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Intel Announced 8-Core CPUs And Iris Pro Graphics for Desktop Chips

MojoKid (1002251) writes "Intel used the backdrop of the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco to make a handful of interesting announcements that run the gamut from low-power technologies to ultra-high-end desktop chips. In addition to outing a number of upcoming processors—from an Anniversary Edition Pentium to a monster 8-core Haswell-E — Intel also announced a new technology dubbed Ready Mode. Intel's Ready Mode essentially allows a 4th Gen Core processor to enter a low C7 power state, while the OS and other system components remain connected and ready for action. Intel demoed the technology, and along with compatible third party applications and utilities, showed how Ready Mode can allow a mobile device to automatically sync to a PC to download and store photos. The PC could also remain in a low power state and stream media, server up files remotely, or receive VOIP calls. Also, in a move that's sure to get enthusiasts excited, Intel revealed details regarding Haswell-E. Similar to Ivy Bridge-E and Sandy Bridge-E, Haswell-E is the 'extreme' variant of the company's Haswell microarchitecture. Haswell-E Core i7-based processors will be outfitted with up to eight processor cores, which will remain largely unchanged from current Haswell-based chips. However, the new CPU will connect to high-speed DDR4 memory and will be paired to the upcoming Intel X99 chipset. Other details were scarce, but you can bet that Haswell-E will be Intel's fastest desktop processor to date when it arrives sometime in the second half of 2014. Intel also gave a quick nod to their upcoming 14nm Broadwell CPU architecture, a follow-on to Haswell. Broadwell will be the first Intel desktop processor to feature integrated Iris Pro Graphics and will also be compatible with Intel Series 9 chipsets."

173 comments

  1. 8 cores? by chris200x9 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    So they finally caught up to AMD.

    1. Re:8 cores? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      No, they're well ahead of AMD in this regard. AMD's 8 "core" CPUs are actually 4 core CPUs that can process 2 integer instructions at the same time on one core. Much like Intel's current i7s are 4 core CPUs that can process an integer and a floating point instruction at the same time on one core. Basically, AMD is marketing hyper threading as being more cores.

    2. Re:8 cores? by Travis+Mansbridge · · Score: 4, Informative

      While each 2 cores on the AMDs share resources, this is different from hyperthreading, and there are indeed 8 cores. http://www.reddit.com/r/builda...

    3. Re:8 cores? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      They share everything except for the ALU, which is duplicated out. This allows two instructions to get through two different ALUs at once. Similarly, Intel's ALU and FPU share everything except for the actual units, which are separate. This allows two instructions to get through two different units at once. This is exactly the same technology, implemented slightly differently, and it has similar performance effects. Hence why AMD's CPUs end up being slower than Intel's despite having "twice as many cores".

    4. Re:8 cores? by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 2

      Uhhh...no. About the only thing not shared these days in (BD-derived) AMD cores is the FPU.

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    5. Re:8 cores? by guacamole · · Score: 3, Informative

      I believe cache is shared, and is believed to be one of the bottlenecks of the current AMD CPUs.

    6. Re:8 cores? by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 4, Informative

      They share everything except for the ALU, which is duplicated out.

      Actually, in addition to integer execution units, they also don't share instruction decoders, L1 data caches, and integer op schedulers. ;-) They do share L1 instruction cache, L2 cache and the FPU pipeline (which is supplemented by the GPU units in ALUs anyway for FP-heavy applications, though).

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    7. Re:8 cores? by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 1

      Oh, I meant "by the GPU units in APUs", of course...

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    8. Re:8 cores? by cheesybagel · · Score: 1

      The data caches are not shared. Each core has a separate data cache. The decoder is the same so they share the instruction cache. But AMD's instruction caches are 64 KB while Intel uses 32 KB sized instruction caches.

    9. Re:8 cores? by gnasher719 · · Score: 1

      I had a look at www.cpubenchmark.net, and the highest AMD processor with 8 cores is rated about 1 percent higher than the 2.6 GHz quad core processor in a Retina MacBook Pro.

    10. Re:8 cores? by Kjella · · Score: 1

      I believe cache is shared, and is believed to be one of the bottlenecks of the current AMD CPUs.

      By far not the most significant one though, in single threaded tests the i7-4770K beats the FX-8350 by 62% in Cinebench R11.5, 73% in Cinebench R10 and 47% in POV-Ray 3.7RC6 and that's when the AMD core is not competing for resources with its sibling. With turbo the picture is a bit more complex than that but 4 Intel cores already equals 6-7 AMD cores. Then you add in cache contention, shared FPU, overhead of more threads for the last 1-2 cores of difference as in the most ideal benchmarks for AMD they're roughly equal. Except the AMD processor is 125W and using every drop of it, while the Intel is 84W, clearly AMD has some very basic performance issues not due to the core layout. They just run slow and hot no matter how you look at them and it's not getting better. In the words of AMD itself:

      As we move forward, we will continue to strategically transform AMD as we diversify our portfolio and drive a larger percentage of our revenue from the semi custom, ultra low power client, embedded, dense server and professional graphics high growth markets.

      Their CPU/APU division "Computing solutions" is already less than half the revenue and none of the operating income of AMD in Q4, that division's 2013 revenue was down 25% compared to 2012 which was a bad year itself and even their Christmas quarter sales showed a strong downwards trend (722M in Q4 vs 790M in Q3), Maybe AMD will survive as a company but the part of AMD that competes with Intel is clearly shrinking and shrinking fast. There's no significant refreshes of the FX or Opteron line in sight and since they're actively diversifying instead of investing I expect the same will happen to their other chips as well.

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    11. Re:8 cores? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Restricting multi-threaded apps on multi-core processors to a single-thread is one of the stupidest tests I repeatedly keep seeing. Start doing benchmarks with real-world single-threaded programs that people use, not this bogus synthetic test that doesn't represent reality. Same goes for that obsolete benchmark of MP3 encoding. You've got 4 or 8 cores, Einstein. Run 4 or 8 encodes in parallel. And if you're going to claim that you have to pull data from the CD-ROM sequentially, then include the ripping time in the benchmark, because that's reality. If the end result is that CPU time is negligible compared to ripping time, then so be it. Be honest about it instead of misleading people.

      If I'm interested in how a CPU performs in Cinebench, It's because I'm using that app. And there's no way in hell I'm going to kick the app in the groin and limit it to a single core. I want to know how fast that CPU renders a scene, and how much it costs. That's it. I can then work within my budget to determine what I'm going to choose and how much of a time tradeoff I'm willing to take.

    12. Re:8 cores? by Blaskowicz · · Score: 1

      Steamroller (used only in Kaveri) now uses two decoders, as long with the assorted little changes (a good review on a decent tech site will explain it)

    13. Re:8 cores? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      AMD didit!

      /SouthPark

    14. Re:8 cores? by Bing+Tsher+E · · Score: 0, Flamebait

      I thought Macs had Altivec Units in them, and Mac users only used Pentiums to heat their coffee.

      Oh? The buzzword right now is 'Retina'?

    15. Re:8 cores? by epyT-R · · Score: 1

      The whole point is to eliminate or at least minimize external limiters so that the comparison is done on like terms. If they were to stream from the cdrom, the cpus will spend most of their cycles idle. So, typically, they rip a track to disk, run the encode several times, and average. This doesn't mislead anyone but the stupid, as it's a given that ripping takes the majority of time. What the test does suggest is that one chip is better with media transcoding than another, and that workload isn't always tied to ripping audio cds

      The whole point of limiting applications to single threads is to compare per-core performance. This allows a general comparison of architecture performance that can be applied to other, similar applications not tested, and is a much more accurate comparison than running fully threaded and then making assumptions with math.

    16. Re:8 cores? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      8 integer cores, but only 4 of everything else. That's little more than Hyperthreading.

    17. Re:8 cores? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The quad core i7 4900MQ in my Alienware laptop is more powerful than AMD's best eight core, server grade Opteron.

    18. Re:8 cores? by log0n · · Score: 1

      While core to core performance is important, it's equally (maybe less even) important to compare 2/4/6/8 cores. We don't compare GPUs with only 1 raster unit enabled.. or a cpu with X amount of cache disabled so that every CPU is equal in cache..

      We buy for the sum, not for the addend.

