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Intel's "Tick-Tock" strategy of micro-architectural changes followed by die shrinks has officially stalled. Although Haswell and Broadwell chips have experienced delays, and Broadwell desktop chips have been overshadowed by Skylake, delays in introducing 10nm process node chips have resulted in Intel's famously optimistic roadmap missing its targets by about a whole year. 10nm Cannonlake chips were set to begin volume production in late 2016, but are now scheduled for the second half of 2017. In its place, a third generation of 14nm chips named "Kaby Lake" will be launched. It is unclear what improvements Kaby Lake will bring over Skylake.
Intel will not be relying on the long-delayed extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography to make 10nm chips. The company's revenues for the last quarter were better than expected, despite the decline of the PC market. Intel's CEO revealed the stopgap 14nm generation at the Q2 2015 earnings call:
"The lithography is continuing to get more difficult as you try and scale and the number of multi-pattern steps you have to do is increasing," [Intel CEO Brian Krzanich] said, adding, "This is the longest period of time without a lithography node change."
[...] But Krzanich seemed confident that letting up on the gas, at least for now, is the right move – with the understanding that Intel will aim to get back onto its customary two-year cycle as soon as possible. "Our customers said, 'Look, we really want you to be predictable. That's as important as getting to that leading edge'," Krzanich said during Wednesday's earnings call. "We chose to actually just go ahead and insert – since nothing else had changed – insert this third wave [with Kaby Lake]. When we go from 10-nanometer to 7-nanometer, it will be another set of parameters that we'll reevaluate this."
| Intel Roadmap | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Year | Old | New | ||
| 2014 | 14nm Broadwell | 14nm Broadwell | ||
| 2015 | 14nm Skylake | 14nm Skylake | ||
| 2016 | 10nm Cannonlake | 14nm Kaby Lake | ||
| 2017 | 10nm "Tock" | 10nm Cannonlake | ||
| 2018 | N/A | 10nm "Tock" | ||
Original Submission
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Gravis on Friday July 17 2015, @10:47AM
despite going to increasingly smaller lithography, intel is sticking to their x86 game plan which consistently results in high power consumption. there is a clear reason that all but a few smartphones use ARM, lower power consumption. intel even tried to scale down x86 to work on a smartphone and they had to add a 3000mAh battery to just get a competitive battery life. AMD seems to be seeing the writing on the wall because they have invested in making an ARMv8 chip for servers.
frankly i've found intel's scheme of constant change to be bothersome because it means that unless you upgrade inside of two years, you have to buy a new motherboard if you want to upgrade your processor.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 17 2015, @11:14AM
Intel was in the motherboard business for a long time, so it was in their best interests to force you towards an upgrade. Where as AMD provided you a CPU upgrade path, to give new life to your older machine.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 17 2015, @12:10PM
Where as AMD provided you a CPU upgrade path, to give new life to your older machine.
Yup.
I just recently upgraded my old Athlon 64 X2 to a 1055t. Going secondary market netted me a deal that just can't be beat with older Intel hardware.
It's not the latest and greatest, but the fact that you can hold off on upgrades with AMD processors is amazing. With AMD, your motherboard could theoretically last 7-10 years with minor component upgrades every now and then.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by theluggage on Friday July 17 2015, @12:49PM
unless you upgrade inside of two years, you have to buy a new motherboard if you want to upgrade your processor.
But how important, really, is being able to put a new processor in an > 3 year old motherboard?
Back in the good old/bad old days (particularly when on-chip caches were taking off), a new processor might have offered you a 50% increase in clock speed and a dramatic performance boost. These days, improvements in raw performance are much more incremental and many of the benefits of a new processor will be support for new versions of DDR RAM, SATA, USB, PCIe, Thunderbolt, NewWonderPort(tm), and (if you use integrated graphics) DisplayPort, HDMU etc. which are useless without motherboard/chipset support.
The other main area of progress is power consumption & thermal performance which, again, are of limited value without a case/cooling rethink, and are more applicable to laptops etc. which aren't usually CPU-upgrade-friendly.
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Friday July 17 2015, @02:38PM
There is one thing Intel could do to raise performance: boost the core counts for its mainstream chips.
