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Intel Unleashes Its First 8-Core Desktop Processor
- programminggeek 12y agoI really don't keep up on this stuff much, but why is this still Haswell based? Why not just do this on Broadwell?
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- loser777 12y agoIntel has a pattern of releasing variations of microarchitectures with higher core counts after their immediate successors have been announced/launched. Think Sandy Bridge-E after Ivy Bridge, Ivy Bridge-E after Haswell, and now Haswell-E. They probably do this because it's probably to easier to manage the larger die size and greater complexity as the process has matured and yields have improved.
- bryanlarsen 12y agoAlso, these are essentially rebadged Xeon's. Xeon's have higher requirements for maturity, testing, stability, et cetera.
- kyrra 12y agoAnd a lot of the time, many of these CPUs are almost identical to one another. They will take a single CPU and brand it in 10 different ways depending on how it does during manufacturing testing. For a given CPU that comes off the production line, the max frequency it can run at will vary from chip to chip. As well, if there are dead cores on that chip they can just disable them and sell the chip at a lower price (though, intel may not do this; nvidia has in the past with graphics chips).
- dbarlett 12y agoThe "Tick-Tock Model" http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/silicon-innovations/intel-tick-tock-model-general.html http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/silicon-innovations/i...
- AlyssaRowan 12y ago"Extreme Edition" is normally what they've done at the end of a lifecycle. Broadwell's been delayed it appears, due to process difficulties possibly? This may fill the gap... a little.
- Alupis 12y ago> Intel's first client processor supporting 16 computing threads and new DDR4 memory will enable some of the fastest desktop systems ever seen. Not necessarily -- as AMD fans (I'm one) have seen, the entire "more cores is better" is not always true -- it heavily depends on the workload, and frankly, most games and programs are not utilizing these cpu's fully (yet). Now, put something like a 2 x 16 core Opterons in a server and you have yourself quite a powerful virtualization platform. With that said - I'm interested in seeing it's price point and performance compared to AMD's offerings.
- tgb 12y agoPrice point (or at least MSRP) is given in the article: $1000 USD for the 8 core model.
- taneliv 12y agoHow well commonly quoted benchmarks (passmark, geekbench, cinebench etc) measure a processor as a VM host? Obviously single core benchmarks are somewhat representative, but miss things like cache sizes at different levels and hyperthreading. Are there benchmarks that would take those into account or would otherwise be good for planning VM host use case?
- Alupis 12y agoFor VM hosts -- the number of cores (plus their respective resources like cache, etc) are more important than how performant each core is individually. Usually for hosting companies, density is more important than raw performance, making 32 cores in 1 physical host very attractive.
- duskwuff 12y agoAnd where did they unveil this new processor? At Penny Arcade Expo. Times really have changed.
- teddyh 12y agoPAX hasn’t stood for Penny Arcade Expo for some time now.
- taeric 12y agoIs this akin to how IBM doesn't stand for Internation Business Machines? That is, is it no longer the same crew?
- teddyh 12y agoIt is probably mostly the same crew, but the point is that they did the rebranding because they wanted to distance themselves from the Penny Arcade site and comic: “[…] You’ll notice that it is no longer the Penny Arcade Expo. It’s outgrown us and it belongs to the gaming community at large now not just PA fans. Someday I expect to attend a PAX and not even be recognized. […]”¹ Therefore, I believe it is incorrect to say that Intel revealed this product at “Penny Arcade Expo”. 1) http://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2014/01/01/resolutions http://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2014/01/01/resolutions
- taeric 12y agoAh.. I see what you mean. I think the main point of the original poster was more that this is at a gaming convention, though. That is, I doubt many of us make a huge distinction between PAX pre and post the direct affiliation with PA. Edit: Also, thanks for that link. Really nice essay by Gabe that I'm glad to have read now.
- teddyh 12y ago> I think the main point of the original poster was more that this is at a gaming convention, though. And my point was to simply correct the name used; PAX used to stand for Penny Arcade Expo; now it doesn’t, so we shouldn’t call it that. I’m still not sure what all the downvoters think I meant.
- seanalltogether 12y agoAnandtech review: http://anandtech.com/show/8426/the-intel-haswell-e-cpu-review-core-i7-5960x-i7-5930k-i7-5820k-tested http://anandtech.com/show/8426/the-intel-haswell-e-cpu-revie...
- leeoniya 12y agoand the recently discovered errata that cripple TSX instructions. http://www.anandtech.com/show/8376/intel-disables-tsx-instructions-erratum-found-in-haswell-haswelleep-broadwelly http://www.anandtech.com/show/8376/intel-disables-tsx-instru...
