Intel Unveils Full Details of Kaby Lake 7th Gen Core Series Processors (hothardware.com)

Reader MojoKid writes: Intel is readying a new family of processors, based on its next-gen Kaby Lake microarchitecture, that will be the foundation of the company's upcoming 7th Generation Core processors. Although Kaby Lake marks a departure from Intel's "tick-tock" release cadence, there have been some tweaks made to its 14nm manufacturing process (called 14nm+) that have resulted in significant gains in performance, based on clock speed boosts and other optimizations. In addition, Intel has incorporated a new multimedia engine into Kaby Lake that adds hardware acceleration for 4K HEVC 10-bit transcoding and VP9 decoding. Skylake could handle 1080p HEVC transcoding, but it didn't accelerate 4K HEVC 10-bit transcoding or VP9 decode and had to assist with CPU resources. The new multimedia engine gives Kaby Lake the ability to handle up to eight 4Kp30 streams and it can decode HEVC 4Kp60 real-time content at up to 120Mbps. The engine can also now offload 4Kp30 real-time encoding in a dedicated fixed-function engine. Finally, Intel has made some improvements to their Speed Shift technology, which now takes the processor out of low power states to maximum frequency in 15 milliseconds. Clock speed boosts across Core i and Core m 7th gen series processors of 400-500 MHz, in combination with Speed Shift optimizations, result in what Intel claims are 12-9 percent performance gains in the same power envelope as its previous generation Skylake series, and even more power efficient video processing performance.

Comments

HALT

[negRo_slim]

Isn't Cannonlake coming out in the second half of 2017? Why not wait a bit for these to drop in price or make the jump to 10nm if the performance is there.

Re:HALT

[Anonymous Coward]

Copied from the web:

"In March 2016 in a Form 10-K report, Intel announced that it had deprecated the Tick-Tock cycle in favor of a three-step "process-architecture-optimization" model, under which three generations of processors will be produced with a single manufacturing process, adding an extra phase for each with a focus on optimization."

That means, Cannonlake will be process shrink (14nm to 10nm) of Kabylake. Is it worth waiting a year for negligible improvements?

Re:HALT

[MTEK]

Wikipedia says H2 2017 for Cannonlake, but my gut says that's too soon for actual product. 10nm would be nice to have in a laptop, but for the desktop?? If someone requires 4K hardware acceleration, don't most discrete GPUs do that today?

Re:HALT

[Solandri]

Broadwell was originally supposed to be released 2014Q3, but (aside from Core M) was delayed until 2015Q1 for mobile and 2015Q2 for desktop processors due to problems Intel had getting enough yield out of the 14nm process. It was delayed so long that most manufacturers (and Intel for some of their product lines) skipped it entirely and moved straight from Haswell to Skylake which came out 2015Q3.

Despite the extra year Intel has budgeted, I wouldn't count on 10nm being ready by the second half of 2017. We're getting really close to the atomic limits of die shrinking - 5-7 nm is probably the limit. As we get closer to that limit, quantum tunneling effects (basically atoms jumping from one place to another) cause all sorts of problems like power leakage. That was what led to the delays at 14nm (Intel) and 16nm (other fabs). It will probably be worse at 10nm.

Re:HALT

[Anonymous Coward]

14 to 10 is hardly negligible

Re:HALT

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't Cannonlake coming out in the second half of 2017? Why not wait a bit for these to drop in price or make the jump to 10nm if the performance is there.

Ahh, yes... Tomorrow, tomorrow...

If we wait until next year, we will only be a year away from something else even more awesomer!

Or we could just take advantage of the incremental increase that corresponds to our current purchase plans. No one needs these new chips, we passed the point of "good enough" years ago. The improvements are real, but they are not worth waiting for.

Re:HALT

[Anonymous Coward]

For desktop performance it's negligible.

