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A few months ago Intel pulled a stunt where they showed a 28 core 5GHz CPU, implying it was a production CPU that would ship this year. They failed to mention t

A few months ago Intel pulled a stunt where they showed a 28 core 5GHz CPU, implying it was a production CPU that would ship this year. They failed to mention that it was attached to an industrial compressor to supply the necessary cooling for the overclocked CPU, and that it was a server socket (https://www.anandtech.com/show/12932/intel-confirms-some-details-about-28core-5-ghz-demonstration https://www.anandtech.com/show/12932/intel-confirms-some-det...). Since then, whenever I see a headline with Intel in it, I heavily discount it until I can verify the facts. They’ve damaged my trust, and I suspect many others.

chrisseaton 8y ago
> and that it was a server socket What's wrong with that? High-end workstations often have the same sockets as servers don't they? Did they say it wasn't a server socket?
- cheschire 8y ago
  The answer to your question is, I believe, in the article that grandfather post linked to. "What Platform Did It Run On? Intel did not answer this platform directly, however it was clear that the CPU was aimed at the LGA3647 server-based socket given from our examination of the demo system. It was unclear how Intel was going to promote this as an extreme workstation-type system, however Intel did note that they expect only a select market to be interested in this type of processor: a niche of a niche."
  - chrisseaton 8y ago
    Hmm I don't see whatever you are seeing. It's running on a server socket. That's normal for an extreme workstation, which is what Intel publicly suggested it was for because they said it was for a very select market.
nordsieck 8y ago
Case in point: > chips will support up to 3.84 TB of memory per socket ... due to combining 512 GB Optane DIMMs and 128GB DDR4 DIMMs > ... > in a 6 x Optane and 6 x DDR4 configuration, they will provide 3072 GB of 3D XPoint memory and 768 GB of DDR4 RAM for a total of 3.84 TB of memory Optane DIMMs don't really have the performance characteristics of traditional DRAM. It sounds like the real capacity per socket is 12 x 128GB = 1.53 GB, which is the same capacity as the previous generation. That being said, I'm optimistic about Optane DIMMs - it seems like an interesting performance point in between DRAM and SSDs.
- evfanknitram 8y ago
  Tiny correction: Should be 1.53 TB, not 1.53 GB
  - akmittal 8y ago
    Certainly not tiny, off by 32 bit
    - MertsA 8y ago
      Tiny correction: Should be 10 bits not 32 bits.
    - evfanknitram 8y ago
      I meant tiny as in maybe not even worth pointing out since people will understand it anyway.
    - detaro 8y ago
      only 3 bit diff between the strings
  - ScottBurson 8y ago
    Even tinier correction: it's exactly 1.5 TB (1536/1024).
- nottorp 8y ago
  Yeah, marketing lies. Go AMD go!
  - gameswithgo 8y ago
    AMD is guilty of it as well. "AVX2" -> not really! But yes I do wish them well. Make the avx support real AMD!
    - cmsimike 8y ago
      As far as I know, Ryzen has avx-256, its four 128bit units can join as two 256 bit ones without any penalty. What makes this not real AVX? Because there is not one dedicated 256-bit unit?
montalbano 8y ago
In addition, their (mis)handling of spectre/meltdown PR also eroded trust IMHO.
- mtgx 8y ago
  As someone who has watched every single Intel announcement very closely over the past ~5 years, I can say that Intel's marketing/PR has started to become palpably more misleading every year. And the reason for that is because their chips/products don't improve as much every year, and Intel is becoming more desperate each year as it faces more competition from Arm, and now AMD, too. So it's trying to "make-up the difference" by being more misleading about it. It's not just the competition either, but the fact that Intel needs to make it sound like their next-gen chips "are so much better" than last year, and make you buy the new ones, too. I'll give an analogy. Let's say a year ago Intel's CPU got an IPC boost of 10%. But this year it's only getting a 5% boost. Intel will either increase power consumption of the chip to get that 10% or will increase boost speed while keeping the base clock speed the same or lower it for the next-gen chip, just so it can say "the peak performance is once again +10% for this new generation!". Kaby Lake, Coffee Lake, and whatever Lake is coming next that isn't on 10nm all suffer from this kind of thinking. It's the same kind of thinking that created the whole scandal with the 28-core "5GHz chip". Intel's marketing is all about creating the perception that their chips are significantly better than the last generation. It's why they now have "Xeon Gold", too. At this point I wouldn't trust any of Intel's announcements until they are verified by trustworthy parties (of which there are only a handful, because most don't go deep enough into their reviews to actually spot what Intel has done to their products to mislead customers).
opportune 8y ago
They probably felt pressured to release that because the next gen thread rippers are actually going to approach those specs: 32 core 3.8 (base) GHz as per https://www.techradar.com/news/amd-ryzen-threadripper-2nd-generation https://www.techradar.com/news/amd-ryzen-threadripper-2nd-ge... supposedly coming out in Q3, i.e. soon
- theevilsharpie 8y ago
  Threadripper may come close in core count, but it cannot use registered memory, which means it's limited to 128 GB of RAM (based on the current maximum UDIMM capacities). That's not competitive in the server space.
  - opportune 8y ago
    oops, you're right, good point
  - throwaway2048 8y ago
    EYPC is their server line, which has a 32 core count cpu with RDIMM support.
  - aoeusnth1 8y ago
    Why does threadripper need to be competitive in the server space? Edit: emphasis on threadripper, which is a consumer product.
    - sandworm101 8y ago
      The server market is like Formula One for chip makers. It is where there is enough money to really push the limits of the technology. Competing in such leagues brings institutional knowledge, and bragging rights. Servers is also where you get back-and-forth discussions with customers large enough to be worth listening to. Getting useful feedback from the users of desktop CPUs is difficult and time-consuming. But someone like Facebook or Google, who buy thousands of CPUs, and know how to use them, can give you quick and reliable feedback. They can test prototypes and suggest changes within weeks.
userbinator 8y ago
If there are 42 address bits, there are 42 address bits. Can't really fake something like that, unlike their overclocking experiment.
some_account 8y ago
Because AMD came out with innovation with their incredible Threadripper while Intel was going to keep dishing out about 10% faster cpus per year and maximize profits. They have gotten greedy and lazy without any competition.
gameswithgo 8y ago
that damaged your trust? That seems totally fine to me, if you need 28 cores at 5Ghz you can have it. get a server board and cool it. Years before that they were interfering with compilers and cheating at benchmarks to screw over AMD which was actual, willful, evil deception, but THIS damaged your trust?
- AtlasBarfed 8y ago
  Um, you forgot intimidating suppliers to not use AMD and much more outright antitrust behavior.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
ChuckMcM 8y ago
Well they do feel a bit under siege according to the press so one might expect them to put their best foot forward. Not that I think they should pull shenanigans like that but it is common for companies, especially tech companies, to do this when they perceive they are losing ground to a competitor. As others have pointed out, the addition comes from their support of Optane "dimms" which have much higher densities than DDR4 memory in the same form factor. This is going to give the folks who write schedulers some more variants to play with. First it was per core memory, then it was per socket memory per core, and now it is memory type per socket per core. So you don't want your process running on Core3 with its pages mapped to Optane memory that is attached to the other socket (worst case).

