzen3 (4-core model). But when manufactured, these are all 8-core chips. Between chips with full functionality between all eight-cores, some will be able to reach higher clocks than others. The 8-core designs are tested, and the ones that reach the highest clocks are 1800X, and the ones that reach the lowest clocks are sold as a 1700. And that's how ONE design gets turned into 10 different SKUs sold to the customer. Because the manufacturing process is innately variable. ------- Intel is known to bin for power-efficiency, high clocks and so forth. The marketing is a way to sell "broken chips" to people who don't care as much about high speeds or low-power draw.
- Shivetya 9y agoone a related note, this is the chipset many in the iMac world are expecting for some new models. being that it will also be a twentieth anniversary of the platform there is expectations of a new chassis as well
- bufferoverflow 9y ago12-core laptops have been available since 2013. http://www.eurocom.com/configure(2,234,0) http://www.eurocom.com/configure(2,234,0)
- glup 9y agoDesktop replacement laptops like that one are admittedly more mobile than real desktops, but the weight and thermals mean they can't be used the same way as a MacBook-sized machine: on a couch, on a plane, etc. They also can't last long on battery (the one you linked has a 330W draw on a 78 watt-hour battery?).
- olympus 9y agoThose have desktop class high TDP CPUs in them. The distinction here is that this is a low(ish) TDP CPU intended for laptops where battery life matters.
- evilduck 9y agoThat design is stretching the definition of "laptop" pretty far.
- mikerg87 9y agoAnyone more in the know - how much ram could one of these new chips handle - the 16GB limit is something that has to go.
- wompfox 9y ago64GB (1), I don't think there has been a 16gb limit for several generations 1: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/processors/core/i9-processors/i9-8950hk.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/processors/...
- dorfsmay 9y agoIsn't the 16 GiB a self-imposed limit by the laptops manufacturers rather than the processors?
- rsynnott 9y agoBit of both. Current Intel chips (including these ones) don't support LPDDR4. This is largely because Intel is at this point years behind on their roadmap; phone chips have supported LPDDR4 for a while. They support LPDDR3 and plain (non-low-power) DDR4. So if you want to go over 16GB, you have to use plain DDR4, and power usage, especially suspended power usage, suffers. Next-gen Intel chips will support LPDDR4, making the whole thing a bit of a non-issue.
- Jesus_Jones 9y agoIf the next gen was close, it would not be an issue. But because it's way behind and one commenter up above stated its 18 months out. So it's an issue. My dev team is finally abandoning mac books for lenovo laptops with 32 gig.
- pacificmint 9y agoIf you mean mbell's comment, they said it's 18 months late, not 18 months out. How many months it's out from this point is presumably something only Intel knows. Or maybe not even Intel.
- zdw 9y agoThere appears to be no LPDDR4 support in these processors, which seems like a major omission: https://ark.intel.com/products/134903/Intel-Core-i9-8950HK-Processor-12M-Cache-up-to-4_60-GHz?q=i9-8950HK https://ark.intel.com/products/134903/Intel-Core-i9-8950HK-P... Which means they'll be stuck using LPDDR3-2133 memory with the same bandwidth as previous generations in any power conscious design. For example, Apple's MacBook Pro line continues to use LPDDR3-2133: https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/specs/ https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/specs/ I wish AMD would add LPDDR4 support to their mobile chips, if only to light another fire under Intel to have feature parity like they did with core count.
- neverminder 9y agoI don't understand how long will this bullshit continue. At the moment your average phone can technically support more than 16GB of RAM (LPDDR4), but not Intel's laptop CPUs. Is there some kind of massive obstacle that we don't know about?
- mbell 9y agoIntel is just behind, Cannonlake which supports LPDDR4 is now ~18 months late. LPDDR4 also uses a different physical signaling scheme than LPDDR3 so it's not a minor change to adapt current processors, if it is even possible without a packaging change.
- nerpderp83 9y agoTechnical management failure in how to mitigate late or stalled deps, fallback should have been to add ddr4 modems to existing chips.
- Declanomous 9y agoThat seem plausible to me, but aren't memory pretty tightly integrated into the design in a modern processor? How would you be able to take advantage of the additional RAM? Second question, do modems exist that could handle the bandwidth of existing designs? It seems like something that would be extraordinarily expensive, and there wouldn't be much of a benefit considering Intel doesn't have competition on this front.
- mtgx 9y agoDid I miss it or is there no mention of price? I assume that's because it's going to be more expensive than AMD's 8-core chips?
- MikusR 9y ago$583
- MikusR 9y agoMuch better article. https://www.anandtech.com/show/12607/intel-expands-8th-gen-core-core-i9-on-mobile-iris-plus-desktop-chipsets-and-vpro/ https://www.anandtech.com/show/12607/intel-expands-8th-gen-c...