Re:HALT

[lsatenstein]

Copied from the web:

"In March 2016 in a Form 10-K report, Intel announced that it had deprecated the Tick-Tock cycle in favor of a three-step "process-architecture-optimization" model, under which three generations of processors will be produced with a single manufacturing process, adding an extra phase for each with a focus on optimization."

That means, Cannonlake will be process shrink (14nm to 10nm) of Kabylake. Is it worth waiting a year for negligible improvements?

Is it probable that 10nm technology at high (3ghz) clock frequencies is too flaky ? With signal connections / transistors so close to each other. I would have concerns about 10nm technology. In my opinion, it needs a year of being in the field (say for 2019) before I would trust 10nm.

Re:Fuck intel

[Anonymous Coward]

Have another cup of coffee and maybe you'll feel better.

AMD May Nearly Catch Up

[BrendaEM]

It's an interesting time in CISC processors. With fabs having to spend exponential amounts of money for incremental gains in performance and power savings, a smaller company like AMD may be able to make a chip that's 90% as fast, at a much lower price, which I hope it does because it's good for customers on both sides.

Re:AMD May Nearly Catch Up

[BrendaEM]

...And I applaud Intel for supporting VP9.

Re:AMD May Nearly Catch Up

[known_coward_69]

At this point it's Apple and ARM. my samsung and apple devices already do 95% of what i want a computer to do and a lot of times it's a lot more than what my laptops do

Re:AMD May Nearly Catch Up

[Anonymous Coward]

It's an interesting time in CISC processors. With fabs having to spend exponential amounts of money for incremental gains in performance and power savings, a smaller company like AMD may be able to make a chip that's 90% as fast, at a much lower price, which I hope it does because it's good for customers on both sides.

It costs AMD more to make chips because they contract out the manufacturing. That's why Intel makes a profit. It has margin.

Re:AMD May Nearly Catch Up

[Anonymous Coward]

...And I applaud Intel for supporting VP9.

Now if only they would support their older hardware. They seem to be cutting the support cycle shorter and shorter and the only real support software wise seems to be coming on the Linux side.

Re:AMD May Nearly Catch Up

[Anonymous Coward]

If all you do is read websites, emails and code for some other system to compile then sure. If you actually need to do something productive in STEM, then real computers are needed.

Re:AMD May Nearly Catch Up

[K. S. Kyosuke]

and code for some other system to compile then sure

What, still live in the mainframe era? We've had good incremental compilers since the 1970s/80s. I mean, everytime the focus of computing shifted, the newcomers had to learn everything from scratch, but nobody is really preventing you from doing whatever you want. (Well...maybe Apple is. They really don't like compilers on iDevices. So there's that, but that only means that iDevices are not "real computers".)

Re: AMD May Nearly Catch Up

[Anonymous Coward]

Not just in STEM, but the arts as well. Faster, better, more audio and video filters and 3D processing are always welcome. The deeper into a project I can get before needing to pre-render, bake, bounce-down, etc, the better.

Re:AMD May Nearly Catch Up

[Anonymous Coward]

You must not want to do much with a PC then. I find mobile devices frustrating. Web browsing on Android and iOS annoys me so much that I just give up and grab my laptop. I'm at the point where all I use my Android phone for are phone calls and a text here or there. They don't even come close to doing what I want them to. I miss my old Blackberry 8300 to be honest.

Re:AMD May Nearly Catch Up

[unixisc]

It's an interesting time in CISC processors. With fabs having to spend exponential amounts of money for incremental gains in performance and power savings, a smaller company like AMD may be able to make a chip that's 90% as fast, at a much lower price, which I hope it does because it's good for customers on both sides.

But AMD, when it wasn't fabless, did squat in having the state of the art fabs, and once it did let go of its fabs, it didn't make it better either. Intel still has the world's best fabs, and nothing that AMD does comes even close. The reason that the fabs are spending gobs of cash is that they are well past the point of diminishing returns, when shrinks would translate into cost reductions. They no longer do. Once Intel gets to depreciate those fabs, their margins would again improve considerably!

