Intel Flagship Core i7-6950X Broadwell-E To Offer 10-Cores, 20-Threads, 25MB L3 (hothardware.com)

MojoKid writes: Intel has made a habit of launching enthusiast versions of previous generation processors after it releases a new architecture. As was the case with Intel's Haswell architecture, high-end Broadwell-E variants are expected and it looks like Intel is readying a doozy. Recently revealed details show four new processors under the new HEDT (High-End Desktop) banner for Broadwell, which is one more SKU than Haswell-E brought to the table. The most intriguing of the new chips is the Core i7-6950X, a monster 10-core CPU with Hyper Threading support. That gives the Core i7-6950X 20 threads to play with, along with a whopping 25MB of L3 cache. The caveat is the CPU's clockspeed — it will run at just 3.0GHz (base), so for applications that aren't properly tuned to take full advantage of large core counts and threads, it could potentially trail behind the Core i7-6700K, a quad-core Skylake processor clocked at 3.4GHz (base) to 4GHz (Turbo).

Comments

Re:20 cores DOES matter

[fyngyrz]

I was under the (admittedly vague) impression that was true only if the thread was using floating point.

CPUs that offer more cores and/or threads than they do FPUs is one of the reasons I write a lot of my multi-threaded stuff (image and baseband RF processing) utilizing appropriately scaled integer math.

I have 8 cores with 8 FPUs on my desk, but many of my users are stuck with some of the wheezier I5 variants.

AMD's response?

[Khyber]

Assuming Intel doesn't go Xeon-scale in pricing for this CPU (who am I kidding, of course they will) I wonder how AMD plans to respond to this.

For now, they've got the consoles holding them afloat. And while I am an AMD fan, I see they are rapidly losing out on the desktop space when it comes to performance (despite both companies having rather meager performance gains for the past several years.)

They'd better figure out what the fuck they're doing, and come up with some competing responses, quickly. Hell, I've got ideas for them, all involving that HBM tech.

1. Use a modified version of that HBM tech to stack their CPU cores and load it up with tons of cache memory (for their non-APU line.) And don't forget to drop a process node, for fuck's sake.
2. Use modified HBM tech to create stacked CPU/GPU/RAM/CACHE on the same die (for their APU line.)
3. Use modified HBM to create stacked single-die CrossFire GPUs that don't consume gobs of power (GPU line.)
4. Use modified HBM tech to create a true monolithic SOC package that integrates EVERYTHING, thus eliminating the need for motherboards - at that point and time, it just becomes a breakout board with a socket. They could probably do away with the interposer as well if They were clever enough in the design.

Re: 20 cores DOES matter

[m.dillon]

Actually, parallel builds barely touch the storage subsystem. Everything is basically cached in ram and writes to files wind up being aggregated into relatively small bursts. So the drives are generally almost entirely idle the whole time.

It's almost a pure-cpu exercise and also does a pretty good job testing concurrency within the kernel due to the fork/exec/run/exit load (particularly for Makefile-based builds which use /bin/sh a lot). I've seen fork/exec rates in excess of 5000 forks/sec during poudriere runs, for example.

-Matt

Re: Intel often communicates poorly.

[Fwipp]

"Intel has made a habit of launching enthusiast versions of previous generations processors after it releases it a new architecture."

Re:20 cores DOES matter

[nadaou]

It depends on the task. For double precision FP calculations using MPI multi-processing (e.g. FORTRAN CFD), the extra overhead of the extra cores talking to each other mostly cancel out the gains.

For many many small short-lifetime processes you'll probably do better.