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Intel Hits 50 Years and Its CPUs Hit 5.0 GHz (venturebeat.com)
Intel will turn 50 next month, so to celebrate that, its CPUs are hitting 5.0 GHz for the first time, it said. At Computex event in Taiwan this week, the chipmaker announced the limited edition 8th Gen Intel Core i7-8086K processor, the first-ever CPU from the company with a 5.0GHz turbo frequency. From a report: Intel, of course, is the world's biggest chip maker, and its fortunes are wedded to the success of the personal computer. "As we transition to the data-centric era, the PC remains a critical facet of Intel's business, and it's an area where we believe there are still so many opportunities ahead," Bryant said. "Today, at Computex in Taipei, I shared our vision for the future of the PC and introduced a wide range of new technologies that will help us and the broader ecosystem make this future a reality. One that transforms the PC from a simple computer into a platform that can power every person's greatest contribution."
"SPARC T8-2 Server Specifications
ARCHITECTURE
Processor
Thirty-two core, 5.0 GHz SPARC M8 processor
Up to 256 threads per processor"
It's the same Skylake uArch which debuted three years ago and naturally this particular CPU is affected by both Meltdown and Spectre. It's still an accomplishment though since it's the first ever consumer CPU to run at a such an insane clockrate.
Oh, and it will be available in very limited quantities.
Intel celebrates 50 years, and the 8086 Instruction Set Architechure celebrates 45 years.
Yep, they held them back at least 5 years so it would coincide with their anniversary. Idiots.
Will I need to hit the turbo button on the front of the PC to get this 'Turbo frequency'?
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People have been running Intel processors at 5GHz for years. They may have needed aftermarket cooling solutions, but it's been something that's possible for quite a while. I guess the question is how high people will be able to overclock this 5GHz CPU. If it costs more than the current 8700k and doesn't actually provide any level of overclocking, then I don't really see it as big news.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Is this the early 2000's where we were all drooling over the faster hertz speed of the clock.
We have been parallelizing the chips and software for over a decade now to reach meaningful speed improvements, while not really caring much about the clock speeds. This approach actually has been a good thing, it allowed great improvements in mobile chip design which cannot draw tones of power and doesn't need a radiator to keep it from melting itself.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
POWER6 was at 5 GHz in 2008
I really wish they'd built a chip that ran at 4.77 GHz...
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The engineers and the marketing department got locked in a room and battled it out to the death. I'll let you figure out who won.
Obviously the growth in clock speed has been exponential (moores law) and goes in major steps process and design changes, but for fun, the linear average increase in clock speed since the launch of the intel 4004 in 1971 (740khz) to the present top line chips (~4.3 Ghz) is 3 Hz per second. Or 3 more cycles per second per second.
This is going back a bit, but the 5GHz threshold is important for another reason... I'm trying to find the exact reference, but back around the time that AMD first released the Athlon CPU, I recall someone from the technology press writing an article which extrapolated what would happen to processor TDPs as clock speeds increased. Obviously we have to bear in mind that die shrinks and improved lithography, better materials and the like all help to drive up the performance-per-watt scale, but this magazine projected that if CPUs [of the day] were ever to scale up to 5GHz, then the thermal-output-per-square inch, extrapolated from the CPU die size, would actually exceed what is found inside a fully-active nuclear reactor.
The amazing thing, then, is not simply that Intel have managed to ship a 5GHz part, but they have done so whilst essentially keeping the thermal profile of the chips more-or-less uniform for a good part of the last few years. In some ways this thermal efficiency is even more impressive than the outright clock speed; it talks to the materials science, packaging design and overall cooling effectiveness, that we've now come to expect from our current crop of processors.