Re:AMD May Nearly Catch Up

[Anonymous Coward]

amd hasn't been able to do '90% as fast' for over a decade... hell, not even 75% within the same power envelope... what makes you think they would be able to do that now? or even anytime in the near or distant future? intel charges more, yes, because they can, amd's failure to compete allows them to.

Re:AMD May Nearly Catch Up

[Anonymous Coward]

How do your Samsung and Apple devices let you work on a 20-inch 4K display with a real full-size keyboard and have several terabytes of storage for $150?

Re: AMD May Nearly Catch Up

[Anonymous Coward]

Cloud storage, USB-C, and bluetooth.

Getting enough FLOPS is an issue, however...

Re:AMD May Nearly Catch Up

[dfghjk]

There are no CISC processors, only CISC instruction sets. That ignorant fanboy feud died back in the 90's. Processor architecture is not driven by instruction set.

Nor are the "interesting times" unique to CISC. All processors have this issue unless they are uncompetitive.

AMD hasn't been competitive in quite a while and there's nothing new there. What has changed is the inherent need for x86 processors at all. Intel's threat is from ARM, not AMD.

Re:AMD May Nearly Catch Up

[blackomegax]

Intel has to fund the overhead of building and rebuilding fabs every year. That shit is expensive as balls. TMSC and the like have lower overhead by having stuck with 28nm for so fucking long and skipping the game to 14/16

Re:AMD May Nearly Catch Up

[Anonymous Coward]

Intel has to fund the overhead of building and rebuilding fabs every year.

That shit is expensive as balls.

TMSC and the like have lower overhead by having stuck with 28nm for so fucking long and skipping the game to 14/16

That's why contracting out manufacturing is more expensive. The cost of the R&D, capital costs and the manufacturing are factored into the cost of the chips.

It seems like a widespread misconception that if you are fabless, you aren't paying for the cost of manufacturing. Intel makes a lot of money because it's lower cost per transistor creates margins that are large enough to cover the costs of R&D and capital investment with plenty left over. Intel's profits are tied to cost effective manufacturing, which they can do because they have the best manufacturing.

When your competitor is selling 14nm chips in volume and you are making 28nm chips in volume, you don't get to charge more per transistor, but the 14nm competitor is making them for a lot less money per transistor. The R&D savings of skipping a generation are small compared to the lost profits and it will catch up with you when you become uncompetitive.

Re:AMD May Nearly Catch Up

[Anonymous Coward]

At this point it's Apple and ARM. my samsung and apple devices already do 95% of what i want a computer to do and a lot of times it's a lot more than what my laptops do...

My mobile devices don't do a tiny fraction of what I want a computer to do. Different folks have different needs. You don't need x86/AMD64 processors? Bully for you. A lot of us do.

Re:AMD May Nearly Catch Up

[Kjella]

Now if only they would support their older hardware. They seem to be cutting the support cycle shorter and shorter and the only real support software wise seems to be coming on the Linux side.

Intel does their part, perhaps you have them confused with Microsoft? They want to terminate Win7, but it is after all a seven year old OS in the extended support phase. The problem here isn't that it's running out of support, it's that I don't want any of their newer products. And I don't really have any right to demand they make the products the way I want them or support age old software because I don't like the new. I suppose I'll eventually have to "upgrade" it to a Wintendo because I don't really give a fuck about Microsoft spying on that and use a different OS for everything else. But it won't be today...

Re:AMD May Nearly Catch Up

[Dead_Smiley]

It's an interesting time in CISC processors. With fabs having to spend exponential amounts of money for incremental gains in performance and power savings, a smaller company like AMD may be able to make a chip that's 90% as fast, at a much lower price, which I hope it does because it's good for customers on both sides.

It would be nice if AMD would catch up. Their biggest problem currently is their massive debt.