    19. Re:8 cores? by guacamole · · Score: 1

      By far not the most significant one though, in single threaded tests the i7-4770K beats the FX-8350 by 62% in Cinebench R11.5, 73% in Cinebench R10 and 47% in POV-Ray 3.7RC6 and that's when the AMD core is not competing for resources with its sibling. With turbo the picture is a bit more complex than that but 4 Intel cores already equals 6-7 AMD cores. Then you add in cache contention, shared FPU, overhead of more threads for the last 1-2 cores of difference as in the most ideal benchmarks for AMD they're roughly equal

      I believe though, the cache design was also blamed for the poor performance of AMD CPUs even in single threaded loads. I heard this could be because, the L2 cache is something like 8-way associative on Intel CPUs but on AMD, it's only 2 or 3 way associative, increasing the possibility that the data you need in cache is constantly overwritten by something else.

      Certainly, I think the poor single-thread performance is that at the core of AMD's problems. AMD CPUs actually do well in benchmarks and applications that are heavily multithreaded, such as handbrake (e.g. the 8-core FX 8350 can slaughter the latest Haswell Core i5s). So sharing some devices between the cores is not as much of the issue as is the poor single threaded performance.

    20. Re:8 cores? by nhat11 · · Score: 1

      Isn't TC's comment more of a joke than something insightful? lol

    21. Re:8 cores? by chris200x9 · · Score: 1

      Yes I was going for a joke, actually the insightful made me wtf a little.

  2. Mac mini by ArcadeMan · · Score: 0

    Is Apple waiting for these new CPUs to release an updated Mac mini? It's been quite 513 days since the last update.

    1. Re:Mac mini by ChunderDownunder · · Score: 1

      I'll wait for the mac nano.

      They could halve the price if they abandoned Intel for their own A7 chip. i.e. iPad internals with 8GB RAM running OS X.

    2. Re:Mac mini by Pope · · Score: 1

      Not gonna happen.

      --
      It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
  3. Needs an better DMI link / more PCI-e lanes by Joe_Dragon · · Score: 1

    The non extreme / severs ones are very limited on PCI-e and even in systems like the MAC pro the pci-e limits / DMI hold it back.

    The mac pro should of had 2 SSD's but due to limits it only has one.

    1. Re:Needs an better DMI link / more PCI-e lanes by Billly+Gates · · Score: 2

      It has a pci express which is several multitudes faster as it is directly on the PCI bus. It is rated for over 700 megs a second.

    2. Re:Needs an better DMI link / more PCI-e lanes by Joe_Dragon · · Score: 1

      number of lanes is to low

    3. Re:Needs an better DMI link / more PCI-e lanes by Blaskowicz · · Score: 1

      The extreme platform as you call it has had relatively affordable quad cores (i7 3830, i7 4820K) and I guess there will be a similar quad core Haswell-E for sale.
      You can go that way if you want a workstation with crap tons of RAM, I/O and PCIe slots.

    4. Re:Needs an better DMI link / more PCI-e lanes by Billly+Gates · · Score: 1

      Is that really true compared to an ata port? It handles graphics cards just fine. Perhaps someone with more knowledge can eleborate on this?

      These cards are just coming out for PC's too and man they are expensive but can promise bandwidth about 1 gig/sec. I think in a few years when this is the norm the mechanical disk will finally die. AHCI will seem slow in comparison.

    5. Re:Needs an better DMI link / more PCI-e lanes by Shinobi · · Score: 1

      He's just bullshitting. He's been spamming the same drivel since at least the Sandy Bridge release, taking no heed to the fact that PCI-E speeds have increased also.

      Hell, a PCI-E 4x slot of the 3.0 spec could handle 4 drives of the type in the Mac Pro he's mentioning, since 3.0 increased transfer capacity per lane to 985MB/s when run at 8GT/s.

      A 16x slot PCI-E 3.0 slot handles stuff like Infiniband 12x(QDR) easily, which is 120Gbit/s...

  4. Only compatible ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ... with thick wallets.

  5. They Both Fudge by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    AMD's 8 "core" CPUs are actually 4 core CPUs that can process 2 integer instructions at the same time on one core.

    Intel calls EMT64 64 bits when it is just 32 bits on each 1/2 of the clock cycle.

    The CPU is dead in the long run. Long live the GPU/APU. Now if we could only code for parallel.

    1. Re:They Both Fudge by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Ehh? Are you implying that intel's desktop chips are not APUs? Last I checked all of them had GPUs built in, and those GPUs were actually pretty competitive with both AMD and nVidia in the power constraints they're operating in.

    2. Re:They Both Fudge by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 1

      Uh, no shared paged memory. No built-in hardware queuing support ("fast-path function calls to GPU"), as far as I'm aware. Perhaps questionable IEE-754 compliance (certainly in case of nVidia). And Intel isn't really interested in competing with AMD's APUs because they're busy trying to sell Xeon Phi for similar workloads.

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    3. Re:They Both Fudge by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      AMD's 8 "core" CPUs are actually 4 core CPUs that can process 2 integer instructions at the same time on one core.

      Intel calls EMT64 64 bits when it is just 32 bits on each 1/2 of the clock cycle.

      The CPU is dead in the long run. Long live the GPU/APU. Now if we could only code for parallel.

      Uhhhh... what? It address more than 32-bits of memory.
      It's clock for clock faster than anything AMD has at pretty much any benchmark.

      This sounds like the fan bois whining about how the Core 2 Quad wasn't a "real" quad core due to having two chips on a single package, but then the "real quad core" Barcelona was quite the disappointment.

      It's a 64-bit chip because it executes a 64-bit instruction set (quite quickly). Maybe in your fantasy land some minute technical detail makes your inferior AMD chip somehow "better", but not in any way that is objectively measurable ("reality").

    4. Re:They Both Fudge by Guy+Harris · · Score: 1

      Intel calls EMT64 64 bits

      Intel hasn't called it EM64T in years. It's now "Intel 64".

      when it is just 32 bits on each 1/2 of the clock cycle.

      Please provide a reliable source for your assertion that all Intel 64 processors have 32-bit data paths internally.

    5. Re:They Both Fudge by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      AMD HSA:
      Integration of Cpu and GPU in Silicon...
      GPU can access CPU Memory...
      Unified Memory for CPU and GPU...
      GPU Context Switching...

    6. Re:They Both Fudge by ppanon · · Score: 1

      It was true for the first generation or two of Intel chips that supported AMD's 64-bit extensions. It hasn't been true for quite a while though.

      --
      Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
    7. Re:They Both Fudge by Guy+Harris · · Score: 1

      It was true for the first generation or two of Intel chips that supported AMD's 64-bit extensions. It hasn't been true for quite a while though.

      So that'd be the 64-bit Pentium 4s (perhaps not surprising, as it was initially a 32-bit microarchitecture, and fully widening it to do 64 bits of arithmetic at the time might've been more work than they wanted to do) and the Core 2 (more surprising, as that microarchitecture was released in 64-bit chips from Day One, but maybe the design work started with a 32-bit chip and the 64-bitness was added at the last minute).

      So I can believe it for the 64-bit Pentium 4s; is there any solid information indicating that it was true of the Core 2 processors?

    8. Re:They Both Fudge by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Don't care. 4 core intel smokes 8 core AMD at the moment. And in the real world, no one gives a fuck whether it is a single core, 4 core, 8 core, or 10 million cores. What counts is how fast it runs the code you want to run on it, and in that respect AMD is dead in the water right now.

    9. Re:They Both Fudge by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Actually, that's exactly what Iris Pro brought –fast shared on-die memory for GPU and CPU.

    10. Re:They Both Fudge by Guy+Harris · · Score: 1

      The first gen Conroe Core 2 chips apparently used a similar design trick. It was after all primarily a return to the Pentium III core with a die shrink and some tweaks to support EMT64. Intel was scrambling to recover from the wasteful detour of the Pentium IV. It might have taken them one more gen before the redesign for full 64-bit ALUs - I don't remember anymore.

      Well, that link looks like a forum of fanboys rather than a forum of experts (for one thing, they appear to be confusing EM64T, the Intel 64-bit x86 instruction set, with the initial implementations; the ISA is true 64-bit, even if the initial implementations don't have 64-bit data paths, just as an IBM System 360/30 was a 32-bit computer even though it had 8-bit data paths internally and did 32-bit arithmetic a byte at a time).

      The first posting linked to an article at chip-architect.com about the 64-bit Pentium 4, and that's the posting that contains the actual analysis of the 64-bit Pentium 4 (as opposed to the shouting on the forum).

      About all the forum posters say about Conroe is "seems to apply since conroe as intel fans will tell you KILLS/rapes/pilleges amd in 32bit, but in 64bit they just shrug and ignore the fact that it dosnt perform as well as conroe 32bit perf would emply."; nobody on the forum appears to have actually looked at the die layout as the guy on chip-architect.com did.