- reitzensteinm 12y agoEven the 5960X, the $999 8 core part, has a maximum memory size of 64gb, unchanged since Sandy Bridge E. That's disappointing, because while the CPU will likely remain close to state of the art for quite some time to come, you'll most likely max out the memory on day one and be stung by an inability to upgrade. Of course, this was probably by design, so that they can sell you another, virtually identical 8 core processor in two more years for another $999. http://ark.intel.com/products/82930 http://ark.intel.com/products/82930
- bryanlarsen 12y agoAccording to the AnandTech article, they expect 16GB DIMM's to be certified soon, which would allow 128GB.
- nullc 12y agoConsidering the haswell parts don't support ECC, how many random bitflips per hour are your 128GB of DDR ram going to be taking and how many instances of unrecoverable data loss per year does that translate into on average?
- Xcelerate 12y agoCould someone give me a simple explanation of what exactly hyperthreading does? They tout 16 logical cores and 8 physical cores in this new chip. I've read the Wikipedia page on it, but it gets too technical. I do molecular dynamics simulations with LAMMPS, and I've noticed performance on my laptop is best with 4 cores. Using all 8 "virtual cores" is actually quite a bit slower.
- nullc 12y agoWhat cpu? some of the earlier hyperthreaded systems were notably less effective than the current stuff. The simple explanation is that you have a core with its set of execution resources. Instead of using those resources to satisfy just a single execution context the processor has two execution contexts, which run independently of each other sharing the resources. This can potentially result in large gains when you have a workload which often leaves a execution stalled waiting on ram, though less than you might guess because there are overheads and because modern processors are already able to extract a fair amount of parallelism out of a single thread. It works out less well for software that sees non-trivial overhead when running more threads, or when more threads increase cache pressure too much.
- wmf 12y agoA Haswell core can execute four instructions per cycle, but sometimes a thread doesn't have four instructions that are ready to execute because they're waiting for something (like a cache miss). In that case, SMT allows the processor to use that idle capacity to execute instructions from a different thread.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- raverbashing 12y agoYeah, I suppose that for your case, HT does nothing at best The more CPU-bound and similar (between them) the tasks are, the less HT is going to make a difference It made sense for single-core P4 and Atoms, but for an 8-core processor, the efficacy of HT is debatable.
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- spiritplumber 12y agoAlso, Parallax has just open-sourced theirs! http://www.parallax.com/microcontrollers/propeller-1-open-source http://www.parallax.com/microcontrollers/propeller-1-open-so... 8-core microcontroller in 2006, not bad. They're releasing a better one later this year, so they've opened the verilog design for the current one.
- kayoone 12y ago8 cores yes, but this is about desktop cpus
- electrograv 12y agoThis is awesome, but off topic. Give me a few days to refresh my Verilog, and I can design you a 16 core CPU; this of course says nothing of the quality and performance of that CPU. I don't mean to bash Parallax but to make a point that making an N-core processor is itself not impressive. Making an N-core architecture that performs like this is.
- zapt02 12y agoFinally!
- graycat 12y agoWhy just "client"? Why not use it in a server? What am I missing? Cost per operation? Can get an AMD 8 core processor, 125 Watts, 4.0 GHz clock, for about $180. So, $1000 for an Intel processor with 8 cores with hyper threading stands to be cost effective? In what sense?
- wmf 12y agoThe server version is called Xeon and it's the same chip with ECC uncrippled. One Haswell core is equivalent to two AMD cores. But yeah, AMD is dramatically cheaper than Intel for equivalent performance.
- selectodude 12y agoEquivalent being the key word there. You can get much more performance in a single Intel chip than you can in an AMD, but you're going to pay for it.
- thinkpad20 12y agoThat leads me to a question that I was going to ask: what is it that justifies the massive markup on Intel chips vs AMD? Is it just the name? Is there an advantage in intel performance or power usage? If so, does it really make up for the price? Because as someone considering building a computer from scratch (I haven't in quite a while), that AMD price tag is very appealing.
- tacotime 12y agoI think many people would agree that the price discrepancy does have a lot to do with branding and marketing strategy. Intel is a larger wealthier company and they assumedly pour a lot more money into R&D than AMD. If you go purely by market capitalization, Intel is about 50-60 times larger and AMD. That's not necessarily a fair measure and ignores a lot of variables but it does help shed a little light on the situation. In addition, AMD's business model has them focusing a lot of their attention on niches that intel doesn't seem as interested in. For instance AMD continues to develop new ARM technologies that could provide a very important market edge for them in the future as small "internet of thing" like devices start to emerge and become a part of people's daily life. Here's a decent article on the subject: http://analysisreport.morningstar.com/stock/research?nav=no&ProductCode=mle&t=AMD http://analysisreport.morningstar.com/stock/research?nav=no&...
- coldcode 12y agoHow does this compare to a 3.0GHz 8-core Xeon E5?