Re:AMD May Nearly Catch Up

[ChrisMaple]

There are ultimate limits to a technology, and the closer we are to the limits, the smaller and slower the improvements come. Since Intel's biggest technological edge is their semiconductor process, as their process advantage gets smaller their performance advantage will get smaller also. When, some day in the future, process advantage entirely disappears, the manufacturer with the best architecture and the best layout optimization will be making the best CPUs.

Re:AMD May Nearly Catch Up

[Anonymous Coward]

And my quad-core i7 HP laptop cost $650 whereas the equivalent MacBook Pro costs $2000. One-third the price for similar performance.

Re:AMD May Nearly Catch Up

[Anonymous Coward]

It's an interesting time in CISC processors. With fabs having to spend exponential amounts of money for incremental gains in performance and power savings, a smaller company like AMD may be able to make a chip that's 90% as fast, at a much lower price, which I hope it does because it's good for customers on both sides.

Scalar quantities like amounts are not exponential. Rates of change can be exponential.

Did you mean "exponentially growing amounts of money for incrementally growing gains"?

Re:AMD May Nearly Catch Up

[Locke2005]

We are stuck with the Intel standard because no other company can afford to spend a billion dollars a year on R&D and building new fabs. Sparc, MIPS, PowerPC, PA-RISC etc. all were good ideas at the time, but there wasn't the money to keep improving them to keep pace with Intel. ARM looks to be Intel's only viable competitor at this point. As others have pointed out, the RISC/CISC argument is meaningless at this point.

Re:AMD May Nearly Catch Up

[Anonymous Coward]

AMD may catch up in manufacturing processes but they are still way behind Intel where it really matters: IPC.

Re:AMD May Nearly Catch Up

[rthille]

IBM is still making Power chips. I imagine they aren't cheap in the research & development department, but they do have a non-consumer focus...

Re:AMD May Nearly Catch Up

[Anonymous Coward]

The Zen redesign looks promising, The "Macro Ops fusion" from the core 2 put Intel way ahead. If you look at the recent Intel chips you see that the internals are as important as the process node from a performance perspective. 22 cores on one chip, yeah that's great. But 6 cores with 40 apu integrated graphics lanes, WHY? Intel has no plan so they let the consumer market flounder, soak enterprise pretend that atom matters in the mobile space.

Re:AMD May Nearly Catch Up

[fisted]

I bet you are a blast at parties.

Re:AMD May Nearly Catch Up

[Anonymous Coward]

Recently had a processor with integrated gfx, go out of support (intel hd 3000 gfx with the second gen chips). Intel decided on the windows side to not add openGl 3.2 or 3.3 support, lied and said that the chip couldn't do it when customers asked why the windows drivers didn't have it but the linux ones did, then back tracked and ended support for the chipset early.

Big disappointment anymore

[Anonymous Coward]

It's like telling me the Sun will be brighter tomorrow. Nothing is so outstanding in improvements anymore in chips. It's just more claims and numbers that most people don't even care about. Who cares about Intel graphics? If your a gamer your not using Intel for graphics and probably never will. My SkyLake was a incredible disappointment and I could have saved a hundred or more dollars buying a Hazwell and got almost as good performance. Its really not the chip anymore because OS's have improved to accommodate tablets and slower CPU's. Windows 10, Linux versions, OS X have all improved resource consumption and power use. It's really not a issue anymore, and Intel can improve slightly those numbers. But any dramatic claims are not happening.

Re:Big disappointment anymore

[110010001000]

As I keep on explaining to people on here: it is because of physics. CPUs aren't going to get faster and faster forever. The performance growth is slowing. You see this is 9-12% improvement over the previous generation. Of course this makes people angry at me when I tell them technological progress isn't guarenteed, because the reality is we won't be seeing things like AI or autonomous cars which depend on ever increasing processing power.