- dang 9y agoOK, we'll change to that from https://www.engadget.com/2018/04/03/intel-8th-gen-i9-laptops/ https://www.engadget.com/2018/04/03/intel-8th-gen-i9-laptops....
- dmix 9y ago> All of the new processors and their accompanying chipsets will support Intel's Optane technology. [..] Intel claims the technology helps game levels load 4.7 times faster on the Core i7 8750H Anyone try out these Optane chips yet and seen a significant difference? This is apparently the other big announcement coming to laptops...
- nfriedly 9y agoI think that's compared to loading from a 5400rpm mechanical hard drive. I'll easily believe that optane is 4.7x faster than that. I also expect most high-end NVME SSDs are going to be in a similar ballpark, maybe "only" 4.5x faster or something.
- aseipp 9y agoOptane performs much better at low queue depths which accounts for many common workloads, and has better power usage at these depths -- this lets it compete with NVMe at the same performance for many tasks with a smaller footprint (e.g. battery). It's not all about peak GB/s, though to be fair not even Intel's blurb makes this obvious... That said it's quite possible NVMe drives will be "good enough" where PCI-e Optane never makes major inroads, even just in terms of pure volume. The dollar-per-GB needs to come down a lot, still. Optane in DIMM form is also still MIA. I'm extremely skeptical it will live up to the original hype it was put through ("thousands of times faster") but I imagine it will be able to outclass many competitors.
- bo1024 9y agoThis claim doesn't make sense to me. I think game loading times are primarily limited by the hard drive. It's about loading data from there into RAM (and/or GPU RAM). The hard drive would be the bottleneck.
- dmix 9y agoOptane is a brand that covers both the harddrive and RAM. For non-SSD HDDs it will provide a cache on commonly accessed files, providing a big boost to disk HDs and a minor boost to SSDs. Which is why I asked if people have noticed an improvement in practice with either the HD or RAM options, as I assume most people here have SSDs.
- slipwalker 9y agoSo, are those chips immune to the Spectre and meltdown already ?...
- nfriedly 9y agoNope. It's basically the same design that they already had, just with the clock speeds and TDP's moved around a bit.
- mmphosis 9y agoand Intel ME has been removed from those chips already ?...
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- jotm 9y agoAre there any real attacks on consumer/prosumer machines using Spectre/Meltdown already?
- bob_theslob646 9y agoI just hope the do extensive testing on cooling these machines. As a former user of laptop workstations, there is nothing worse than having to always lug around a bulky UPC as well as worry about overheating. The other reason I could see them doing this is maybe related to wanting to push people to use more graphic related applications (3D rendering), but even that is slowly going to cloud.
- mnw21cam 9y agoThat web site is extremely heavy. I hate to think how much Javascript it's trying to run in the background.
- k_sze 9y agoYes, but no Vega. :(
- einrealist 9y agoAccidently dropped my gaming laptop during the weekend. Guess I will buy a new one. The Gigabyte Aero 15X v8 looks promising. So this is a nice coincidence. The only issue is the missing Spectre / Meltdown silicon fixes. And even when they are available, its probably pure luck to get a model having it. :(
- jumelles 9y agoI miss the old processor wars; is this a reboot?
- chx 9y agoWTF. The Core i7-8700T is a desktop CPU with 6 / 12 cores/threads at 2.4-4.0 GHz at 35 W for 303 dollars. The i7-8750H has the amount of cores and thread it is rated at 2.2-4.2 GHZ. But it's 45 W and 395 dollars. That's a lot of money and heat to pay for a paltry 5% speedup at the very top -- and let's not forget the non Turbo speed is 8% lower.
- thesausageking 9y agoGhz range != performance. Among other differences, the i7-8700T only has turbo on one core.
- chx 9y agoAt least this article doesn't say anything about that. In fact, it presumes all cores have turbo (which would make sense): At the peak turbo of 4.0 GHz, or for all-cores somewhere in the middle (again, Intel won’t specify), the power will obviously be higher. Later they do some "sleuthing" to quote them and come up with this chart which again indicates turbo across all cores: https://images.anandtech.com/doci/12607/Turbos.png https://images.anandtech.com/doci/12607/Turbos.png
- jtl999 9y agoHow's the TDP?
- mark-r 9y agoIntel is dead to me until they support ECC memory in their desktop processors like Ryzen does.
- tasty_freeze 9y agoDoes this generation add any hardware support to mitigate/eliminate meltdown and/or spectre?
- lwhalen 9y agoGreat. Can we get > 16GB RAM while we're at it? :-)