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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.
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.
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
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.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
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.
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.
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.
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.
Time to remove the word Core from the processor name. It adds nothing!
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.
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.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
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.
That feature has been around for several generations of core procs. It's nothing special to skylake.
p-states are definitely the bomb, though
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...
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.
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.
John_Chalisque