Re:Big disappointment anymore

[mikeabbott420]

There is still plenty of room for improvements with specialized design and software even if physics is limiting the improvements in general purpose cpus.
New interconnect technology like on chip photonics, specialized hardware like artificial neurons, and new software designs to take advantage of new capabilities provide plenty of room for future growth.
Even if hardware stays still there is plenty of improvement to be made in algorithms, coding and working with ever larger networks.

I'm betting on A.I. and autonomous cars.

Re:Big disappointment anymore

[Anonymous Coward]

the reality is we won't be seeing things like AI or autonomous cars which depend on ever increasing processing power.

Define "we". You and I? Maybe. Humanity? No, one day humanity will see such things. There is nothing "special" about humans to suggest that computers cannot one day become our peers.

Re:Big disappointment anymore

[Moof123]

I want more cores. If every machine shipped with 8 cores today, software would find a way to use them before too long. Most higher end Skylakes have 40% dead silicon in the form of a crappy GPU that is never used. Why not use that space for more cores, a bigger caches, or virtually ANYTHING else.

9-12% improvement per year is a giant yawn, as we Skylake, and so on. Intel is mired in molasses, their prices stay high while their improvements are awesomely negligible.

Re:Big disappointment anymore

[AbRASiON]

Do I give your post recognition for being mostly on point, or do I completely freak out at another example of one of those very weird uses of "anymore"? Sorry it's too jarring. Stop that, you're doing it wrong.

Anymore is only interchangeable with nowadays SOMETIMES not all the time.

Re:Big disappointment anymore

[rthille]

I'm hoping that Chinese 64-Core ARM server processor starts to make its way to the consumer space...

Re:Big disappointment anymore

[Anonymous Coward]

You have to be careful with some of the Intel Chips if you are running windows. They for some reason don't always put the highest level of openGL the chip can do into the windows driver. They usually do for the Linux drivers, but not the windows ones.

Re:Big disappointment anymore

[jemmyw]

The Sun will be brighter tomorrow. On average anyway. It gains 1% luminosity every 100 million years.

Re:Big disappointment anymore

[Zan Lynx]

That "crappy GPU" is more cores. Specialized cores, but even the Intel GPU is ridiculously fast for the right kind of code. Now that we're getting Vulkan and DX 12 software should be able to run GPU compute on the Intel or AMD integrated GPU while doing video on the discrete card.

I predict a future with a lot more OpenCL code in it. I also predict a future with more idiot gamers who complain that using all of the CPU cores plus the integrated GPU ruins their 4.6 GHz overclocks.

Re:Big disappointment anymore

[Anonymous Coward]

You're complaining (rightly) about the use of the 'positive anymore'. However if you look carefully at what was said above, he did actually say 'not anymore' which is perfectly acceptable. It was merely somewhat obfuscated by the separation between the not and the anymore: "It's really not a issue anymore,".

Microarchitectural details?

[Theovon]

I'm sure the graphics and video playback specs are important, but I'd like to know what changes they've made architecturally in the processor core. Maybe I missed it, but this article seems light on those details.

Re:Microarchitectural details?

[Freedom Bug]

According to Anandtech, there are no core architectural improvements, the IPC is the same as Skylake. Clocks per watt is substantially improved, though.

Re:Microarchitectural details?

[Theovon]

Huh. All this time, I thought Intel was touting this as being predominantly about architectural improvements while staying on the same process. Obviously, they have improved their process, but this seems like a departure from what I'd read about (or assumed?) previously.

Re:Microarchitectural details?

[Anonymous Coward]

It does not look like much at all. The 10-19% seems to come from the clock bump.

500/3000 = 19%

Re:Microarchitectural details?

[dinfinity]

Nope. Officially it's now: Process-Architecture-Optimization, but tick-tack-tock is what some people are calling it, with the tack having been tacked on there to allow selling 'refreshes' of processors with the same architecture and process whilst giving the impression of meaningful progress.

Re:Microarchitectural details?

[TechyImmigrant]

It does not look like much at all. The 10-19% seems to come from the clock bump.

500/3000 = 19%

Just like the old days. We rode the wave from 1 MHz to 4GHz.

