8 ms·

The top Alder Lake desktop CPU has 16-cores, 8P+8E, compared to 8P in the 11-th gen. The E cores get around half the performance of the P cores, so the 8P+8E is

• delusional 4y ago
  It's worth making it explicit that many home computing tasks are highly parrallelizable because the work is actually completely separate programs. If you watch a video while writing a document in word, that's trivially parrallelizable.
  • paulmd 4y ago
    It’s also not very intensive, especially since video decode usually runs on the GPU. (Or it should - browsers are not always very good about this but the tools are there, they just don’t want to pay licensing fees to use them.) I always cringe a bit when people insist they need 6 cores “so they can have discord and Spotify open while they game”. People don’t generally have a very good intuitive sense of just how little cpu time it takes to run those (a lot of times the “at the desktop” measurements are not even with the processor clocked up, it’s running in the lowest active power state), and there is almost always a little cpu headroom due to non-perfect game scaling. Context switching is cheap, your OS is running thousands of threads at any given time, but people don’t have a good intuitive sense of the overhead of context switching either. Playing a video and writing a document is something that can be trivially done on a core2duo era processor, or the modern equivalent of a low-end dual-core nuc with e-cores (atom cores) like a J4005. You don’t even need performance cores for that. The tradeoff Intel is making is that some tasks need performance cores because they can’t really be parallelized all that well, and embarrassingly parallel stuff is more efficient to implement with lots of smaller cores. In principle this is also more power efficient, like big.LITTLE in phones, but Intel actually seems to have fairly poor power scaling - they are space efficient but not all that power efficient. This is also partially due to the fact that the little cores share a core voltage with the big cores - the big cores need higher voltage to clock up and that kills efficiency on the little cores. At that point you may as well clock the little cores up too since they have to share the voltage anyway, and that’s an inefficient way to run them. As Agner Fog mentions, the AVX-512 is also present in silicon yet disabled, which hugely blows up core size for almost no benefit (it’s dark silicon which does have some minor thermal benefits). Alder Lake is in many ways not that well-designed at a high level, but it is magnificently fast on those performance cores and the e-cores would be very nice if they weren’t conjoined awkwardly to the p-cores. Gracemont-based server and atom chips are going to be nifty when they finally arrive. Apple is still way ahead with Icestorm though - those cores are absolutely absurdly tiny for the performance they give. They are 0.5mm2 each iirc, even considering the node shrink that is teeny-tiny, they are half as many transistors as a Zen3 core and almost the same performance (meaning much higher IPC) or something along those lines. Firestorm is neat but Icestorm didn’t get nearly the attention and it is really insanely fast for how few transistors it uses.
    • ByteJockey 4y ago
      > they just don’t want to pay licensing fees to use them Can you blame browser makers for this? When was the last time you saw someone pay for a browser? Pre-2005 Opera?
      • paulmd 4y ago
        Google makes enough money off Chrome and youtube they could afford to pay licensing fees so that end-users have a good experience. Software decoding vs hardware decoding is a massive difference in user experience.
        • ByteJockey 4y ago
          > Google makes enough money off Chrome and youtube Chrome is free and youtube notoriously doesn't make a profit (unless this changed in 2021). Their money comes mostly from search.
    • nicoburns 4y ago
      > Playing a video and writing a document is something that can be trivially done on a core2duo era processor, or the modern equivalent of a low-end dual-core nuc with e-cores (atom cores) like a J4005. You don’t even need performance cores for that. Playing a video and editing a document, sure. But change that to being on a video call and having a few moderately intensive web apps open (say Gmail, Google Docs and some kind of project management software) and your average dual core processor from a few years ago is going to start to struggle.
      • NikolaNovak 4y ago
        I do some work on my ThinkPad t420s. It's about a decade old now. I understand it's anecdotal but fwiw. Note that it's plugged into Ethernet. I do ALL my work on a t25 which is just about 5 years old now. This includes daily calls with dozens of video participants (ms teams and WebEx mostly) while I have chrome and Firefox open with multiple tabs including outlook and Gmail and slack, couple of MS words, couple of PowerPoints, Visio, etc. That's a dual core processor from more than couple of years ago and it's nowhere near capacity with that workload. It does have lots of ram and Ethernet to residential Fibe 1gbps. But CPU just hasn't been an issue and I plan to work on this another 5 years
  • hyperbovine 4y ago
    I should not like to have to read that document.
