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Yet the marketing push for Ice Lake was that even if the CPU cores lost most of their IPC gains to lower clock speeds, the GPU itself was to be a massive improv

Yet the marketing push for Ice Lake was that even if the CPU cores lost most of their IPC gains to lower clock speeds, the GPU itself was to be a massive improvement. I'm looking forward to seeing if the demos were on the Dev Kit hardware, because if that was the performance on a specially binned two year old iPad Pro chip, it's pretty darn impressive.

monocasa 6y ago
It's Tiger Lake that's supposed to see the passable GPU, when they use the same cores as their new discrete GPU. Not that I'm really defending Intel here, they fell behind the curve.
- GeekyBear 6y ago
  Jam tomorrow, but never jam today? With Intel, I've gotten to the point where I'll only believe their marketing spiel after the hardware ships and the claims are confirmed by third party testing. However, they did indeed market Ice Lake as a huge GPU improvement.
  - monocasa 6y ago
    Lol, like I said, Intel is obviously out of the picture. I'm not really defending them, just being as charitable to their side as I can for the sake of argument. But yes, their GPUs are perennially terrible, and their fab side has too many issues these days to rely on being able to ship a leading edge process node at scale. I'm just on the side that a semicustom AMD APU would have made way more sense for the stated reasons of the arch switch, as you would have been able to have all the power/watt and raw GPU perf improvements (if not more) without switching arch from under your users. And the Xbox One is an incredibly secure chip that'll be the first major game console I know of to not be hacked to allow unsigned code during it's lifetime, and that's while running games in kernel mode. I think the real reason for the switch is the fact that catalyst runs iOS apps unmodified on macOS/aarch64. When you look at their 10-K that's where they make their real money, and I suspect that they had a hard conversation about the mac app store not meeting expectations and this is how they intend to get macs on that same gravy train. That has a lot of implications for their incentive structure going forward that doesn't look great for people who want a genreal purpose computer ala Cory Doctorow's "The Coming War on General Computation".
    - GeekyBear 6y ago
      I think the real reason for the switch is the same as the switch away from PPC to Intel. Higher performance per watt and less waste heat. AMD going from an also-ran to highly competitive is certainly impressive. However, it's not "more than double the performance of the competition for less than half the power budget" level impressive. >In the face-off against a Cortex-A55 implementation such as on the Snapdragon 855, the new Thunder cores represent a 2.5-3x performance lead while at the same time using less than half the energy. https://www.anandtech.com/show/14892/the-apple-iphone-11-pro-and-max-review/2 https://www.anandtech.com/show/14892/the-apple-iphone-11-pro... However, that's in the mobile space. Time will tell how well Apple does competing in the laptop/desktop arena.
      - monocasa 6y ago
        > Higher performance per watt and less waste heat. The thing is, I don't really see that in heir designs. You're not going to get "more than double the performance of the competition for less than half the power budget" even when you compare to Intel, and I doubt that you're going to beat AMD. And yes, when you compare to other ARM cores the Thunder does well, but that's not it's competition in the laptop space. Intel and AMD are, and a Thunder core does not do well against a Zen 2 core.
        GeekyBear 6y ago
        Thunder is an ARM "little" core implementation. It's not meant to compete with a full performance core from anyone. It competes against other "little"cores. I'm sure when Intel starts shipping their chips that mix Core and Atom, someone will start comparison testing. As far as performance per watt and less waste heat, you don't even have to wait to see what their 5nm desktop/laptop chips look like, their iPhone chips with a tiny power budget and passive cooling are already competitive with Intel and AMD. >Last year I’ve noted that the A12 was margins off the best desktop CPU cores. This year, the A13 has essentially matched best that AMD and Intel have to offer – in SPECint2006 at least. In SPECfp2006 the A13 is still roughly 15% behind. https://www.anandtech.com/show/14892/the-apple-iphone-11-pro-and-max-review/4 https://www.anandtech.com/show/14892/the-apple-iphone-11-pro...

monocasa 6y ago

It's Tiger Lake that's supposed to see the passable GPU, when they use the same cores as their new discrete GPU. Not that I'm really defending Intel here, they fell behind the curve.

GeekyBear 6y ago
Jam tomorrow, but never jam today? With Intel, I've gotten to the point where I'll only believe their marketing spiel after the hardware ships and the claims are confirmed by third party testing. However, they did indeed market Ice Lake as a huge GPU improvement.
- monocasa 6y ago
  Lol, like I said, Intel is obviously out of the picture. I'm not really defending them, just being as charitable to their side as I can for the sake of argument. But yes, their GPUs are perennially terrible, and their fab side has too many issues these days to rely on being able to ship a leading edge process node at scale. I'm just on the side that a semicustom AMD APU would have made way more sense for the stated reasons of the arch switch, as you would have been able to have all the power/watt and raw GPU perf improvements (if not more) without switching arch from under your users. And the Xbox One is an incredibly secure chip that'll be the first major game console I know of to not be hacked to allow unsigned code during it's lifetime, and that's while running games in kernel mode. I think the real reason for the switch is the fact that catalyst runs iOS apps unmodified on macOS/aarch64. When you look at their 10-K that's where they make their real money, and I suspect that they had a hard conversation about the mac app store not meeting expectations and this is how they intend to get macs on that same gravy train. That has a lot of implications for their incentive structure going forward that doesn't look great for people who want a genreal purpose computer ala Cory Doctorow's "The Coming War on General Computation".
  - GeekyBear 6y ago
    I think the real reason for the switch is the same as the switch away from PPC to Intel. Higher performance per watt and less waste heat. AMD going from an also-ran to highly competitive is certainly impressive. However, it's not "more than double the performance of the competition for less than half the power budget" level impressive. >In the face-off against a Cortex-A55 implementation such as on the Snapdragon 855, the new Thunder cores represent a 2.5-3x performance lead while at the same time using less than half the energy. https://www.anandtech.com/show/14892/the-apple-iphone-11-pro-and-max-review/2 https://www.anandtech.com/show/14892/the-apple-iphone-11-pro... However, that's in the mobile space. Time will tell how well Apple does competing in the laptop/desktop arena.
    - monocasa 6y ago
      > Higher performance per watt and less waste heat. The thing is, I don't really see that in heir designs. You're not going to get "more than double the performance of the competition for less than half the power budget" even when you compare to Intel, and I doubt that you're going to beat AMD. And yes, when you compare to other ARM cores the Thunder does well, but that's not it's competition in the laptop space. Intel and AMD are, and a Thunder core does not do well against a Zen 2 core.
      - GeekyBear 6y ago
        Thunder is an ARM "little" core implementation. It's not meant to compete with a full performance core from anyone. It competes against other "little"cores. I'm sure when Intel starts shipping their chips that mix Core and Atom, someone will start comparison testing. As far as performance per watt and less waste heat, you don't even have to wait to see what their 5nm desktop/laptop chips look like, their iPhone chips with a tiny power budget and passive cooling are already competitive with Intel and AMD. >Last year I’ve noted that the A12 was margins off the best desktop CPU cores. This year, the A13 has essentially matched best that AMD and Intel have to offer – in SPECint2006 at least. In SPECfp2006 the A13 is still roughly 15% behind. https://www.anandtech.com/show/14892/the-apple-iphone-11-pro-and-max-review/4 https://www.anandtech.com/show/14892/the-apple-iphone-11-pro...