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Intel Demos Kaby Lake 7th Gen Core Series Running Overwatch At IDF (hothardware.com)
Reader MojoKid writes: Intel unveiled a number of new product innovations out at IDF last week, but the company also stuck to its core product march by teasing its next gen Core series processor. Kaby Lake is the follow-up product to current, 6th Generation Skylake-based Core processors. With Kaby Lake, Intel is adding native support for USB 3.1 Gen 2, along with a more powerful graphics architecture for improved 3D performance and 4K video processing. Kaby Lake will also bring with it native HDCP 2.2 support and hardware acceleration for HEVC Main10/10-bit and VP9 10-bit video decoding. To drive some of those points home, Intel showed off Overwatch running on a next-gen Dell XPS 13 built around a 7th Gen ULV Core i5 processor, in addition to a HP notebook smoothly playing back 4K HDR video. Kaby Lake 7th Generation Core-based products should start arriving to market in the fall.
HDR HEVC video on 4K is not trivial to process on a very low power CPU. That's where the hardware acceleration comes in as being important.
As a point of reference, my desktop 4770K that's overclocked to 4.7GHz can have problems with playback of 60 Hz 4K HEVC video when in software mode, and that's with a software decoder that's using all available cores too.
With mpv setup properly, my GTX-1080 can show the same videos perfectly smoothly with single-digit CPU usage and the GPU doesn't even really heat up that much either since only a relatively small part of the GPU actually does the video acceleration. The hardware accelerated paths for video decoding are quite important.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
The most pointless, short, useless and under-described "demo" I've ever seen.
I'm not familiar with Overwatch's spec but pretty much they show one short-range view of two static robots turn the corner to walk up some stairs with some skyboxes, then jump back and that's IT. Nothing there performance-related. And we know why. Compared to a real graphics card, it can't compete.
All the other stuff was pretty meh too. Oh look, it's faster than previous generations. Cool. I should hope so otherwise it's pointless trying to sell it.
....the digital revolution is coming to and end.
So Intel's next processor will be 'Swan Lake'?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Too bad, but it was nice while it lasted!
You mean we'll have to start work on optimising our software?
Shit.
The response to the end (or slowdown) of Moore's law vs the ever increasing processing needs, is to go back to the days of pre-bloatware. We need to start writing efficient code again.
OH THE HORROR! Please! Won't someone think of the Ask Toolbar?!?!?!
Except that CPUs have not really needed minimum size transistors for a long time now. They're still needed - Moore's law really helps memory devices, but general random-logic devices like a CPU or GPU don't benefit as much, at least on the processing side.
In fact, the real bottleneck is wiring - there's so much wiring that it's actually what keeps the transistor density low. In fact, in the general logic area, tons of extra transistors are fabbed that aren't hooked up - these are for revisions to the metal layers only (the numerical revisions - e.g., A1, A2, A3, etc) so there's no need to redo masks for the diffusions and all that. There's just so much space between transistors available that you can fab lots of spares.
The vast majority of transistors in a traditional logic device are used for caches and onboard memory - where the wiring is regular and consistent and transistors can be made the absolute smallest and density the highest.
Kaby Lake is Skylake Refresh. No new wafer, just slightly improved clocks, slightly lower prices and a new chipset.
If 8 cores were standard, I think you would see game engines putting a lot of effort into making use of them. I wish the dead silicon of the GPU in my skylake was 2 more cores, it would be more value than a disabled crappy GPU in a high'ish end machine.
The current pricing for a 6 or 8 core CPU is obscene, highway robbery at its worst.
I can't tell if you are serious or not, but their Zen architecture should be dropping soon, and they at least in theory have caught up with the Intel CPUs of a generation or two ago.
If they have a good price point, they might start actually giving Intel some competition, which is good, since Intel has done next to nothing very interesting since the Ivy/Sandy Bridge days.