- wmf 12y agoAbout 5% faster than a E5 v2.
- rsiqueira 12y agoIntel's disclaimer says at the end of the page: "products do not contain conflict minerals (tin, tantalum, tungsten and/or gold) that directly or indirectly finance or benefit armed groups in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) or adjoining countries."
- qwerta 12y agoThis thing supports 8 DDR4 slots. Finally we are moving beyond 32GB RAM limit.
- fdsary 12y ago> Finally we are moving beyond 32GB RAM limit We sure are living in a sci-fi millennia
- FranOntanaya 12y agoCan't wait to ditch my hard drives and run a RAM Drive only plugged to a portable RTG.
- rythie 12y agoX79 Socket 2011, which this is the successor to already supported 64GB with 8 DIMMs so nothing has changed yet. They've yet to announce a socket 1150 successor, most likely it will have 4 DIMM max., however, I expect 16GB DIMMs to appear in DDR4 soon.
- Zardoz84 12y agoAnd the FX 8120 eight core CPU ??
- fdsary 12y agoTitle Caps And "Unleaches". Intel Unleaches 8-Core Paralel Marketing On News.Ycombinator
- Corrado 12y agoI wonder if Apple will announce anything that uses this processor in the Sep. 9th event? I could possibly see it being used in a refreshed Mac Pro or iMac.
- m_mueller 12y agoThis alongside with two high end NVIDIA chips (Geforce Titan) in a Mac Pro would be insanely good. Not sure whether it's possible thermally though.
- wmf 12y agoHaswell-EP will be used in a Mac Pro refresh, but I would bet against Apple using any preciousss keynote time to discuss such a minor refresh.
- lucb1e 12y agoI'm both excited and not. This is more power in a CPU and that's great progress, but for a desktop? I mean servers, games and graphical applications would be faster but the majority of our waiting time when using a computer is on a single-threaded calculations. As someone who doesn't game a lot and uses GIMP only for the most basic of purposes, I would much rather have an improved dual core CPU that produces less heat in total (compared to 8-cores) and can be clocked higher because of that.
- knweiss 12y agoHaswell-E is Intel's high-end consumer CPU series and there's nothing wrong with that. However, only buy it if you regularly use software that is able to utilize that many cores/threads. The dual-core CPU you are looking for is called the "Pentium Anniversary Edition: Intel Pentium G3258" and was released in July.
- umanwizard 12y agoWell, yeah. This is their very highest-end processor, and costs more than the entire desktop+monitor+peripherals that most people need. Not sure what point you're trying to make. Do you think companies shouldn't continue pushing the envelope of what's possible? Edit: "very highest-end processor" should read "very highest-end PC processor". I'm excluding the workstation-class Xeon.
- wmf 12y agoThe tradeoff between fewer faster cores and more slower cores has been mostly solved by turbo mode. If only a few cores are in use they will turbo to a high frequency and the others will turn off. Unfortunately in practice the turbo isn't very good on Haswell-E.
- higherpurpose 12y agoIntel is getting disrupted by the book (they keep moving upmarket now). The funny thing is they know it. But they can't stop it at this point. So they just go along with it.
- ck2 12y agoI'd still rather have 6ghz 4-core but I guess that isn't going to happen (anytime soon for a reasonable price).
- auvrw 12y agothis is a pretty naive comment, but it's really intended to be totally serious: what's up with cores? like, why do we really need cores? is it really fundametally better architecture to have a RISC sitting at the front of the instruction pipeline to distribute x86 instructions to some internal set (particularly wrt. to power consumption), or do we in fact just have cores in order to increase fab yield [/ootbcomp.com-bootcamping]
- wmf 12y agoAre you proposing a 32-issue processor instead of eight 4-issue cores? One problem with that is that most software doesn't have enough instruction-level parallelism to use such resources. Such a complex processor would also be likely to become bottlenecked on central control structures like the issue window (which can be solved with clustering, but then you're almost back to multicore). But check out EDGE/TRIPS/E2 for some ideas in this area.
- auvrw 12y agoI'm talking about something I don't understand....
- Kompulsa 12y agoWhy didn't they do this sooner? AMD already has an Operton 16-core processor. I'm not saying that AMD is any better, but I thought Intel would have started selling these from long ago, judging based on the pace of the computer industry.
- Kompulsa 12y agoI take that back, I see that Intel has ten-core commercial processors on the market already.
- moon_of_moon 12y agoMore, in fact. http://ark.intel.com/#@ServerProducts http://ark.intel.com/#@ServerProducts But your original point is a valid one: AMD introduced desktop 8 core processors a couple of years ago, while this is intels first 8 core desktop processor.
- tracker1 12y agoOf course HP will now include it in a desktop with half the features disabled, and no option in the BIOS to enable them.
- surak 12y ago5yrs late