  6. Weird Business Strategy by Stormy+Dragon · · Score: 2

    Other details were scarce, but you can bet that Haswell-E will be Intel's fastest desktop processor to date when it arrives sometime in the second half of 2014. Intel also gave a quick nod to their upcoming 14nm Broadwell CPU architecture, a follow-on to Haswell.

    Does anyone else find it kind of weird that Intel seems to have gotten into a pattern where their supposed top of the line CPUs are perpetually a generation behind their supposed commodity CPUs in terms of technology?

    1. Re:Weird Business Strategy by Amtrak · · Score: 3, Insightful

      This is because these chips are meant for the Server and Workstation market where stability and longevity is more important than bleeding edge tech. As long as they stay the fastest chips you can buy who cares if they are a process node behind. Not the businesses actually buying them. If you want a "Kickass" gaming machine save your money and don't buy an E series Intel.

    2. Re:Weird Business Strategy by rsborg · · Score: 1

      Other details were scarce, but you can bet that Haswell-E will be Intel's fastest desktop processor to date when it arrives sometime in the second half of 2014. Intel also gave a quick nod to their upcoming 14nm Broadwell CPU architecture, a follow-on to Haswell.

      Does anyone else find it kind of weird that Intel seems to have gotten into a pattern where their supposed top of the line CPUs are perpetually a generation behind their supposed commodity CPUs in terms of technology?

      Not at all - the commodity CPU customers can do beta test for the more risk-averse enterprise server CPU customers.

      --
      Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
    3. Re:Weird Business Strategy by Kjella · · Score: 1

      Does anyone else find it kind of weird that Intel seems to have gotten into a pattern where their supposed top of the line CPUs are perpetually a generation behind their supposed commodity CPUs in terms of technology?

      They're not really consumer CPUs, they're a spin-off of Intel's server/workstation CPUs for the enterprise. That market requires a lot of validation and is generally very conservative preferring tested and true technology so it's not unnatural for server chips to lag behind consumer chips by a generation and so the "enthusiast" processors aren't ready until the Xeons are. My guess is that most of them are "damaged goods", server CPUs with ECC, QPI, vPro, TXT or other essential server features broken, but if you pair it with a high end motherboard you can sell it for $1000 to the "money is no subject" segment.

      There's no business reason for Intel to make a CPU just for serving the high end desktop market, sure each chip is very profitable but they don't sell in big volume. If you look at the benchmarks the two extra cores don't help you in games at all, even with dual high-end video cards you're still GPU limited. Sure if you're doing video encoding, 3D rendering or any other task that'll load all six cores fully it's faster. If 64GB (8x8GB) vs 32GB (4x8GB) RAM matters to you then sure. But we're talking very narrow use cases here, even if AMD were able to give them competition I'm quite sure they'd follow the Xeon roadmap anyway. Oh and they are first to adopt DDR4 (since the Xeons do) but I'm sure that's actaully an advantage, my guess is the premiums on non-ECC DDR4 modules will be huge like everything else.

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    4. Re:Weird Business Strategy by petermgreen · · Score: 1

      It makes sense for a couple of reasons

      1: Intel desperately want to stop the portable computing market moving away from laptops and laptop-like tablets towards smartphone-like tablets. To do that they need to get the most power efficient technology possible into ultrabooks and ultrabook-like tablets.
      2: Making a design work properly with 2-4 cores on one chip for laptops and mainstream desktops is a lot simpler than making it work properly with 8+ cores and inter-chip links for a server part (and the high end desktop parts are basically server parts with the inter-chip links disabled and overclocking enabled).

      It is a pain to the high end desktop users who have to choose between a low end platform and a core design that is a generation behind and as such it probablly cuts into intel's high end desktop sales but ultimately those high end desktop users are a small part of the market.

      --
      note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
    5. Re:Weird Business Strategy by triffid_98 · · Score: 1

      Because

      #1. For CPU heavy loads you probably have more than one CPU per board.

      #2. Most people don't use their 1U Rack-Mount Servers to play Crysis and TitanFall, they just need to handle a crap-ton of threads/ram/drives. Therefore having the latest built-in GPU features does nothing useful.

      #3. Stability > Core Speed

    6. Re:Weird Business Strategy by radarskiy · · Score: 2

      The design-side motivation is to alternate architectural changes with process shrinks so that you're not trying to debug both at the same time. Prescott tried that, and look how that turned out.

      The marketing motivation is that the buyer of the commodity part is more price sensitive and the buyer of the performance part is more feature sensitive. You use the shrunk process for commodity parts first due to the increased die per wafer, which give you both greater volume and lower cost per die so that you can still maintain margins at lower price points.

    7. Re:Weird Business Strategy by bloodhawk · · Score: 1

      nothing weird here at all, commodity vs reliability. Stable, tested proven chips generally stay one step behind. consumer commodity chips give them a chance to weed out any problems without placing risks on chip lines that simply MUST work.

    8. Re:Weird Business Strategy by mikael · · Score: 1

      Commodity CPU's can be advanced in small steps every six months, while enterprise CPU's can be advanced in large steps every few years.

      --
      Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
  7. Bout time... by LoRdTAW · · Score: 4, Funny

    Finally! I have been waiting for next gen Iris graphics since like forever!

  8. Pointless by danknight48 · · Score: 1

    8 Cores wont magically make the code threaded.
    We still live in this era of Single threaded applications and games, drives me up the wall.

    64bit applications are still mostly 32bit. It took 10 years, but at least the 4gb memory limit turned some heads.

    1. Re:Pointless by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      There's no reason for most programs to be 64bits. Most programs don't need to address that much RAM nor do they need the additional registers that you get with 64bit processors.

      Now for programs that use massive amounts of RAM or need the additional registers, going 64bit makes sense, but it's silly to suggest that there's something wrong with 32bit programs in general that would be fixed by moving to 64bit.

    2. Re:Pointless by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I just did a ps -e | wc -l and got 245. Maybe most of my processes are only single threaded but since there's 245 of them I'm glad my processor has 8 hardware threads to handle them.

    3. Re: Pointless by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      ASLR

    4. Re:Pointless by Salgat · · Score: 1

      64 bit is advantageous since you're no longer running under the WOW64 emulation layer (all Windows 32 bit programs run under this emulator on 64 bit Windows). The overhead isn't large, but it does exist. There are few reasons not to just run native.

    5. Re:Pointless by lgw · · Score: 2, Insightful

      The few times I'm ever waiting on CPU, it's multi-threaded. Video transcoding, occasionally compiling. I can't remember the last time I heard of a game being CPU bound - that's always GPU-bound these days.

      --
      Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
    6. Re:Pointless by viperidaenz · · Score: 1

      But your memory usage will be lower if all your pointers are 4 bytes instead of 8.

    7. Re:Pointless by UnknownSoldier · · Score: 1

      > We still live in this era of Single threaded games,

      That hasn't been true since the PS3 and Xbox 360 days.

      Yes, a lot of (PC) indie games are single-threaded, but any game that ships on consoles is multi-threaded.

    8. Re:Pointless by Blaskowicz · · Score: 1

      A dual core solves that already. That allows your most CPU hungry process to use 100% of one core (when it does) while your 244 other processes use about 10 to 20% of the other core.

    9. Re:Pointless by Blaskowicz · · Score: 1

      Games are often CPU bound or rather have some significant CPU requiremets, it's just that new graphics cards are always benched on fast CPUs and the "gamers" tend to keep their hardware up to date. If you put a good graphics card on an old, unspectacular CPU your games may run like crap.

    10. Re:Pointless by Blaskowicz · · Score: 1

      A point that I read somewhere is that even though they're multithreaded, they largely have "the rendering thread", "the audio thread", "the physics thread" etc.
      Few games are really well multi-threaded. On the other hand this puts a tab on run-away CPU requirements.

    11. Re:Pointless by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I can't remember the last time I heard of a game being CPU bound - that's always GPU-bound these days.

      Civilization5 when it first was released was terrible. 45-60 seconds between end of turns for gaming rigs 1-2 years old. Google it and look for forums posts from late 2010/early 2011 describing the issue. That aspect of the game was CPU bound due to the scripting engine in use - Lua.

    12. Re:Pointless by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      But your memory usage will be lower if all your pointers are 4 bytes instead of 8.

      So what? 8Gb of ram is quite cheap and you can fit 32Gb+ in a consumer grade desktop system.

    13. Re:Pointless by guacamole · · Score: 1

      There are plenty of specialized applications that use that many cores. Media encoding comes to mind. An average desktop doesn't need these chips, but there are some users more than willing to pay a premium price for this.

