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"Identical Performance to the Core i9-9900K, At Just Over Half The Power" This looks like trouble for Intel!

by bratao 8y ago

jandrese 8y ago
Yeah, but that's comparing a mid 2019 chip to a chip you can buy today. Intel will probably make some announcement about their chip that's faster than this one right about the time this hits the shelves. It's the neverending rat race for chipmakers.
- zanny 8y ago
  Up to this point Intel has been competing with AMD by dramatically cutting their previously massive margins between what was possible on their tech and what they were milking consumers for with their enthusiast platforms. Intel won't be able to compete with this with another one of their Arizona fabbed 14nm chips. The techs 8 years old now, but they still haven't demonstrated a readiness in anything newer yet. This might be the pants down moment Intel can't bounce back from a few months later.
- fleetfox 8y ago
  It looks like Intel 10nm desktop CPUs are going to be available only in 2020.
- wmf 8y ago
  It's possible that Intel will announce a 10C Comet Lake but then AMD can quickly counter with a 16C Ryzen. Then Intel has no response unless they can cram an 18C -X die into an 115x socket.
- qball 8y ago
  I'm not so sure about that. The Intel playbook has, for the last 8 years, been either "same architecture, same clock speed, less power draw" (remember, Sandy Bridge [2011] and Broadwell [2014] perform within 10% of each other given the same clock speed- a consequence of chasing thin-and-light laptops and tablets) or "same architecture, higher clock speed, more power draw" after Zen hit store shelves. Instructions per clock haven't changed significantly in many years; Intel has just slowly gotten better at hitting higher clocks because smaller transistors pull less power. Overclockers have known for years that 5GHz is about the maximum that Intel's architectures can do under standard conditions (i.e. not liquid nitrogen), and the bottleneck there has primarily been due to heat generation and not processor instability. It hasn't escaped Intel that these kinds of clocks were easily possible- they had special CPUs sold at those maximum speeds for high-frequency trading applications (not sold to the general public), and that fact was being kept in reserve as a strategic advantage against potential competition. But that advantage has already been used up (not that AMD has one at the moment either; Zen and Zen+ have practically zero overclocking headroom on their fastest examples). Intel will need a new architecture to compete, and that's still likely at least a year down the road- and unlike the last time this happened (the Pentium 4 was supposed to reach 5GHz, but capped out at 3.8 for heat and power draw reasons) they don't have another architecture waiting in the wings to save them.
  - kllrnohj 8y ago
    > the Pentium 4 was supposed to reach 5GHz Somewhat minor nit but it was actually supposed to reach 10GHz: https://www.anandtech.com/show/680/6 https://www.anandtech.com/show/680/6 "Realistically speaking, we should be able to see NetBurst based processors reach somewhere between 8 – 10GHz in the next five years before the architecture is replaced yet again. Reaching 2GHz isn’t much of a milestone, however reaching 8 – 10GHz begins to make things much more exciting than they are today. Obviously this 8 – 10GHz clock range would be based on Intel’s 0.07-micron process that is forecasted to debut in 2005. These processors will run at less than 1 volt, 0.85v being the current estimate." And overclockers did actually push that chip all the way to 8GHz with extreme measures. Core 2 then hit the reset button and clock speeds dropped substantially (from 3.8ghz to 3.0ghz) in exchange for huge boosts to IPC. Intel didn't exceed the P4's 3.8GHz clocks until nearly 10 years later with the 4.0ghz i7-4790k (AMD was actually the first to 4 ghz with the AMD FX-4170)

"Identical Performance to the Core i9-9900K, At Just Over Half The Power" This looks like trouble for Intel!

by bratao 8y ago

"Identical Performance to the Core i9-9900K, At Just Over Half The Power" This looks like trouble for Intel!

Yeah, but that's comparing a mid 2019 chip to a chip you can buy today. Intel will probably make some announcement about their chip that's faster than this one right about the time this hits the shelves. It's the neverending rat race for chipmakers.

zanny 8y ago
Up to this point Intel has been competing with AMD by dramatically cutting their previously massive margins between what was possible on their tech and what they were milking consumers for with their enthusiast platforms. Intel won't be able to compete with this with another one of their Arizona fabbed 14nm chips. The techs 8 years old now, but they still haven't demonstrated a readiness in anything newer yet. This might be the pants down moment Intel can't bounce back from a few months later.
fleetfox 8y ago
It looks like Intel 10nm desktop CPUs are going to be available only in 2020.
wmf 8y ago
It's possible that Intel will announce a 10C Comet Lake but then AMD can quickly counter with a 16C Ryzen. Then Intel has no response unless they can cram an 18C -X die into an 115x socket.
qball 8y ago
I'm not so sure about that. The Intel playbook has, for the last 8 years, been either "same architecture, same clock speed, less power draw" (remember, Sandy Bridge [2011] and Broadwell [2014] perform within 10% of each other given the same clock speed- a consequence of chasing thin-and-light laptops and tablets) or "same architecture, higher clock speed, more power draw" after Zen hit store shelves. Instructions per clock haven't changed significantly in many years; Intel has just slowly gotten better at hitting higher clocks because smaller transistors pull less power. Overclockers have known for years that 5GHz is about the maximum that Intel's architectures can do under standard conditions (i.e. not liquid nitrogen), and the bottleneck there has primarily been due to heat generation and not processor instability. It hasn't escaped Intel that these kinds of clocks were easily possible- they had special CPUs sold at those maximum speeds for high-frequency trading applications (not sold to the general public), and that fact was being kept in reserve as a strategic advantage against potential competition. But that advantage has already been used up (not that AMD has one at the moment either; Zen and Zen+ have practically zero overclocking headroom on their fastest examples). Intel will need a new architecture to compete, and that's still likely at least a year down the road- and unlike the last time this happened (the Pentium 4 was supposed to reach 5GHz, but capped out at 3.8 for heat and power draw reasons) they don't have another architecture waiting in the wings to save them.
- kllrnohj 8y ago
  > the Pentium 4 was supposed to reach 5GHz Somewhat minor nit but it was actually supposed to reach 10GHz: https://www.anandtech.com/show/680/6 https://www.anandtech.com/show/680/6 "Realistically speaking, we should be able to see NetBurst based processors reach somewhere between 8 – 10GHz in the next five years before the architecture is replaced yet again. Reaching 2GHz isn’t much of a milestone, however reaching 8 – 10GHz begins to make things much more exciting than they are today. Obviously this 8 – 10GHz clock range would be based on Intel’s 0.07-micron process that is forecasted to debut in 2005. These processors will run at less than 1 volt, 0.85v being the current estimate." And overclockers did actually push that chip all the way to 8GHz with extreme measures. Core 2 then hit the reset button and clock speeds dropped substantially (from 3.8ghz to 3.0ghz) in exchange for huge boosts to IPC. Intel didn't exceed the P4's 3.8GHz clocks until nearly 10 years later with the 4.0ghz i7-4790k (AMD was actually the first to 4 ghz with the AMD FX-4170)