Re:Microarchitectural details?

[Khyber]

Are you running your calculations on a Pentium 1?

500/3000 = 0.16667

Re:Microarchitectural details?

[willy_me]

In the summary is specifically identifies "steed step technology" as being the big change. It will make no difference when gaming or running a server but laptops and other low power devices should get a big lift. Waking up faster implies the CPU can go to sleep (or low frequency mode) more frequently and total power consumption will be reduced. And for those who did not click on the article - delay was previously ~95ms and has been reduced to ~15ms.

Graphics!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll probably build my next gaming machine with KBL to replace my IVB machine. As with my current CPU, the 60% of die area for graphics will sit idle while a Nvidia card does its job.

It would be nice for a graphicsless gaming version with more cores and cache.

Re:Graphics!

[unixisc]

Actually, how does Kaby Lake's graphics compare to the latest from either NVIDIA or AMD?

Re:Graphics!

[Anonymous Coward]

And how does Intel KBL/SKYL graphics compare to Nvidia/AMD graphics found on mid-range and high-end smartphones?

Re:Graphics!

[Anonymous Coward]

It would be nice for a graphicsless gaming version with more cores and cache.

Xeon E3-1231v3?

Re:Graphics!

[blackomegax]

You may be served by AMD Zen. 8 cores, broadwell class IPC per clock, 16 threads, 14 or 16 nm process. Probably much much cheaper than the 6 and 8 core Intel options. no igpu

Re:Graphics!

[Anonymous Coward]

You'll want the enthusiast/HPC models then. They don't include gpus.

Re:Graphics!

[Anonymous Coward]

It would be nice for a graphicsless gaming version with more cores and cache.

Xeon E3-1231v3?

Yes, that's an option. But no employee discount for that, which makes it more expensive than the desktop CPU although not by much.

Re:Graphics!

[Bengie]

Skylake IGP is about the same performance as AMD's current IGPs and $70 discreet GPUs.

Re:Graphics!

[Anonymous Coward]

They made sure to tie the newer versions of those to C2xx chipsets now. You can't overclock, and the motherboard will be a server or "workstation" one. But you get to use ECC DRAM then, as most of the cost has been paid towards the "professional" chipset and branding.

Re:Graphics!

[sexconker]

Actually, how does Kaby Lake's graphics compare to the latest from either NVIDIA or AMD?

Intel : Real GPU :: potato gun : howitzer

Re:Graphics!

[cfalcon]

What I find interesting is that all the desktop Intel chips have this massively powerful coprocessor sitting right next to them. If you don't have a graphics card, then it provides mid range graphics. If you DO have a graphics card then... it just... sits there...

But there's nothing forcing that. You COULD have an application that uses the graphics card for graphics, and the coprocessor on the chip for some other kinds of math. In practice, this would be a big hassle: it wouldn't work great on any chip without that (AMD, Xeons), and it wouldn't work unless you also had a graphics card along with your desktop series Intel chip.... ...but while those practical market considerations are real, the fact is, there's a ton of processing that could be done, but isn't.

Re:Graphics!

[sexconker]

A lot of AMDs chips have embedded GPUs. AMD calls the whole thing an APU.
They also integrate it fairly intelligently with direct access to shared resources and shit. Their whole HSA push.

With DX12 and Vulkan games should in theory be able to access all GPUs and use them opportunistically, across discrete/embedded and even across vendors. The most common use now is to use the discrete GPU as your GPU and use the embedded GPU to encode video. If Nvidia hadn't locked down hardware accelerated PhysX to their cards you'd have games getting free, accelerated PhysX processing because they'd be able to use the shit in the CPU.

Re:Graphics!

[Locke2005]

Valid point. Gamers looking to win penis size contests at LAN parties will be buying GTX 1080 cards are replacing them with the latest and greatest in two years, so on-chip graphics are irrelevant and unnecessary for them. For gaming, Kaby Lake doesn't show any real improvement in benchmarks over Skylake (at the same clock speed), although it may be easier to overclock. I'm probably going to wait, cause I don't need to win any dick size contests in the near future.