chrisseaton 8y ago

> and that it was a server socket What's wrong with that? High-end workstations often have the same sockets as servers don't they? Did they say it wasn't a server socket?

cheschire 8y ago
The answer to your question is, I believe, in the article that grandfather post linked to. "What Platform Did It Run On? Intel did not answer this platform directly, however it was clear that the CPU was aimed at the LGA3647 server-based socket given from our examination of the demo system. It was unclear how Intel was going to promote this as an extreme workstation-type system, however Intel did note that they expect only a select market to be interested in this type of processor: a niche of a niche."
- chrisseaton 8y ago
  Hmm I don't see whatever you are seeing. It's running on a server socket. That's normal for an extreme workstation, which is what Intel publicly suggested it was for because they said it was for a very select market.

nordsieck 8y ago

Case in point: > chips will support up to 3.84 TB of memory per socket ... due to combining 512 GB Optane DIMMs and 128GB DDR4 DIMMs > ... > in a 6 x Optane and 6 x DDR4 configuration, they will provide 3072 GB of 3D XPoint memory and 768 GB of DDR4 RAM for a total of 3.84 TB of memory Optane DIMMs don't really have the performance characteristics of traditional DRAM. It sounds like the real capacity per socket is 12 x 128GB = 1.53 GB, which is the same capacity as the previous generation. That being said, I'm optimistic about Optane DIMMs - it seems like an interesting performance point in between DRAM and SSDs.

evfanknitram 8y ago
Tiny correction: Should be 1.53 TB, not 1.53 GB
- akmittal 8y ago
  Certainly not tiny, off by 32 bit
  - MertsA 8y ago
    Tiny correction: Should be 10 bits not 32 bits.
  - evfanknitram 8y ago
    I meant tiny as in maybe not even worth pointing out since people will understand it anyway.
  - detaro 8y ago
    only 3 bit diff between the strings
- ScottBurson 8y ago
  Even tinier correction: it's exactly 1.5 TB (1536/1024).
nottorp 8y ago
Yeah, marketing lies. Go AMD go!
- gameswithgo 8y ago
  AMD is guilty of it as well. "AVX2" -> not really! But yes I do wish them well. Make the avx support real AMD!
  - cmsimike 8y ago
    As far as I know, Ryzen has avx-256, its four 128bit units can join as two 256 bit ones without any penalty. What makes this not real AVX? Because there is not one dedicated 256-bit unit?