    • helldritch 4y ago
      That's a fair point, although some people do constantly multitask. I have ADHD and I'm capable of doing work while focussing entirely on two tasks, often I'm looking at one screen where I'm writing code while reading an article on another screen. Sometimes I feel like "reality" is too slow and I've already figured out the code for the unit test (or whatever I'm working on) in my head and I'm impatiently waiting for my hands to catch up while filling in a boilerplate template. I often focus on two things at once because the main work I'm doing isn't stimulating enough. A lot of people question how I'm able to do this without making constant mistakes, but before I started on my medication my brain and the world around me was so incredibly noisy. Not necessarily sound, it's just that everything around me was a distraction. When I'm taking my medication, the distractions don't exist and there's almost so little happening that I find it unsettling. I don't really know how to describe it properly so this probably made little sense. Just imagine you have a really angry baby screaming at you 24/7, it would probably effect your work? Now the baby is suddenly being quiet and you're able to work really effectively, but you got so good at coping with the baby distracting you that now you have all this spare CPU time in your brain which used to be devoted to denoising.
      • seunosewa 4y ago
        Your ADHD medication is performance enhancing.
        • helldritch 4y ago
          Absolutely. But you first have to factor in that my ADHD is performance degrading. As an example: Mirtazapine is an antidepressant used to treat major depressive disorder, but that doesn't mean you can give it to an otherwise emotionally healthy person and it'll give the same effect delta to them. If you put a crutch on a healthy leg, it doesn't suddenly become a better leg. My medication allows me to experience the world without crippling anxiety and constant distraction, it just so happens that 30 years living with those issues means that a large portion of my attention and time was devoted to dealing with them. So, yes, my ADHD medication is performance enhancing, but that's an incredibly reductive way to look at it. That doesn't mean that anyone can take it and perform better, in fact studies of studies have found that the results of stimulative medication for people without ADHD (such as those who are using it to try and improve cognition during studying) can be similarly triggered by placebo effects: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3489818/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3489818/ As it remains unclear whether stimulant medication has the same effect on healthy individuals as for those with ADHD, it is possible that many reported effects of prescription stimulants in healthy individuals may stem from placebo effects. Looby and Earleywine (2011) examined whether placebo effects influence reports of subjective mood and cognitive performance among college students who endorsed several risk factors for prescription stimulant misuse (e.g., low grade point average, fraternity/sorority involvement, binge drinking). Interestingly, participants believed that they had better ability to focus and persevere, particularly for a sustained amount of time, when they expected to receive MPH (Looby and Earleywine 2011). This is similar to circumstances in which participants may engage in nonmedical-stimulant use to study or cram for extended hours. On the other hand, when experimental participants did not expect to receive MPH, their attention appeared disrupted resulting in inconsistent reaction times throughout the CPT. I take my medication because I have a disability. I was diagnosed later in life and have a well tested / carefully controlled history of use with this medication where I'm frequently checked against diagnostic guidelines. In almost every metric of my life the disability had a negative effect, you can see a history of that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28739990#28741432 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28739990#28741432 If my medication is performance enhancing, then literally any antidepressant, antianxiety, anticoagulant, anti-inflammatory, antihistamine, antibiotic, etc., is also performance enhancing by the same thought. What we need to consider is the baseline it lifts you from and the place it takes you to. It's probably worth mentioning that I'm in the UK, not the USA, where access to stimulant medication is a _lot_ stricter and it can be very difficult to get a diagnosis of ADHD. I had to go through several hour long sessions with specialised psychiatrists to receive the diagnosis after spending years being tested for other conditions like Mixed-Anxiety Disorder. An excerpt from my remission notice is here showing the clinically recognised reduction in symptoms, it mentions that the decision was based on both subjective and objective justifications: https://i.imgur.com/RJQCAs6.png https://i.imgur.com/RJQCAs6.png The diagnostic screening questions for the ASRS1.1 are here showing the areas where I subjectively improved: https://add.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/adhd-questionnaire-ASRS111.pdf https://add.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/adhd-questionnair... On a side-note, your comment came across very harshly. It's very easy to make a short, pointed statement like that about a topic you aren't very familiar with, but you should consider how informed your statements actually are - if they're backed in data or long term subjective beliefs. Sometimes, brevity imparts a lot of information in few words, sometimes it just comes across as rude.
  • arinlen 4y ago
    > It's worth making it explicit that many home computing tasks are highly parrallelizable because the work is actually completely separate programs. That's a great point. At any point in time there are already dozens of processes running, of which only a fraction are tied to a GUI. Even GUI apps are currently resorting to launching multiple processes. For example, Firefox announced last year their new site isolation security architecture where they load each site as an independent process. https://hacks.mozilla.org/2021/05/introducing-firefox-new-site-isolation-security-architecture/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2021/05/introducing-firefox-new-si... Also, here's a link to a recent HN discussion on Firefox's recent announcement. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31355857 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31355857
    • mister_tee 4y ago
      possibly chromium-based browsers have had site isolation for about 4 years as well https://security.googleblog.com/2018/07/mitigating-spectre-with-site-isolation.html https://security.googleblog.com/2018/07/mitigating-spectre-w...