Re:Graphics!

[Anonymous Coward]

> I don't need to win any dick size contests in the near future That's just something that people with small dicks say.

Re:Graphics!

[willy_me]

But Skylake IGP uses main memory. As such, use of the GPU can impact adjacent CPU functions due to limited memory bandwidth. A discreet GPU recovers the memory allocated by Skylake and minimizes contention for system memory. And let us not forget that many devices are limited by heat dissipation. Offloading the GPU helps minimize the heat generated within the CPU. The discreet GPU is a safer option - but I must admit the Intel GPUs are a desirable option for most users.

IME Backdoor

[Anonymous Coward]

You know everyone will want one of these just to have an Intel inside IME NSA approved backdoor overseeing their PC

bye bye Nvidia

[Anonymous Coward]

Now Intel can leave Nvidia behind once and for all having Xeon dominate 99.9% of A.I. servers

http://venturebeat.com/2016/08/23/intel-blasts-back-at-nvidia-saying-xeon-dominates-97-of-a-i-servers/

Kaby Lake

[johnsmithperson123]

Is still Skylake Refresh. Slightly tweaked GPU (software mostly, I suspect) slight clock boost, and new chipset. My expectations for IPC increases are 0%, or maybe 3% if they bothered to create a new wafer. Trust me, Kaby Lake will underwhelm.

Re:Kaby Lake

[sexconker]

I still have no reason to leave my overclocked i7 2600k.

Re:Kaby Lake

[Carewolf]

Is still Skylake Refresh. Slightly tweaked GPU (software mostly, I suspect) slight clock boost, and new chipset. My expectations for IPC increases are 0%, or maybe 3% if they bothered to create a new wafer. Trust me, Kaby Lake will underwhelm.

IPC changes are none. Because the architecture is the same. They can get 5-10% higher frequencies on the same power envelope, but MHz to MHz it is CPU wise identical to Skylake.

Re:Kaby Lake

[ArtemaOne]

Damn. I was hoping to ditch my 2600k running at 4.4GHz, but it is looking like you may be correct.

CORE?

[Script Cat]

Time to remove the word Core from the processor name. It adds nothing!

Re:CORE?

[cfalcon]

These are the Intel Core line of chips. It's a stupid name, but it does tell you what broad family of chips you are dealing with.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

What did they do to their processors?

[Anonymous Coward]

I keep hearing about how "Skylake needs special support" from OSes. Is this some stupid Intel version of Optimus that's breaking everything or did they change their instruction set?

Re:What did they do to their processors?

[Bengie]

Skylake doesn't "need" special support, unless you want to take advantage of it's special clocking ability, which makes it more responsive. Normally the OS tells the CPU what speed to run at, but the OS can only update this on context switch, which can take several milliseconds per change and many changes to ramp-up the frequency. When the CPU controls itself, it can change frequency in response to load up to 2x faster. For long sustained tasks, this shows up as a about 2% increase in performance, but for short bursty tasks, this shows up as a 25% improvement, all the while only consuming about 0.8% more power under load.

Summary based on benchmarks:
1) Makes the CPU 25% "faster" for very short lived workloads by quickly ramping up from idle
2) Makes the CPU 2% faster for sustained workloads
3) Only consumes 0.8% more power under load and saves power for the short lived loads by completing them more quickly.

Re:What did they do to their processors?