    14. Re:Pointless by guacamole · · Score: 1

      Nonetheless, benchmarks show that there are new games that will take advantage of say 8-core CPU. I think it's measurable when you look at 6-core AMD FX vs 8-core AMD FX of the same generation. Nonetheless, a lot of people and magazines do not recommend buying anything more expensive than an unlocked quad-core Haswell i5 ($220-240). Anything faster gets too expensive.

    15. Re:Pointless by Shinobi · · Score: 1

      Anecdote time:

      I used to have a dual core Athlon 64, and had a GF 9800GT, and Crysis had to be run at a really low res, with all graphics at bottom settings, and I always attributed that to the GPU.... Then I upgraded to a i5-2500.... And suddenly I could play Crysis at 1920x1080 and even pull up some of the settings to medium or even high... Because the CPU could suddenly keep the GPU fed...

    16. Re:Pointless by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      > I can't remember the last time I heard of a game being CPU bound

      Try Planetside 2 (it's free to play!) on an AMD processor. Press Ctrl+F (or is it Left_Alt+F?) to bring up the FPS monitor. After a second or three, it'll tell you whether your CPU or your GPU is the current bottleneck. Go get into a big fight and watch as -regardless of graphics settings- your frame rate becomes CPU bound.

      I cannot report on Intel performance, as I don't have one of those machines around to play with.

    17. Re:Pointless by petermgreen · · Score: 2

      Memory is fairly cheap (though if you really want lots of memory in addition to the cost of the memory itself you have to consider the cost of the platform to accomodate that memory) but cache, particulally the lower levels of cache that are closest to the CPU isn't so cheap, if you have a pointer-heavy workload (e.g. data structures that are mostly cross-references implemented using pointers) then you can fit a lot less of your workload in cache with .64-bit pointers.

      For java (which is very pointer heavy) this was so bad that they implemented tricks in the VM so that if the java heap size is below a certain level then "ordinary object pointers" can be stored in 32-bits.

      On linux there is something out there called x32 which aims to combine the advantages of the 64-bit processor mode with the advantages of 32-bit pointers but it's unclear if it will ever catch on.

      you can fit 32Gb+ in a consumer grade desktop system.

      If you had left off the + then you would have been more on the mark. The largest reasonablly available modules of desktop memory are 8GB and the most slots you will find in a mainstream desktop board is 4 (and many boards only have two). If you want to go over 32GB you have to move to the high end desktop platform (and if you want to go over 64GB you have to move to workstation/server platforms).

      --
      note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
    18. Re:Pointless by petermgreen · · Score: 1

      The thing is when you look more closely you find that most of those processes are spending most of their time asleep. So there is little to be gained from more than 2 cores (one for the program you actually care about, one for the background crap) unless the program you actually care about can effectively spread it's work across multiple threads*.

      * There are a lot of processes that have multiple threads but only use one of them at a time to do significant work.

      --
      note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
    19. Re:Pointless by WuphonsReach · · Score: 1

      The thing is when you look more closely you find that most of those processes are spending most of their time asleep. So there is little to be gained from more than 2 cores (one for the program you actually care about, one for the background crap)

      That's a good argument for dual-core over single-core. Buying a single-core CPU is for chumps and has been since 2007. But it is not a very good argument for staying with dual-core over moving up to quad/hex/octo core setups. That argument boils down to cost, and whether paying an extra $50-$75 for the extra two cores is worth it over the life of the machine.

      The fastest dual-core Intel chips right now are 3.5-3.6GHz (Ivy Bridge and Haswell, roughly $150-$160). The fastest quad-core Intel chips are also 3.5-3.6GHz (Ivy Bridge and Haswell, roughly $300). Or you can go with the budget-priced quad-core Intel chips for around $200 and get something with 3.1-3.3GHz clocks.

      That means, by giving up about 10% single-core performance, you gain the ability to spread your work out across four cores instead of just two cores. So as soon as you get into the realm of multi-threaded applications which can use the multiple cores, you gain.

      It's not hard to swamp a dual-core CPU. I do it all the time on my 2007 era Core2 Duo. It's a lot harder to swamp a quad-core CPU enough to make the system unresponsive. And for server work, we need 8/16 core CPUs.

      --
      Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
    20. Re:Pointless by WuphonsReach · · Score: 1

      The few times I'm ever waiting on CPU, it's multi-threaded. Video transcoding, occasionally compiling. I can't remember the last time I heard of a game being CPU bound - that's always GPU-bound these days.

      There are dozens of AAA titles which are CPU bound. Especially multi-player games where the CPU has to keep track of everything so that it can all happen in a deterministic order. Since that can't happen across multiple-threads, your FPS gets limited by the speed of a single core.

      (Planetside 2 is probably the best known example. Even with their OMFG patches last fall to try and make it more multi-threaded, the game performance is still limited by the speed of a single core.)

      --
      Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
    21. Re:Pointless by WuphonsReach · · Score: 1

      Indeed, the sweet spot for CPU prices is about $80-$120 for the "budget" minded, and $150-$250 for the "mid-range". The CPUs at $300+ are where you spend a lot of cash for small improvements in performance over the mid-range CPUs.

      The same price ranges also apply to GPUs. Any GPU in the $80-$120 range can probably handle most games at 720p, going with something in the $180-$220 range gets you a GPU that can handle almost everything at 1080p. Spending $300+ on a GPU is only needed if you are doing a triple-headed setup with multiple 4K resolution monitors.

      You can still build a mid-ranged gaming PC these days for about $1000. That gives you $200 for the CPU, $200 for the GPU, $200 for RAM/motherboard, $100 for the Windows license and $150 for the case/PSU/misc and $150 for SSD.

      It won't be top-of-the-line, but it will last you 3-5 years.

      --
      Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
    22. Re:Pointless by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Web Browsing actually takes advantage of multiple cores these days. You don't see it pegging constantly because most websites are very bursty, with activity mainly on page load and maybe some ajaxy activity down the line, but it is significant.

      Conventional wisdom for a long time was that the network costs overwhelmed everything (I believed that for a time), but these days you get sites where the bulk of the work, even despite heavy browser optimization, occurs after the network activity has finished.

      That's not to say it benefits a lot from 8 cores, so I get I'm a bit off-point, but it is a very common scenario that benefits from > 2 cores.

  9. How about 2 fast cores instead of 8 slow ones? by JoeyRox · · Score: 1

    We've been limping along with ~10% performance increases per chip generation since forever.

    1. Re:How about 2 fast cores instead of 8 slow ones? by Ken_g6 · · Score: 2

      You asked for it, you got it! Though the downside is these two fast cores don't include AVX, AVX2, or a few other instruction sets.

      --
      (T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
    2. Re: How about 2 fast cores instead of 8 slow ones? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      How are increases in speed, "limping?" This year's machine is the fastest you have ever had. Next year is even faster. Limp?

    3. Re: How about 2 fast cores instead of 8 slow ones? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Limping means that the speed upgrades in new processor generations aren't what they used to be. Is that so hard to understand?

    4. Re:How about 2 fast cores instead of 8 slow ones? by Salgat · · Score: 1

      The only reason you saw phenomenal speed increases on single cores in the past was because we were no where near the frequency barrier. Going from 200 to 400MHz was extremely easy compared to 4GHz to 8GHz, which isn't even possible except in exotic conditions.

    5. Re: How about 2 fast cores instead of 8 slow ones? by UnknownSoldier · · Score: 2

      Silicon tops out at ~ 5 GHz.
      Germanium X tops out at ~500 GHz.

      The average consumer doesn't give a rats ass about GHz, which means that you will never see cheap 10 GHz CPUs anytime soon.

      Hell, we're STILL waiting for Knights Corner / Landing 48+ core CPU to ship to the general public.

    6. Re:How about 2 fast cores instead of 8 slow ones? by Hamsterdan · · Score: 1

      This, but AMD with Athlon helped a lot (at 33Mhz a year, we might have 2Ghz CPUs now), Otherwise Intel wouldn't have had have any incentive to push clock speeds that fast. If AMD were kicking them again, I'm pretty sure those exotic conditions wouldn't be such a barrier anymore.

      --
      I've got better things to do tonight than die.
    7. Re:How about 2 fast cores instead of 8 slow ones? by Sloppy · · Score: 2

      Ok, but aside from the n% increase over the n% increase over the n% increase over the n% increase, what has Intel done for us?

