Slashdot Mirror
Intel Reveals 10nm Sunny Cove CPU Cores That Go Deeper, Wider, and Faster (pcworld.com)
Long criticized for reusing old cores in its recent CPUs, Intel on Wednesday showed off a new 10nm Sunny Cove core that will bring faster single-threaded and multi-threaded performance along with major speed bumps from new instructions. From a report: Sunny Cove, which many believe will go into Intel's upcoming Ice Lake-U CPUs early next year, will be "deeper, wider, and smarter," said Ronak Singhal, director of Intel's Architecture Cores Group.
Singhal said the three approaches should boost the performance of Sunny Cove CPUs. By doing "deeper," Sunny Cove cores find greater opportunities for parallelism by increasing the cache sizes. "Wider" means the new cores will execute more operations in parallel. Compared to the Skylake architecture (which is also the basis of Kaby Lake and Coffee Lake chips), the chip goes from a 4-wide design to 5-wide. Intel says Sunny Cove also increases performance in specialized tasks by adding new instructions that will improve the speed of cryptography and AI and machine learning.
Singhal said the three approaches should boost the performance of Sunny Cove CPUs. By doing "deeper," Sunny Cove cores find greater opportunities for parallelism by increasing the cache sizes. "Wider" means the new cores will execute more operations in parallel. Compared to the Skylake architecture (which is also the basis of Kaby Lake and Coffee Lake chips), the chip goes from a 4-wide design to 5-wide. Intel says Sunny Cove also increases performance in specialized tasks by adding new instructions that will improve the speed of cryptography and AI and machine learning.
We all know how all Intel CPUs are broken, but the why is very important.
AMD invented 64-bit for x86 chips AND invented the first true dual core x64 part. At that time AMD had a massive lead over Intel, and it's god-awful, hyper long pipeline Netburts. Tho outlets like Slashdot and Anandtech informed you, at the time, that Netburst- with its race to 10GHz- was the WINNING architecture.
Then Netburst went bust, and Intel went back to the Pentium 3, updated it with AMD's best ideas (legal due to cross patent agreement) and produced the Core 2 architecture.
But, here's the thing. Intel made the NSA and performance friendly decision to BREAK multi-threading on the CPU.
Proper on-chip multi-threading MUST be 'lock and key'. This means each thread has a unique ID, and that ID acts as a 'key' to open the 'lock' of memory resources that thread has the right to access. Intel NEVER implemented 'lock and key' but AMD always did.
So what did Intel's CHEAT achieve apart from ensuring the NSA always has low level access to your Intel CPU?
1) massively improved memory latency, for the hardware mechanism that implements the 'lock' has a real impact on access speeds.
2) massive improvements on power efficiency (the lock and key takes power for each memory access)
3) much higher clock speeds due to 1 and 2
In other words, ALL the advantages Intel seemed to have over AMD from the core 2 onwards were down to Intel using an illegal (in CS terms) broken by design CPU architecture.
Today the ONLY way to fix the Intel issue is to run ONE thread at a time on the CPU, and do a complete state flush between multi-tasking thread exchanges. The performance hit would approach 80-95%, which is why no solution uses this extreme but correct adjustment.
Next year, AMD's Zen 2 (ryzen 3) utterly wipes out Intel- and Intel will never recover. But Intel sits on a literal mountain of cash, so expect no end of PAID Intel promotion on sites like Slashdot in the continuing future.
Isn't their purpose to reduce speed?