[Overzeetop]

Which basically means that Apple will take advantage of it, but Microsoft won't. This was touted as one of the prime features of the Surface Pro 4, along with the deep sleep states. Except that the W10 OS is so horribly managed that it never turns over control to the CPU of clock speed, and any process of any type can prevent the OS from allowing the CPU from going into a deep sleep state. And, by all user accounts, that's exactly what happens on the Surface Pro. The SP4 team has pretty much given up on the connected sleep and you just expect that the machine will randomly stay awake until it hits 0% battery after 12 hours or so in your bag. The OS group, otoh, has made the Anniv. Update a CPU killer by locking the CPU at it's maximum 100% of the time under default settings, and there is no "fix" from MS - just users who have figured registry hacks to allow forced low power states so you can manage clock speed in meatspace. Not exactly a ms-level response time to changing needs.

Re:What did they do to their processors?

[Anonymous Coward]

Summary based on benchmarks:

1) Makes the CPU 25% "faster" for very short lived workloads by quickly ramping up from idle
2) Makes the CPU 2% faster for sustained workloads
3) Only consumes 0.8% more power under load and saves power for the short lived loads by completing them more quickly.

And trust me, there was a fuckton of work putting all the low latency power state switching support in all the bits of the chip. For systems on a battery, it means better battery life, which is what makes it worthwhile.

Re:What did they do to their processors?

[Anonymous Coward]

That feature has been around for several generations of core procs. It's nothing special to skylake.

p-states are definitely the bomb, though

Re:What did they do to their processors?

[Bengie]

No, this was released with Skylake, Intel was advertising it all over the place and saying how only Windows 10 would support it because it's so new.

Any Surveillance Tech Inside?

[Anonymous Coward]

probably the more important question these days.

Found the LUDDITE!

[Anonymous Coward]

ONLY apps can app apps, NOT LUDDITE computers running LUDDITE software!

Apps!

H.265 / VP9

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope. Officially it's now: Process-Architecture-Optimization, but tick-tack-tock is what some people are calling it, with the tack having been tacked on there to allow selling 'refreshes' of processors with the same architecture and process whilst giving the impression of meaningful progress.

In this instance, added support for H.265 and VP9 isn't nothing. Certainly not worth junking your current system if you recently purchased, but a nice addition to those who are / were planning to upgrade anyway.

Going from using (per the slides at Ars) 12W to decode to 0.5W will certainly add runtime on many portable devices. Encoding is also improved (for conferencing, etc.).

Re:H.265 / VP9

[Anonymous Coward]

for those of us who don't use H.265 or VP9, it is meaningless progress.

Devil's Canyon

[Anonymous Coward]

Although Kaby Lake marks a departure from Intel's "tick-tock" release cadence

No, Devil's Canyon was the departure.

Please use a good tech site.

[Darkness Of Course]

Hot hardware? Seriously, if it the posting is from them (and it is) always link in Anandtech and Techreport if available. http://www.anandtech.com/show/... http://techreport.com/review/3...

This is clickbait

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not that the new CPUs will only support Windows 10, it's that Microsoft won't be backporting support for the new CPUs into their older operating systems. Linux and friends are fine, nothing to see here, move along.

Where to improve in future

[John Allsup]

In the past, there has been a shift from outboard hardware and coprocessors to CPUs, then from single core to multi-core. I invisage offloading the main CPUs as much as possible. Having lightweight RISC cores (e.g. what you find in a cheap smartphone) doing things like menial OS duties, possibly even much of what a kernel traditionally does, I/O and sound, moving the GUI and much rendering (e.g. what OSX's Quartz 'display pdf' layer did, and stuff like window management) to a RISC core on the GPU, and so on. If you take a $200 CPU chip, and offload much of the menial OS stuff that could be done sufficiently quickly with a $1 RISC core, how much CPU power will that free up, especially since there is less task switching to do? Then in CPU design, taking the task switching and hyperthreading thing up again, having a means in hardware to save/load state to cache, and then to memory in the background. Much of these things were done in old school mainframes and supercomputers, so much knowhow is still around (e.g. having a front-end machine to the main processors: the suggestion above is to put the GUI in a frontend machine running on the GPU card, so that the main CPUs only have to worry about window content). Trying to find parallelism in CPU tasks is one thing, moving them back off the CPU is another.