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How many will they ship, though? And at what price? Interesting how only when AMD starts shipping something competitive with their chips, does Intel roll up i

How many will they ship, though? And at what price? Interesting how only when AMD starts shipping something competitive with their chips, does Intel roll up its sleeves and get busy on breaking new ground. There almost seems to be a correlation ...!

hvidgaard 8y ago
When AMD released a competitive GPU, nVidia released a new GPU with chips that had been sitting in a warehouse for more than 6 months. Competition is necessary.
- bhouston 8y ago
  Yeah, Volta should have been ready to ship in volume like 6 months ago. Now I am not completely sure they are just sitting in a warehouse though. I understand Volta is currently in mass production and will launch around July/August.
  - twtw 8y ago
    All the current rumors and info I've seen indicate that Volta will never be in a consumer graphics card, so it has already launched (tesla v100 was available ~July 2017).
    - bhouston 8y ago
      I was referring to Volta launching in mainstream GeForce GPU line. I understand it is launching soon.
- twtw 8y ago
  could you specify what generation you are talking about? There have been a lot of GPUs.
- ashleyn 8y ago
  I bought a Sandy Bridge CPU in 2011. 4 cores, 8 threads, 3.0 ghz. Last year I went looking through consumer-class CPUs looking to upgrade. They are more or less all a very unimpressive 4 core, 8 thread, 3.0 ghz. Maybe they have a tiny bit more cache. There is absolutely no reason to upgrade. Progress on consumer-class CPUs this decade has been utterly anemic. The only one I've seriously been wowed by is the Ryzen Threadripper. Now all of a sudden, Intel is readying better CPUs. Entirely coincidental, I'm sure.
  - krylon 8y ago
    > They are more or less all a very unimpressive 4 core, 8 thread, 3.0 ghz. Maybe they have a tiny bit more cache. There is absolutely no reason to upgrade. In a way, that was good thing, though. For the first time in my memory, a five-year-old PC is not a piece of junk I am just too lazy to get rid off, but a machine fully capable running current software (at least after install more RAM and an SSD). (Within reasonable limits, of course, I am not talking about high end games or such.) The fact that CPUs did not get faster (not much, at least) also meant that software could not afford to get slower, which greatly extended the useful lifespans of older machines.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - cdelsolar 8y ago
      Yeah, I'm on my 2013 Macbook Pro right now and it still runs like a dream (within reason). I don't see myself changing it anytime soon.
  - ajross 8y ago
    That 2600K you bought in 2011 was a premium part. The ones you're looking at now are low end. If you look in the same price range you find 6-core Coffee Lake CPUs at 4.4GHz, which has 50% more cache, about 2x the GPU performance, maybe 15% better IPC on typical workloads, and draws about 30% less power under load. No, it's not the mid 90's anymore where we were tripling performance every time we upgraded. There's still progress.
fyi1183 8y ago
Exactly. Keep in mind that AMD is currently selling 32-core chips. They don't go up to that insane frequency, but still. There's plenty of opportunity to shop around if you want really beefy systems, which is a very refreshing state of affairs compared to just two years ago.
- chaosbutters314 8y ago
  The 1950x is 16 cores and 32 threads
  - cthalupa 8y ago
    So? The Epyc 7501, 7601, etc, are all 32 cores and 64 threads.
api 8y ago
Did Moore's law really stagnate as much as we think or do we just have a lazy monopoly?
- PedroBatista 8y ago
  Both.
- Synaesthesia 8y ago
  Moores law held up pretty well. Frequency scaling did not continue as it did in the old days, I mean we had 3ghz back in the P4 days. But performance has certainly improved thanks to better IPC, more cores etc.
  - Joky 8y ago
    The law is about transistors I believe, not about frequency or performance, isn’t it?
    - leetcrew 8y ago
      as originally formulated, yes, but no one really cares about transistor density itself; we care because it correlates well with performance.
    - newman314 8y ago
      Not quite 5ghz. We have P8 based E880Cs running SAP @ 4.95ghz, iirc.
  - chriswarbo 8y ago
    I remember reading about IBM Power chips running at 5GHz years ago (maybe it was https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/07/01/04/1824223/ibms-new-processors-to-exceed-5ghz https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/07/01/04/1824223/ibms-ne... ). Presumably they were too expensive (manufacturing, power, cooling, etc.) since they're not ubiquitous. IIRC the "barrier" to going any higher was the speed of light across the chip: running faster than 5GHz would require the output to be causally independent from the input!
leovailati 8y ago
Interesting, I wonder if it has to do with the marketing side of things rather than development. They cannot develop a CPU in less than 6 months. I think it could just be that they want to have the last word, so people will talk about it for longer.
krylon 8y ago
In Germany, we have a saying: Konkurrenz belebt das Geschäft (roughly: Competition enlivens business). I am just afraid Intel will once more use its deep pockets and questionable business practices to crush AMD just when things were starting to get interesting again. EDIT: Typo
ajross 8y ago
They're already shipping them. 28 core Skylake-SP parts have been available under the Xeon Platinum branding for almost a year now. This is presumably just a consumer paint job on the existing silicon. And yes, they're very expensive: $10k+ per chip.
- ucha 8y ago
  Yes, the Xeon Platinum 8180 had 28 cores clocked at 2.5Ghz with a TDP of 205W. I don't see how they could pull off 5Ghz this year, apart from using LN2...
  - ajross 8y ago
    You've gotten confused about how the numbers interact. The 2.5GHz is a base frequency calibrated to be under the TDP under all operating conditions[1], actual clocks are allowed to be higher (in particular when only a subset of cores are used), but subject to thermal throttling. The chip turbos to 3.8GHz in single core operation. Surely the 5GHz number is likewise a turbo rate. This sounds extraordinarily doable to me. I'd be very shocked if this was anything but an off-the-shelf SKL-SP die with consumer fusing. [1] And given that it's a server part, this calibration is inherently more conservative than you see in desktop stuff.
    - loeg 8y ago
      That Cinebench score reflects a multi-threaded benchmark, which is not a workflow where the CPU would (or should, anyway) turbo a single core. Also, while not AVX-intensive, CB does use some AVX, which usually draws more power (and thus limits clock more) than pure integer or even ordinary FPU computation. Jumping from 3.8 GHz single core turbo to 5 GHz 28-core turbo is a big jump in power.