montalbano 8y ago

In addition, their (mis)handling of spectre/meltdown PR also eroded trust IMHO.

mtgx 8y ago
As someone who has watched every single Intel announcement very closely over the past ~5 years, I can say that Intel's marketing/PR has started to become palpably more misleading every year. And the reason for that is because their chips/products don't improve as much every year, and Intel is becoming more desperate each year as it faces more competition from Arm, and now AMD, too. So it's trying to "make-up the difference" by being more misleading about it. It's not just the competition either, but the fact that Intel needs to make it sound like their next-gen chips "are so much better" than last year, and make you buy the new ones, too. I'll give an analogy. Let's say a year ago Intel's CPU got an IPC boost of 10%. But this year it's only getting a 5% boost. Intel will either increase power consumption of the chip to get that 10% or will increase boost speed while keeping the base clock speed the same or lower it for the next-gen chip, just so it can say "the peak performance is once again +10% for this new generation!". Kaby Lake, Coffee Lake, and whatever Lake is coming next that isn't on 10nm all suffer from this kind of thinking. It's the same kind of thinking that created the whole scandal with the 28-core "5GHz chip". Intel's marketing is all about creating the perception that their chips are significantly better than the last generation. It's why they now have "Xeon Gold", too. At this point I wouldn't trust any of Intel's announcements until they are verified by trustworthy parties (of which there are only a handful, because most don't go deep enough into their reviews to actually spot what Intel has done to their products to mislead customers).

opportune 8y ago

They probably felt pressured to release that because the next gen thread rippers are actually going to approach those specs: 32 core 3.8 (base) GHz as per https://www.techradar.com/news/amd-ryzen-threadripper-2nd-generation https://www.techradar.com/news/amd-ryzen-threadripper-2nd-ge... supposedly coming out in Q3, i.e. soon

theevilsharpie 8y ago
Threadripper may come close in core count, but it cannot use registered memory, which means it's limited to 128 GB of RAM (based on the current maximum UDIMM capacities). That's not competitive in the server space.
- opportune 8y ago
  oops, you're right, good point
- throwaway2048 8y ago
  EYPC is their server line, which has a 32 core count cpu with RDIMM support.
- aoeusnth1 8y ago
  Why does threadripper need to be competitive in the server space? Edit: emphasis on threadripper, which is a consumer product.
  - sandworm101 8y ago
    The server market is like Formula One for chip makers. It is where there is enough money to really push the limits of the technology. Competing in such leagues brings institutional knowledge, and bragging rights. Servers is also where you get back-and-forth discussions with customers large enough to be worth listening to. Getting useful feedback from the users of desktop CPUs is difficult and time-consuming. But someone like Facebook or Google, who buy thousands of CPUs, and know how to use them, can give you quick and reliable feedback. They can test prototypes and suggest changes within weeks.

userbinator 8y ago

If there are 42 address bits, there are 42 address bits. Can't really fake something like that, unlike their overclocking experiment.

some_account 8y ago

Because AMD came out with innovation with their incredible Threadripper while Intel was going to keep dishing out about 10% faster cpus per year and maximize profits. They have gotten greedy and lazy without any competition.

gameswithgo 8y ago

that damaged your trust? That seems totally fine to me, if you need 28 cores at 5Ghz you can have it. get a server board and cool it. Years before that they were interfering with compilers and cheating at benchmarks to screw over AMD which was actual, willful, evil deception, but THIS damaged your trust?

AtlasBarfed 8y ago
Um, you forgot intimidating suppliers to not use AMD and much more outright antitrust behavior.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

ChuckMcM 8y ago

Well they do feel a bit under siege according to the press so one might expect them to put their best foot forward. Not that I think they should pull shenanigans like that but it is common for companies, especially tech companies, to do this when they perceive they are losing ground to a competitor. As others have pointed out, the addition comes from their support of Optane "dimms" which have much higher densities than DDR4 memory in the same form factor. This is going to give the folks who write schedulers some more variants to play with. First it was per core memory, then it was per socket memory per core, and now it is memory type per socket per core. So you don't want your process running on Core3 with its pages mapped to Optane memory that is attached to the other socket (worst case).