      Intel makes the 2 fast core processor right now, today, and it'll cost you a staggering $120 to $150. It's called the Haswell Core i3 and each of its cores is faster than any of the cores in your $5000 machine from 2007. It will run Dwarf Fortress faster than anyone would have imagined back then.

      Of course there's no limit to what you'd like, but if you have a problem with the amazing shit you can buy today, the problem is with you, not the amazing shit.

      --
      As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
    8. Re:How about 2 fast cores instead of 8 slow ones? by dave420 · · Score: 1

      Listen to yourself! AMD are so awesome that they can force Intel to break physical barriers, and make materials do things they simply can not?? AMD might have helped in the past, but you sound insane.

    9. Re:How about 2 fast cores instead of 8 slow ones? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's impossible to break the sound barrier.
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...

      It's impossible to go beyond 1 um.
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...

      It's impossible to go beyond .1 um.
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...

      It's impossible to go faster than 4Ghz
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...

    10. Re:How about 2 fast cores instead of 8 slow ones? by Hamsterdan · · Score: 1

      People are running CPUs much faster than 4Ghz (albeit with really exotic cooling). If they can run a CPU at 8.4 Ghz with sub-zero cooling now, In a couple of years with smaller nodes and perhaps different techniques and materials we will have cpus running in the 5-6Ghz range.

      I remember when people thought breaking 1Ghz was impossible unless helium or nitrogen was used. For a while it was, until new fabrication techniques were used. Now we have multi-Ghz chips that are passively cooled.

      Trust me, we'll get there, we'll find a way...

      --
      I've got better things to do tonight than die.
  10. Re:How to cripple good hardware by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Not true at all. The current generations is excellent, to the point that only nVidia's highest end 750m and above mobile graphics chips are actually faster than it. Each successive iteration of the last 3 has got them step by step closer. It's entirely reasonable to expect that broad well will basically be on a par with the current best mobile chips of AMD and nVidia.

  11. So they finally caught up to Parallax Inc.? by spiritplumber · · Score: 1

    I've been using 8 core chips since 2006... so have most people who use Parallax microcontroller. I still wonder why the Arduino made such a splash since it came out a couple years after the Prop.

    --
    Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
    1. Re:So they finally caught up to Parallax Inc.? by Salgat · · Score: 1

      You have to remember that Intel and AMD work inside a very limited silicon die area. It would be trivial for them to make a 100 core CPU if they wanted, but the performance would drastically go down. It all comes down to core quantity versus core performance (to put things in perspective, even an ancient single core celeron from the early 2000s would outperform a parallax 8 core cpu). As far as why the Arduino made such a splash, that's because Atmel microcontrollers come with heavy peripheral support, heavy documentation, and a fantastic support for hobbyists through their free IDEs. Atmel is a big corporation that still pushes hard for hobbyist adoption.

    2. Re:So they finally caught up to Parallax Inc.? by spiritplumber · · Score: 1

      Thanks, I learned something today!

      --
      Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
  12. What's with the past tense in the headline? by wonkey_monkey · · Score: 1

    Intel Announced 8-Core CPUs And Iris Pro Graphics for Desktop Chips

    Okay, I know that strictly speaking it did happen in the past, but that's not how headlines are usually written.

    --
    systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
  13. Re:Nerdly Business Strategy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    News for the newly-hatched nerd: E = M x server x server. Ergo, must be short on addendium. I suggest you use http://beta.slashdot.com/.

  14. DDR4? by sshir · · Score: 1

    Am I is the only one concerned about amount of RAM?

    I mean, everybody is so excited about DDR4... But do people understand that instead of 8 dimm slots we'll get only 4 (1 dimm per channel instead of 2-3)? So while keeping costs on this side of reasonable, we're getting only half the amount of memory?

    WTF?!!

    1. Re:DDR4? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Enthusiast mobos mostly only have 4 slots anyway. And Intel showed a Haswell-EP system with 3 DIMM slots per channel while they keep saying it's 1 per channel; clearly we haven't gotten the full story.

    2. Re:DDR4? by triffid_98 · · Score: 1

      I mean, everybody is so excited about DDR4... But do people understand that instead of 8 dimm slots we'll get only 4

      No...not everyone. Going from DDR2 to DDR3 netted fractional gains in real world applications and indications are that the same will be true going from DDR3 to DDR4.

      Also plenty of consumer level boards only have 4 DIMM slots now. Which has always been plenty for most people, ever since we moved up from DDR1 boards and their crappy 2GB limit per stick.

    3. Re:DDR4? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Full story: DDR4-LRDIMM

    4. Re:DDR4? by rogermcdodger · · Score: 2

      You'll have 16GB unbuffered DIMMs so you aren't losing anything. With Haswell-EP using LR-DIMMs allows 3 per channel for 768GB per CPU.

    5. Re:DDR4? by petermgreen · · Score: 1

      Enthusiast mobos mostly only have 4 slots anyway.

      Define "Enthusiast mobos", there are plenty of LGA2011 desktop boards with 8 dimm slots.

      And Intel showed a Haswell-EP system with 3 DIMM slots per channel while they keep saying it's 1 per channel; clearly we haven't gotten the full story.

      That's EP not E, it wouldn't surprise me if ddr4 desktop memory only supports 1 dimm per channel while registered ECC DDR4 server memory supports more. Just as with DDR3 the desktop stuff maxed out at two dimms per channel while the server stuff went up to three dimms per channel

      --
      note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
    6. Re:DDR4? by petermgreen · · Score: 1

      So while keeping costs on this side of reasonable, we're getting only half the amount of memory?

      I suspect it will be a pain when the platform first comes out but in time 16GB desktop DDR4 modules will become affordable while I doubt 16GB desktop DDR3 modules ever will (if the boards even support them)

      --
      note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
    7. Re:DDR4? by Rockoon · · Score: 1

      No...not everyone. Going from DDR2 to DDR3 netted fractional gains in real world applications and indications are that the same will be true going from DDR3 to DDR4.

      To put a bullseye on this, its because latencies havent really changed. Its a rare workload that isnt either CPU limited or RAM latency limited, rather than RAM bandwidth limited. DDR4 isnt going to change that.

      --
      "His name was James Damore."
    8. Re:DDR4? by dugancent · · Score: 1

      "Enthusiast mobos" - anything on the front page of Newegg.

      --
      SJWs are the new boogeyman. -Me
    9. Re:DDR4? by Blaskowicz · · Score: 1

      Fun story, AMD supports 16GB unregistered DDR3 DIMMs, but Intel CPUs don't, except the 8-core Atom and presumably Broadwell. If those 16GB DIMMs ever get affordable and readily available, it would probably be in 2015 when there are Broadwell desktops/laptops around.

    10. Re:DDR4? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Not if you are using an APU system.

      AMD's APUs share the memory bandwidth between the CPU and on die GPU, with their push for HSA so as to use that GPU as a coprocessor the memory bandwidth starts becomming a real limiting factor, especialy on the top end APUs.

    11. Re:DDR4? by Shinobi · · Score: 1

      And this is a well-known problem, ever since the SGI O2 with its UMA had the same problem. It had top-of-the-line memory bandwidth for a small desktop workstation at the time at 2.1GiB/s for the system RAM, but in terms of 3D performance etc, it was outperformed by what on paper was inferior predecessors unless the dataset was really large(And then the CPU couldn't keep up instead.....)

      We already see some of the issues with the new Xbox, while the PS4 won't run into the issues quite as badly, due to going with GDDR5

    12. Re:DDR4? by WuphonsReach · · Score: 1

      16GB DDR3 modules are only $165 now, which is roughly the same price as 2x8GB of DDR3.

      --
      Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
    13. Re:DDR4? by petermgreen · · Score: 1

      16GB regsitered ECC DDR3 server modules are only $158 according to newegg but at least on the intel side you need a server board and CPU to use them.

      16GB unregsitered non-ecc desktop DDR3 modules are another matter. Afaict only one specialist manufacturer has announced that they are making them and when I google the part number they list I don't find anywhere actually selling it. Also from what I have read the standard init code that intel gives to bios manufacturers doesn't support 16GB modules and it is unclear whether it will ever be updated to do so.

      Note that regsitered ECC modules can be quad rank while desktop modules are limited to dual rank. So a 16GB server module needs 4Gb chips while a 16GB desktop module needs 8Gb chips. A 32GB server module uses 8Gb chips and costs about $750 according to crucial which IMO gives a clue as to how expensive 16GB desktop modules are likely to be if and when they become available for purchase.