AMD promises to improve IPC of Zen by 40%, compared to 5-10% for the latest Intel launches. They are also switching from clustered multithreading (Bulldozer) to simultaneous multithreading (Zen). So each Zen core will be a "real" core now rather than half of a "module". There are even rumors of a 16-core, 32 thread mainstream Zen chip [digitaltrends.com].
An 8-core Zen chip could suddenly become a real challenge to Intel's i7 quad-core processors next year. Intel's enthusiast processors have come with 6 cores for several generations, and Haswell-E will include an 8-core variant. Mainstream desktop/mobile chips have been stuck at 4 cores. That might change now that games, web browsers, and utilities are increasingly multithreaded.
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(Score: 2) by tibman on Friday July 17 2015, @02:48PM
Might as well solder the CPU onto the motherboard with that attitude : P Not all computers are built with high-end parts. As high-end parts become middle and low you can continue to upgrade your machine for cheap.
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(Score: 2) by theluggage on Friday July 17 2015, @08:11PM
Not all computers are built with high-end parts. As high-end parts become middle and low you can continue to upgrade your machine for cheap.
But that's what eBay is for. If you've got a dual 'Sandy Bridge' i3, then the obvious upgrade would be a second-hand or surplus 'Sandy Bridge' i7 quad, which would be a significant upgrade, not a new-model i3 dual which (even if it was made to work on your motherboard) would offer relatively modest improvements.
CPU upgrades were a thing back when the per-core performance of CPUs was increasing far more rapidly than it is today. These days, the CPU is fairly low down the upgrade list.
(Score: 2) by Zinho on Friday July 17 2015, @09:20PM
If you've got a dual 'Sandy Bridge' i3, then the obvious upgrade would be a second-hand or surplus 'Sandy Bridge' i7 quad, which would be a significant upgrade, not a new-model i3 dual which (even if it was made to work on your motherboard) would offer relatively modest improvements.
See, that's the difference in philosophy that Gravis and Tibman were trying to point out. If you bought an AM3+ motherboard in 2011 you could use it with any processor from the Phenom II / Athlon II / Sempron / Opteron / FX chip lines based on your available budget, and today's latest chip designs still work on it. The obvious upgrade for my Athlon II chip is a modern FX chip, no motherboard replacement required. In contrast, Intel requires a new motherboard to go from core i3 to core i7?
Tibman's right, if every chip architecture change requires a new motherboard then there's no difference to the consumer between a chip you can't swap out (soldered to the board) and one you won't swap out (upgrade within the same processor family isn't worth the money, as you said).
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Saturday July 18 2015, @03:50AM
Incremental indeed. My CADCAM box is three years old, and buying new with the same budget would only get me about another 20% performance.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 4, Insightful) by iwoloschin on Friday July 17 2015, @01:51PM
Want to quote some citations on x86 being more power hungry than ARM? I've heard this argument over and over, but it doesn't hold up.
For low power devices, cell phones and such, yes, it does appear that ARM is more power efficient than x86. But we're not talking about performance at all, just the raw power used by a CPU running the cellphone to do normal cellphone things.
On the flip side, for high end servers, where are all the ARM chips? Surely if ARM was more power efficient we'd see high end servers using ARM to save power, if only for the massive cost savings (power costs money, power makes heat, cooling costs even more money, etc). But where are all of the ARM servers? I haven't seen any big plays here, which makes me suspect that while ARM may use less power overall, x86 (or Intel's superior fab?) provides a much higher performance per watt number than anything ARM has come up with.
Maybe (hopefully!) at some point ARM and x86 will cross paths, but for now, it seems that for absolute minimal power consumption, you use ARM, but for any sort of serious amount of work, while plugged into wall power, you should be picking x86. They both have their uses, but it's impossible to claim one as being better than the other without constraining your use case.
(Score: 2) by Zinho on Friday July 17 2015, @09:52PM
Want to quote some citations on x86 being more power hungry than ARM?