hvidgaard 8y ago

When AMD released a competitive GPU, nVidia released a new GPU with chips that had been sitting in a warehouse for more than 6 months. Competition is necessary.

bhouston 8y ago
Yeah, Volta should have been ready to ship in volume like 6 months ago. Now I am not completely sure they are just sitting in a warehouse though. I understand Volta is currently in mass production and will launch around July/August.
- twtw 8y ago
  All the current rumors and info I've seen indicate that Volta will never be in a consumer graphics card, so it has already launched (tesla v100 was available ~July 2017).
  - bhouston 8y ago
    I was referring to Volta launching in mainstream GeForce GPU line. I understand it is launching soon.
twtw 8y ago
could you specify what generation you are talking about? There have been a lot of GPUs.
ashleyn 8y ago
I bought a Sandy Bridge CPU in 2011. 4 cores, 8 threads, 3.0 ghz. Last year I went looking through consumer-class CPUs looking to upgrade. They are more or less all a very unimpressive 4 core, 8 thread, 3.0 ghz. Maybe they have a tiny bit more cache. There is absolutely no reason to upgrade. Progress on consumer-class CPUs this decade has been utterly anemic. The only one I've seriously been wowed by is the Ryzen Threadripper. Now all of a sudden, Intel is readying better CPUs. Entirely coincidental, I'm sure.
- krylon 8y ago
  > They are more or less all a very unimpressive 4 core, 8 thread, 3.0 ghz. Maybe they have a tiny bit more cache. There is absolutely no reason to upgrade. In a way, that was good thing, though. For the first time in my memory, a five-year-old PC is not a piece of junk I am just too lazy to get rid off, but a machine fully capable running current software (at least after install more RAM and an SSD). (Within reasonable limits, of course, I am not talking about high end games or such.) The fact that CPUs did not get faster (not much, at least) also meant that software could not afford to get slower, which greatly extended the useful lifespans of older machines.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - cdelsolar 8y ago
    Yeah, I'm on my 2013 Macbook Pro right now and it still runs like a dream (within reason). I don't see myself changing it anytime soon.
- ajross 8y ago
  That 2600K you bought in 2011 was a premium part. The ones you're looking at now are low end. If you look in the same price range you find 6-core Coffee Lake CPUs at 4.4GHz, which has 50% more cache, about 2x the GPU performance, maybe 15% better IPC on typical workloads, and draws about 30% less power under load. No, it's not the mid 90's anymore where we were tripling performance every time we upgraded. There's still progress.