      --
      note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
    14. Re:DDR4? by Bengie · · Score: 1

      Memory bandwidth is only an issue if you need to go out to memory. Because they share the same cache, when the CPU requests data, the GPU gets to make use of the cached data. They've already done benchmarks, the APU doesn't benefit from more bandwidth almost at all. Going from the stock 1866hmz to 2000mhz, gives under 1% performance gain and going to 2166mhz does virtually nothing. That with a memory heavy benchmark.

  15. heard them duck fart underwater before by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Heard those claims for years.

    Then every time I end up with a system with intel gfx they have never delivered.

    1. Re:heard them duck fart underwater before by jones_supa · · Score: 1

      Please describe calmly and accurately what kind of problems have you experienced with Intel HD Graphics hardware. They have stable and accurate DirectX and OpenGL support, run shaders properly, work great on all operating systems, and have good performance per watt. For a PC, right now they are probably the best integrated graphics solution.

  16. Iris Pro is a white elephant by edxwelch · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The eDRAM simply makes the chip way too expensive.
    If you look at the price of i7 core 4770R: $358. It's an i7 but has only has 6 MB of cache (compared to the 8mb of the regular i7 4770). So basically, it's about the same value as a i5-4670K which cost $243. With the price difference you could buy a Radeon R7 260X, which will trash Iris Pro in performance.

    1. Re:Iris Pro is a white elephant by Blaskowicz · · Score: 2

      6 MB L3 plus 128 MB of L4 gets you a faster CPU than 8 MB of L3 alone, actually.

    2. Re:Iris Pro is a white elephant by ArcadeMan · · Score: 1

      And instead of a power-hungry R7 260X room heater, you could get a cool nVidia GTX 750TI.

    3. Re:Iris Pro is a white elephant by edxwelch · · Score: 2

      What does that have to do with it? i5-4670K and i7-4770R have same amount of L1, L2 and L3 cache

    4. Re:Iris Pro is a white elephant by Blaskowicz · · Score: 1

      You brought up the 6MB vs 8MB comparison.

    5. Re:Iris Pro is a white elephant by guacamole · · Score: 1

      Maybe that's why we don't see many PCs with Iris Pro graphics. The OEMs know that comparable dedicated GPUs cost less.

  17. Re:How to cripple good hardware by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Look up Iris Pro on Youtube. There's a few demo videos of systems with an Iris Pro gfx chip. I think it would work very well for most modern games. There's potential for a Steambox and it is running full HD video.

    This definitely isn't the Intel on-board graphics of old. Hopefully Iris Pro will get good 'Nix drivers.

  18. server cpus are more complicated by Chirs · · Score: 1

    The desktop/laptop processors are easy...single socket, relatively small number of cores.

    It takes effort to add the bits to allow the processors to scale to 10/12 cores, huge caches, and multiple sockets. They also use more complicated memory modules, different motherboards, etc.

    Also, large companies are able to get their hands on limited quantities of these cpus well before they're generally available for large-scale ordering to allow their engineers to build products on them and test how they'll behave.

    1. Re:server cpus are more complicated by Austerity+Empowers · · Score: 1

      I would argue it the other way, that achieving high single thread performance is very complicated and requires both more design work as well as better understanding of the given process than is usually available for the initial launch where they're using projected and calculated si characteristics. A year later they have some experience with massive volume production, know to many decimal places what their yield will be, as well as have more time to do custom circuits that high freq CPUs will require.

      Adding more cores and newer "technology" is an architectural challenge, but generally a known quantity in terms of implementation (most of the time).

  19. Only took seven years and 3 process nodes... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The first quad core desktop CPU from Intel was the 65nm Core 2 Q6600 released more than seven years ago. Now that it is possible to fit more than eight times the number of transistors into the same area, Intel throws enthusiasts an astronomically priced bone? How generous.

    1. Re:Only took seven years and 3 process nodes... by viperidaenz · · Score: 1

      They used those 8x more transistors to increase the performance per clock
      I couldn't find any current quad core Haswell CPU's with a 2.4G clock like the Q6600, but an i5 4430 is twice as fast, despite having less cache.
      It's multi-threaded performance is on par with a 2 core G1820 Celeron. The Celeron is must better at single threaded performance and uses half the power, despite having integrated graphics in there too.

      They also moved the memory controller in to the CPU. That takes up space.

  20. So much wrong in this thread... by thesandbender · · Score: 5, Insightful

    AMD's Bulldozer cores have Clustered Integer Core which has two true ALU "cores" and one shared FPU. For integer instructions this is two true cores and not "hyper-threading". For FP instructions this is "hyper-threading" and why Intel has been regularly handing AMD it's arse in all benchmarks that aren't strictly ALU dependent (gaming, rendering, etc). AMD's FPU implementation, clock for clock, is a bit weaker on most instructions as well. And yes, the FPU _is_ shared on AMD processors.

    EMT64 is not "32 bits on each 1/2 of the clock cycle". That doesn't even make any sense. EMT64 is true 64 bit. x86-64 does have 32 bit addressing modes when running on non-64bit operating systems. This is part of the x86-64 standard and hits AMD, Intel and VIA.

    Hardware Queuing Support is part of the Heterogeneous System Architecture open standard and won't even be supported in hardware until the Carizzo APU in 2015. Since this is an open standard, Intel can chose to use it.

    Both architectures have shared caches.

    WTF does nVidia's IEE-754 compliance have to do with Intel vs AMD?

    I'm not an Intel or AMD fanboy, I try to use the right one for the job. I prefer AMD for certain work loads like web servers, file servers, etc because they have the most integer-bang for the buck. If I'm doing anything that involves FP, I'm going to use an Intel Chip. Best graphics solution?... yeah, I'm not even going to go down that hole.

    1. Re:So much wrong in this thread... by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 1

      Hardware Queuing Support is part of the Heterogeneous System Architecture [wikipedia.org] open standard and won't even be supported in hardware until the Carizzo APU in 2015. Since this is an open standard, Intel can chose to use it.

      The first is not a correction of something that was "wrong in this thread" (if I was wrong in the first place - there *is* already HW for it in Kaveri, even though the implementation may change in the future) , and the second is an opinion (I really don't think that Intel will follow suit any time soon on that).

      WTF does nVidia's IEE-754 compliance have to do with Intel vs AMD?

      Well, AMD apparently takes care for the execution units to be completely interchangeable, so that code could executed on one core or the other as necessary with identical results, which is one of the point of the APUs ("use the right core for the job"). From my "perhaps" you can probably infer that I posited that Intel may not take that care because they don't simply have the motivation.

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    2. Re:So much wrong in this thread... by Wizel603 · · Score: 1

      I may be wrong, but I've been led to understand that EMT64 is a typo of EM64T. How true is this?

    3. Re:So much wrong in this thread... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      We do not know.

  21. Three Article links are all the same? by itsybitsy · · Score: 1

    At the time I posted this comment the three links in the article all go to one page, http://hothardware.com/News/In.... Oops. Could /. or the author correct the links assuming two are missing or remove two of them, we really don't need three links all going to the same page. Thanks a bunch.

  22. NO. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    a single core INTEL is more powerful than 2 AMD cores.

    So in other words, they were already ahead, and now they are literally over Twice as fast.

  23. What's a "desktop"? by grumpyman · · Score: 1

    Really.

  24. And the Mac Pro is now lagging again. by LWATCDR · · Score: 1

    Unless they have a refresh of the Pro when the chip launches or soon after the Pro is back to being too expensive for the performance.

    --
    See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
    1. Re:And the Mac Pro is now lagging again. by Billly+Gates · · Score: 2

      The pro has a +10 core if you max it out.

    2. Re:And the Mac Pro is now lagging again. by rjr3 · · Score: 1

      I am typing this on a 2013 Retina 2.7 w/16Gb.
      I did not entirely buy it for the more or less 3% price difference with an HP/Dell.
      I bought it because of everything else it does better and being more integrated than a Windows 7 / Windows 8.x laptop and the 5 to 7 hour battery life.
      Your belief that a Pro is too expensive is not accurate when you compare the 512Gb SSD, 16Gb ram, 802.11 ac, 2 * 10Gb Thunderbolt ports to any other ( who else makes a comparable device ? ) vendors platforms.
      I am a network engineer with multiple 10G network core and edge environments, please tell me who else makes a laptop that I can attach 2 10Gb adapters and do data capture at wire speed ?
      Oh,
            And I want 2K+ graphics on my desktop monitor while at the same time having retina level quality on my laptop.
      any one ?
      No, I couldn't find one either. Pseudo comparable HP Z series laptops have spinning disk, 4 Gb ram, single 1Gb NIC and run $2800. Adding Retina level display to an HP costs $600 and a 512Gb SSD is not even an option - the largest HP SSD is 256Gb.