  • admax88qqq 4y ago
    That's not highly parallelizable, that's only 2 task. If those two tasks aren't themselves multithreaded (which they arn't if you're doing them in your browser) then you need at most 3 cores. All the other background processes in your browser and OS are not using any significant CPU time, and can all comfortably share a fraction of a single core.
• xmodem 4y ago
  Indeed, I do sometimes wonder what it'd be like if they made the entire processor out of E cores.
  • moonbug 4y ago
    that's the Phi.
  • SirGiggles 4y ago
    I believe Sierra Forrest will be first in the new line of E only CPUs to do just that [1] [1] https://www.servethehome.com/intel-sierra-forest-the-e-core-xeon-intel-needs/ https://www.servethehome.com/intel-sierra-forest-the-e-core-...
  • paulmd 4y ago
    the concept of “e-cores” is a rebranding of Atom. The Atom name is extremely tarnished from the days when it was super slow in-order netbook cores but Intel started seriously revamping the design in 2012-2014 with silvermont and airmont. They have been good for several years now - Goldmont (eg J5005) is between core2quad and Nehalem i5 (non-SMT) level performance despite running lower clocks (ie IPC is higher), and there have been 2 subsequent generations since - but they haven’t been able to escape the stigma of the atom branding until now. Denverton is actually a very interesting platform for the wattage - that’s 16 Goldmont cores in a 32W package (despite being 14nm!) with full RDIMM support and QuickAssist acceleration. And as mentioned there is a new atom-based server platform with newer cores (I think they’re not the Gracemont but actually the next iteration?) coming in the next year or two. https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/intel/cores/denverton https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/intel/cores/denverton If you want something with a lower core count now, look for something with a J3405, J5005, or Tremont-based processor. Intel has some NUCs with those chips and there are also itx-form factor motherboards from other companies like Asrock and gigabyte. Actually a lot of the 2-bay synology NASs come with those chips, I believe it’s the ones ending in J. They have fairly nice video encode/decode support for their price bracket which makes them nice for plex/etc.
    • spijdar 4y ago
• moffkalast 4y ago
  Well it would make some sense to have perhaps 2 or 4 single core speed focused cores for the main process that you're currently working on, and then add as many of the smaller E cores as you can, to handle the hundreds of background processes so that the P cores can run uninterrupted by them. If this works that way in practice is anyone's guess though.
  • sorenjan 4y ago
    I think a single E core can handle all the background processes when they're not doing any real work. I currently have around 250 processes and 3500 threads running on my computer, and the CPU utilization is 1%. It would probably make sense to use an extremely power efficient core that's only used for background services, one core that could be clocked much higher than all the rest for the foreground thread(s), and maybe some combination of E and P cores for the rest of the threads doing actual calculations. But adding lots of simple E cores for parallel work feels a bit like Larrabee. It's clear that we need something in between regular quad core CPUs, and GPUs connected through PCIe. Some kind of parallel compute unit should be standard in pretty much all CPUs (or SoCs) eventually.
    • zozbot234 4y ago
      > It's clear that we need something in between regular quad core CPUs, and GPUs connected through PCIe. Some kind of parallel compute unit should be standard in pretty much all CPUs (or SoCs) eventually. So, an iGPU accessing unified RAM?
• GeekyBear 4y ago
  > What people need to realize is that a P cores takes around 4 times the die area/transistors of an E core, and use probably 3 to 4 times the power of an E core, but performance is only around double that of an E core... (Btw, these ratios are pretty similar as those for the Firestorm/Icestorm cores in Apple's M1.) Apple's strategy with their in house chips has always involved optimizing for performance and power draw, and not so much for die area. They throw execution hardware at the problem and run the clocks slower for power efficiency. For instance, going back to the 2012 A5x: >the A5X is approximately 2x the size of NVIDIA's Tegra 3, and even larger than a dual-core Sandy Bridge desktop CPU While it's technically possible for Apple to have ramped up CPU clocks in pursuit of higher performance, Apple has traditionally been very conservative on CPU clock frequency. Higher clocks require higher voltages (especially on the same process node), which result in an exponential increase in power consumption. https://www.anandtech.com/show/5688/apple-ipad-2012-review/11 https://www.anandtech.com/show/5688/apple-ipad-2012-review/1... Caring less about die area makes sense when you are selling the whole widget and not just the chip itself.