Intel: We 'Forgot' To Mention 28-Core, 5GHz CPU Demo Was Overclocked (tomshardware.com)

At Computex earlier this week, Intel showed off a 28-core processor running at 5GHz, implying that it would be a shipping chip with a 5.0GHz stock speed. Unfortunately, as Tom's Hardware reports, "it turns out that Intel overclocked the 28-core processor to such an extreme that it required a one-horsepower industrial water chiller." From the report: We met with the company last night, and while Intel didn't provide many details, a company representative explained to us that "in the excitement of the moment," the company merely "forgot" to tell the crowd that it had overclocked the system. Intel also said it isn't targeting the gaming crowd with the new chip. The presentation did take place in front of a crowd of roughly a hundred journalists and a few thousand others, not to mention a global livestream with untold numbers watching live, so perhaps nerves came into play. In the end, Intel claims the whole fiasco is merely the result of a flubbed recitation of pre-scripted lines, with the accidental omission of a single word: "Overclocked." Maybe that's the truth, but there's a lot of room for debate considering how convenient an omission this is.

Comments

Re:Really?

[iggymanz]

well IBM power8 has 5GHz chip, what's Intel's problem

Updated: Intel's YEARS of insufficient management

[Futurepower(R)]

I've updated this from a comment I made before. To me, it seems like a more in-depth understanding of Intel's management in the past 15 years.

Intel's insufficient management: Intel has had many years of insufficient management, in my opinion. (Jan. 22, 2018)

Here is a comment of mine posted exactly 12 years ago: Lower prices are not the answer. Proposal. (June 9, 2006)

Intel's poor marketing: It is not difficult to find other evidence of insufficient management at Intel. Since the beginning of this year I've gotten 40 poorly considered, poorly written marketing emails from Intel. Whoever writes those ads seems to have almost no technical knowledge and no ability with sophisticated communication. This is an amazingly foolish sentence from emails I got from Intel on March 6 and March 8, 2018: "Up your marketing game with segment-focused campaigns..."

Recent background: Meltdown and Spectre: 'worst ever' CPU bugs affect virtually all computers (Jan 4, 2018) "Meltdown is currently thought to primarily affect Intel processors manufactured since 1995, excluding the company's Itanium server chips and Atom processors before 2013."

Linus Torvalds Calls Intel Patches 'Complete and Utter Garbage'. (Jan. 22, 2018)

Two previous errors in design of Intel processors: Pentium FDIV bug (1994) and the Pentium F00F bug (1997)

More EXTREME evidence of insufficient management at Intel: Intel was aware of the chip vulnerability when its CEO sold off $24 million in company stock. (Jan. 3, 2018)

Will Intel be allowed to PROFIT from many years of producing processors with vulnerabilities? Will Intel be treated like U.S. banks in 2008, when many banks profited and many finance system managers got bonuses after the financial crash?

If vulnerabilities are profitable, would Intel deliberately allow vulnerabilities in its products? Were the previous vulnerabilities deliberate? Did the CEO know about the vulnerabilities previously? Do others at Intel profit from the vulnerabilities?

Re: Really?

[dgatwood]

RISC is a solution looking for a problem at this point. While you dont need a complicated decoder on RISC, If you want to perform as well as x86 while being RISCy then you need more instruction fetch bandwidth going into the decoder than x86 needs. Its a tradeoff that does not favor RISC, which is why it lost. RISC was winning up until the moment that CPU's went super-scaler, at which point the instruction fetch shortcoming becomes a losing burden.

Not at all true. RISC didn't lose. PowerPC lost because Apple didn't have the marketshare to be worth IBM's time. IBM wanted to focus on building hardware for gaming consoles where they thought they could get better volume, and didn't want to spend the R&D effort to build a version of the G5 that could thermally survive in a laptop. The gaming console designs mostly paired lots of DSP hardware with a really minimal (603e-quality) main core, so those designs were unsuitable for Apple's needs.

But RISC itself has basically won at this point. The most popular CPU architecture on the planet, by a large margin, is ARM, which is RISC. There are on the order of 250 times as many ARM chips built every year as x86/x86-64 chips from AMD and Intel combined. Pretty much every cell phone out there uses the ARM ISA, and more and more tablets are switching to ARM every year. Why? Because CISC doesn't scale nearly as well as RISC in terms of CPU horsepower per unit heat/power, which is the most critical thing for mobile devices, laptops, etc.

I expect CISC to be basically dead in twenty years, and possibly sooner.