      Formula F1 cars may be expensive, but for the people who know how to use them correctly - they are worth every penny.

    3. Re:And the Mac Pro is now lagging again. by dave420 · · Score: 1

      Formula 1 cars? Really? Do you have any idea how infantile that makes you sound? :) If we compare computing to motoring, you are just a commuter like the vast majority of people, and nothing more. Get over yourself.

  25. Why? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Integrated Intel graphics are the worst in the industry in terms of performance. This has been the case for many, many years. I simply don't trust Intel on this score after being repeatedly promised "game changing" designs and the result is cr*p, quite frankly.

    If you must have an integrated graphics solution, go with AMD. Their implementation is much superior. If you want the best CPU and the best graphics (again, performance-wise), then get an Intel CPU and pair it with a separate graphics card.

    The Intel graphics solution is adequate for many business PC's, media PC setups, servers and otherwise relatively undemanding graphics computation loads. But I don't believe the Iris hype because, well, 50 times burnt, 51 times shy. Or something like that.

    1. Re:Why? by RightSaidFred99 · · Score: 0

      You are full of outdated rubbish. You don't have to "believe" anything, there are benchmarks out there. You won't beat Iris in terms of power/performance.

    2. Re:Why? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      But Iris is easily smoked in terms of price/performance.

    3. Re:Why? by Khyber · · Score: 2

      "You are full of outdated rubbish."

      Please, GMABooster is already preparing to unlock the underclocked Iris GPU.

      Because this is what Intel does. Use it at max power, show performance, then underclock the shit out of it and ship it off.

      The 950 would have been competitive if it had shipped at its stock 400 MHz (minus not having hardware T&L) instead of the fucked 166MHz the drivers forced at low level.

      --
      Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
    4. Re:Why? by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

      If you must have an integrated graphics solution, go with AMD. Their implementation is much superior.

      Their silicon implementation might be better. Their drivers are still hot canned crap. I have a Foxconn motherboard with onboard video and even with the latest drivers if I actually load them (and not just VGA) then the system just crashes. So I dropped a $10 (after MIR) nVidia card in there and everything is working. Only idiots specify AMD graphics. Its only purpose in years has been to mine bitcoins, and now there are dedicated miners which are more efficinet.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    5. Re:Why? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Mining a SHA coin like bitcoin with a GPU is stupid, GPU is only good for scrypt coins like doge.

  26. Re:How to cripple good hardware by Rockoon · · Score: 1

    Look up Iris Pro on Youtube.

    Look up the price difference between a chip with Iris Pro and a similarly spec'd chip without. How does the Iris Pro compare with a $200+ stand alone GPU?

    ding ding ding .. now you get it .. the Iris Pro is crap, not because it doesnt perform, but because it costs many times what its actually worth.

    --
    "His name was James Damore."
  27. Re:AMD posts go here by cheesybagel · · Score: 1

    Actually I run an AMD processor. So what if it had half the FP power. Most FP intensive applications I use have GPU acceleration. Oh and yeah it was cheaper than an Intel processor with the same integer performance. Heck it was cheaper than an Intel processor with the same FP performance. That's how expensive Intel processors are these days.

    If you got a yourself a PS4 or a Xbox One you are using an AMD processor.

  28. 99% of the population has no need for it! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Modern boxes are so damn fast already, the software is already 20-30 years behind!
    First we need a new, inherently multithreaded parallel language, then we need to get the programming community up to speed with it. Another 8-10 years to get an OS that supports it.............

  29. Re:How to cripple good hardware by RightSaidFred99 · · Score: 1

    Lol, 2001 called, it wants its information back.

  30. What's a "grumpyman"? by viperidaenz · · Score: 3, Funny

    Really.

  31. timing is everything by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Heh, not even a week after building myself a new system....

    1. Re:timing is everything by mister_playboy · · Score: 1

      Our 4770Ks will still have much better performance per dollar than these E-chips.

      I'm not happy to find that we got gimped out of VT-d by buying the current top chip, however. Being able to (possibly) run Windows only in a VM for gaming while using Linux as the host would be awesome.

      --
      Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law ::: Love is the law, love under will
  32. Re:AMD posts go here by Blaskowicz · · Score: 1

    But with AMD you have a higher power bill, need to buy a bigger heatsink, stay clear from lowest end motherboards. It ain't exactly cheaper.

  33. Bull by Blaskowicz · · Score: 1

    No, they're well ahead of AMD in this regard. AMD's 8 "core" CPUs are actually 4 core CPUs that can process 2 integer instructions at the same time on one core. Much like Intel's current i7s are 4 core CPUs that can process an integer and a floating point instruction at the same time on one core. Basically, AMD is marketing hyper threading as being more cores.

    What you describe is superscalar execution, and was the point of the original Pentium. That's Instruction-Level Parallelism not Thread-Level Parallelism. Also the Pentium Pro/Pentium 2 had three FPUs.

    It's lame that this comment is modded insightful, you're making shit up.

  34. Caught up? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    How long has it been since Intel produced a desktop CPU with a process above 22nm? Meanwhile, AMD only managed to get down to 28nm.. pretty soon it will be Intel @ 14nm Vs AMD at 28nm. And just in case you need someone to do the math for you, that means Intel will be able to fit twice as many transistors in half as much space.. It's not like Intel can't put more cores in, their E5 V2 series Xeons have 12 cores + hyperthreading. AMD chips need all 8 cores just to keep up with 4 in a Haswell i7.

  35. Pointless Argument by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    When it comes to CPU advancement, the only race that has ever really mattered is shrinking transistors. In that race Intel isn't just winning, given how far ahead they are, they've already won. Personally I think Intel are holding back, how would AMD respond if Intel suddenly started dumping 10 and 12 core Haswells onto the market at $300-400 each. AMD would be gone within months, and Intel would have no competition in the desktop/laptop market. Of course they wouldn't do that, even though they could, being seen as a bully isn't good PR.

  36. Re:AMD posts go here by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    You always have to buy a bigger heatsink/fan than the stock piece of shit they give you, no matter if it's Intel or AMD. Unless you mind the sound of a turbine kicking in when you load the CPU down.

    Power usage is insignificant unless you're talking about battery life on mobile.

    Not sure what you're hinting at with low end boards. I haven't had a board related problem on Intel or AMD, ever. That includes the old ECS K7S5A I had.

  37. the nsa is proud by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    so now the nsa has a new marketing partner

  38. First hand knowledge by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    It was approximately 2010. I asked about EM64T while participating in a build event at an Intel convention in Chicago. They called corporate and confirmed. The machine that I walked away with used a Mini-ITX board, had an I5 and HD4000 graphics. Perhaps things have changed since then. I have bought both AMD and Intel since.

    1. Re:First hand knowledge by Guy+Harris · · Score: 1

      It was approximately 2010. I asked about EM64T while participating in a build event at an Intel convention in Chicago. They called corporate and confirmed.

      So, in 2010, they'd either be Core 2 (not inconceivable, as per my other reply, if the Core 2 design started out as 32-bit and changed to 64-bit late in the game) or Nehalem (less likely, as by that time I'd expect them to have a design that started out as 64-bit, unless their design pipeline was as deep as Pentium 4's pipeline :-)).

      The machine that I walked away with used a Mini-ITX board, had an I5 and HD4000 graphics. Perhaps things have changed since then.

      I rather suspect they have.

    2. Re:First hand knowledge by TheRaven64 · · Score: 1

      The Core 2 and later were entirely new 64-bit microarchitectures. The Core 1 was the last that began life as a 32-bit design. That said, the integer data paths had been 64 bit since the Pentium. I don't really understand what the grandparent is claiming (you don't do things in half a clock cycle - it's the discrete unit of time within a CPU). I suspect that he's confusing it with the Atom's implementation of SSE, which dispatched one 64-bit operation per cycle, so if you had two SSE operations back to back in the instruction stream there'd be an extra cycle of latency, but you still got the same performance improvement from denser instructions and only got one extra cycle of latency before the result was available. I had a student implement something similar last year, and found that this approach gave a very good ratio of performance to die area used (although on a more modern x86 chip you have a lot of spare transistors to play with, so now it doesn't make much sense to do the saving, and it doesn't help much with power consumption as it means the SSE execution units need to be powered for longer and you need a more complex micro-op path).