fyi1183 8y ago

Exactly. Keep in mind that AMD is currently selling 32-core chips. They don't go up to that insane frequency, but still. There's plenty of opportunity to shop around if you want really beefy systems, which is a very refreshing state of affairs compared to just two years ago.

chaosbutters314 8y ago
The 1950x is 16 cores and 32 threads
- cthalupa 8y ago
  So? The Epyc 7501, 7601, etc, are all 32 cores and 64 threads.

api 8y ago

Did Moore's law really stagnate as much as we think or do we just have a lazy monopoly?

PedroBatista 8y ago
Both.
Synaesthesia 8y ago
Moores law held up pretty well. Frequency scaling did not continue as it did in the old days, I mean we had 3ghz back in the P4 days. But performance has certainly improved thanks to better IPC, more cores etc.
- Joky 8y ago
  The law is about transistors I believe, not about frequency or performance, isn’t it?
  - leetcrew 8y ago
    as originally formulated, yes, but no one really cares about transistor density itself; we care because it correlates well with performance.
  - newman314 8y ago
    Not quite 5ghz. We have P8 based E880Cs running SAP @ 4.95ghz, iirc.
- chriswarbo 8y ago
  I remember reading about IBM Power chips running at 5GHz years ago (maybe it was https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/07/01/04/1824223/ibms-new-processors-to-exceed-5ghz https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/07/01/04/1824223/ibms-ne... ). Presumably they were too expensive (manufacturing, power, cooling, etc.) since they're not ubiquitous. IIRC the "barrier" to going any higher was the speed of light across the chip: running faster than 5GHz would require the output to be causally independent from the input!

leovailati 8y ago

Interesting, I wonder if it has to do with the marketing side of things rather than development. They cannot develop a CPU in less than 6 months. I think it could just be that they want to have the last word, so people will talk about it for longer.

krylon 8y ago

In Germany, we have a saying: Konkurrenz belebt das Geschäft (roughly: Competition enlivens business). I am just afraid Intel will once more use its deep pockets and questionable business practices to crush AMD just when things were starting to get interesting again. EDIT: Typo

ajross 8y ago

They're already shipping them. 28 core Skylake-SP parts have been available under the Xeon Platinum branding for almost a year now. This is presumably just a consumer paint job on the existing silicon. And yes, they're very expensive: $10k+ per chip.

ucha 8y ago
Yes, the Xeon Platinum 8180 had 28 cores clocked at 2.5Ghz with a TDP of 205W. I don't see how they could pull off 5Ghz this year, apart from using LN2...
- ajross 8y ago
  You've gotten confused about how the numbers interact. The 2.5GHz is a base frequency calibrated to be under the TDP under all operating conditions[1], actual clocks are allowed to be higher (in particular when only a subset of cores are used), but subject to thermal throttling. The chip turbos to 3.8GHz in single core operation. Surely the 5GHz number is likewise a turbo rate. This sounds extraordinarily doable to me. I'd be very shocked if this was anything but an off-the-shelf SKL-SP die with consumer fusing. [1] And given that it's a server part, this calibration is inherently more conservative than you see in desktop stuff.
  - loeg 8y ago
    That Cinebench score reflects a multi-threaded benchmark, which is not a workflow where the CPU would (or should, anyway) turbo a single core. Also, while not AVX-intensive, CB does use some AVX, which usually draws more power (and thus limits clock more) than pure integer or even ordinary FPU computation. Jumping from 3.8 GHz single core turbo to 5 GHz 28-core turbo is a big jump in power.