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    3. Re:First hand knowledge by smallfries · · Score: 1

      The GP's confusion is probably due to the relationship between throughput and latency. Intel's designs have one cycle of latency for basic arithmetic operations (add, sub, xor etc), but they can despatch multiple operations per cycle. The Core 2 was the last chip that I looked at in detail and from memory it could execute three basic instructions per cycle with a one cycle latency. On benchmarks this looks like 1/3 cycle per 64-bit operation. The previous chip that I looked at from Intel (which was not a Core design so I guess it was a late P4 design) could do two basic instructions with a one cycle latency so it looked like a 1/2 cycle operation. But all of these operations were 64-bit, I've never seen a 64-bit design from Intel that used 32-bit operations internally.

      --
      Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
    4. Re:First hand knowledge by Calinous · · Score: 1

      There was a time (Prescott Pentium 4, or maybe all the Pentium 4 processors) when the ALU was "double pumped" - it worked at twice the frequency of the rest of the system. So, it was on "half a general CPU cycle" or a "full cycle of the ALU).
            But that was quite a long time ago, and more than 3 microprocessor generations had passed.

    5. Re:First hand knowledge by TheRaven64 · · Score: 1

      That doesn't quite make sense as you've described it, because you can still only push one operations in to the ALU or get them out on cycle boundaries relative to the rest of the pipeline. It may run in a different clock domain (modern Intel CPUs have several clock domains for various things) for internally pipelined operations, but that still gives you a best case of starting an operation one cycle and getting the result back the next (and, more plausibly, two later). For multi-cycle operations, like divide or multiply, it would give a noticeable speedup, because the throughput would double (although the latency would remain one cycle), but for single-cycle operations there'd be no detectable difference.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    6. Re:First hand knowledge by Calinous · · Score: 1

      http://www.anandtech.com/show/...
            Written by men much smarter than I

  39. Re:How to cripple good hardware by sexconker · · Score: 1

    Not true at all. The current generations is excellent, to the point that only nVidia's highest end 750m and above mobile graphics chips are actually faster than it. Each successive iteration of the last 3 has got them step by step closer. It's entirely reasonable to expect that broad well will basically be on a par with the current best mobile chips of AMD and nVidia.

    Every generation idiots spout off "Intel graphics are good now!" and every generation it's a complete joke.
    This shit has been going on for 2 fucking decades.

  40. AMD 16 cores, Intel 10 working as 20 frequently by dbIII · · Score: 1

    The opterons are real 16 cores that can do 4 way (4 sockets for 64 cores). However Intel have real 10 core Xeons that may as well be 20 for floating point tasks, and there are 4 socket machines that can take them (and an IBM thing that is effectively 8 sockets). The price difference between those two top ends is utterly enormous but the Intel machines are supposed to perform significantly better - whether it's worth getting one of those or four of the AMD ones for the same price depends on what you want it for, and other costs (eg. per machine licences may make a stupidly expensive machine with a bucketload of cores pay for itself in the first year verses several much cheaper ones).
    To sum up, if you are using a vast number of cores at 100% CPU it's probably not going to be a task doing much with the integer units so you can double the number of full Xeon cores to get the number of threads you can run - thus treat 8 cores as 16 and 10 as 20.

  41. yes, AMD chips perform worse by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Don't pretend that it's about AMD and Intel's chip designs. Intel has more advanced fabs than TSMC or GlobalFoundries.

    AMD was doing better a decade ago for two reasons. IBM had some nice patents on semiconductor technology, and Intel made a huge blunder with Netburst and focusing so much resources on Itanium.

    For the past decade, however, Intel's process advantage has meant AMD is only competitive in laptops and tablets. Behind GlobalFoundries and TSMC are Samsung and a bunch of other companies with a few fabs, that make cell phone chips.

  42. Cx power state by Hal_Porter · · Score: 1

    Does anyone else think that Intel should introduce power states like you get in embedded systems where you have 'rules' like "reprogram the SDRAM controller and bus interface controller. Oh and make sure there's no AHB bus activity (e.g. access to SDRAM or Flash memory) at all when you do it, otherwise the whole system will lock up hard". Traditionally these rules are discovered empirically and are documented by sweary comments in check ins.

    The reason is

    1) It'll keep those bastards at the OEMs on their toes.

    2) More work for consultants working on Bioses, the ACPI standard etc.

    Actually support for ARM systems means this sort of thing will probably happen

    http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/26...

    Supporting Device Tree would require Microsoft to rewrite large parts of Windows, whereas mandating UEFI and ACPI allowed them to reuse most of their existing Windows boot and driver code. As a result, largely at Microsoft's behest, ACPI 5 has grown a range of additional features for describing things like GPIO pinouts and I2C connections. Whatever your weird device layout, you can probably express it via ACPI.

    Obviously doing this sort of thing via ACPI methods adds and additional - and from a consultancy point of view entirely welcome - level of fuck to "reprogram the SDRAM controller and bus interface controller. Oh and make sure there's no AHB bus activity (e.g. access to SDRAM or Flash memory) at all when you do it, otherwise the whole system will lock up hard".

    I.e. if you didn't have ACPI but rather just had a hard coded chipset specific hacks file, you could just have a few lines of assembler to poke the hardware in the right order and stick in in TCM (or if you're in a bad mode cunningly aligned to a cache line). Now with ACPI you're supposed to use AML bytecode which is run by - I shit you not - an interpreter in the OS.

    --
    echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
  43. Re:AMD posts go here by Blaskowicz · · Score: 1

    I was thinking a 15 euro heatsink will do on an Intel, and a 30 euro one on AMD.

    Cheapest motherboards are those around 45 euros or less. Putting a 125 watt FX on that is a very bad idea. The electric load is too big and the CPU may be throttled down. In contrast an Intel mobo will run i5/i7 fine. I agree that low end mobos have great stability otherwise, they have high volume and production is reliable.

    Power use is insignificant if you don't pay for it or shut down/stand by the PC often. Else over the course of three years the AMD system may well cost more.

  44. re: Germanium X by MrL0G1C · · Score: 2

    Make that 798Ghz

    "When we tested the IHP 800 GHz transistor at room temperature during our evaluation, it operated at 417 GHz,"

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

    --
    Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
  45. "Enthusiasts" by DarthVain · · Score: 1

    I don't think the poster knows what hardware "enthusiasts" really mean. No one is looking forward to the "e" EXTREME series CPU. Perhaps some people with more money than brains. Enthusiasts want CHEAP hardware that they can then fiddle with to gain big results. Haswell while a decent CPU only really offered better power efficiency and a few more instruction sets that might be potentially useful in a few years. Not exactly a ringing endorsement.

    This sort of thing costs $1000+ dollars, so unless you are a rich enthusiast and money is no object, then quite pointless.

    To use the Slashdot car analogy, it is comparing a car enthusiast, and Honda creating a race car. The race car costs 5$ million, and unless you are obscenely rich, you aren't going to buy one to run to the grocery store. You might however buy that generation of retail car that uses some of the technology being shown off in the race car, It is that, a showcase of technology, not a reasonable thing, just like the $1000+ dollar video cards, they want to be able to say "see, there we are the best, check this out, now buy our other more reasonably priced chips...". Which if you think about it, means you should probably release the extreme version first dummies.

    1. Re:"Enthusiasts" by petermgreen · · Score: 1

      Which if you think about it, means you should probably release the extreme version first dummies.

      Ever noticed how intel have recently been using misleading part numbers to make it less obvious that their high end parts are a generation behind their mainstream parts?

      --
      note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
  46. opensource drivers, convenient for laptops by Chirs · · Score: 1

    I have one of those "Optimum" laptops with combined Intel graphics and discrete Nvidia graphics. Unfortunately Dell implemented it with all the external monitor ports hooked up to the Nvidia chip, which means that if I want to drive external monitors I need to fire up the power-hungry Nvidia chip even though the integrated graphics could do it perfectly well.

    Also, the Nvidia chip supposedly supports three external monitors, but it actually doesn't work, and the added performance over the integrated graphics is pointless if you're not gaming.

    Finally, throw in the fact that the Intel drivers are open source and actively supported by Intel.

    1. Re:opensource drivers, convenient for laptops by Rockoon · · Score: 1

      ...what does any of that have to do with spending $200 more than you need to?

      You dont seem to get it. The Iris Pro is touted for its performance, but that performance is only enabled by an expensive ram chip bolted to the CPU, and compared to other $200 solutions, completely sucks. The fact that you irrelevantly have some shitty Dell that you stupidly purchased (do you also use AOL to connect to the internet?) doesnt mean anything to anyone.. The Iris Pro isnt made a good choice by your bad choices.

      --
      "His name was James Damore."