Sure:
“The X-Gene-equipped units [at PayPal] cost approximately one-half the price of traditional data center infrastructure hardware and incurred only one-seventh of the annual running cost,” [source] [datacenterknowledge.com]
There's even a Windows Server build in the works for ARM, [zdnet.com] which takes away one of the last reasons to stay with Intel in the face of reduced power requirements on ARM. Again, from that last article I linked:
The bottom line one is that a 64-bit ARM powered microserver has a thermal design power (TDP) of of between 10 and 45 watts. A conventional x86 server runs more than 90 watts. The lower the power consumption the lower the not just the direct server utility bills, but the lower the overall data center running costs.
Let me put it put concrete numbers.
A 64-bit ARM server will use no more half the power of its x86 counterpart. ZDNet estimated that the kilowatt hour cost for commercial use per year per server in 2013 was $731.94. Multiply that by the number of servers in a data center and then divide that number by two.
Since power consumption is often a data center's single greatest cost, that is a tremendous saving.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
(Score: 2) by dusty monkey on Saturday July 18 2015, @09:56AM
The least that you could do was check the numbers before stringing together what is clearly shit, or rather, parrot complete shit that someone else strung together. To arrive at the $713.94 figure given in the article you cited, the author cites another article that uses a draw of 850 watts per server to arrive that the $713.94 cost, but thats an order of magnitude larger than the 90 watts the author of the article you cited had just mentioned for conventional x86 servers.
The author of the article that arrives at $713.94 (Teena Hammond) is dead on, for an atypical server that draws 750 watts, such as you would find in a supercomputing cluster. But why then is the author of the article you cited (Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols) misrepresenting the $713.94 figure? Its because he is a hack author that doesnt know shit about anything, and for some reason you didnt bother to care about the veracity of it. Gullible people (such as yourself) seem to have swallowed it without any critical thought at all.
I can predict how and why you pushed this shit on us. You had a preconceived notion and posted the first thing that you could find that seemed to support it, and you did it as fast as you could which is why you didnt put any critical thought into it. Your actions are highly similar to the actions of the god damned author of the mis-informative highly inaccurate and misleading article that you cited.
- when you vote for the lesser of two evils, you are still voting for evil - stop supporting evil -
(Score: 2) by Zinho on Sunday July 19 2015, @05:09PM
[lots of rant]
Wow, you really feel strongly about this. I didn't mean my careless research to be personally offensive to you.
Here's my take on this.
* my first web search found not only support for the idea that data centers were switching to low power chips, but also a specific example (PayPal, although they're not alone [zdnet.com])
* It's my experience that a strong fraction of a server's power use is in the processor (disk and cooling being the next two biggest costs, not necessarily in order)
* High-efficiency chips, if serving to meet the load, cost less to run (45W < 90W, kWh = $)
The fact that companies are creating the product and marketing it means that it's at least not insane; the fact that PayPal is willing to admit to purchasing it means that they did the math and it works for them. I know it's more complicated than that; at full load the right comparison is computations per Watt, and you'll need more of the lower-power chips to do the same work. It's not a slam dunk in either direction.
As much as it may offend you, microservers are a real thing. Especially for paralellizable applications, large numbers of low-power processors can be used to do real-life work [datacenterdynamics.com] in a cost-effective way. It's not for everyone, nor for every application, but there are times when it makes sense.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
(Score: 2) by dusty monkey on Tuesday July 21 2015, @12:46AM
I didn't mean my careless research to be personally offensive to you.
Its not, but it appears that being critical of what you did is offensive to you. Can't just accept that you made a mistake, that you have faults that need working on, I guess.
As much as it may offend you, microservers are a real thing.
No shit sherlock. Apparently any criticism of you means the person being critical must be completely opposite on every possible thing. Here is an idea... next time, just dont be so damned worse than worthless. You do realize that your post was worse than worthless, right? It was misinformation. You did harm.
- when you vote for the lesser of two evils, you are still voting for evil - stop supporting evil -
(Score: 2) by Zinho on Tuesday July 21 2015, @06:51AM
. . . it appears that being critical of what you did is offensive to you. Can't just accept that you made a mistake, that you have faults that need working on, I guess.
Actually, I'm more confused than offended at the intensity of your response to my quoting the $713.94 figure for annual processing cost. You spent an entire post decrying my lack of research on this point, when I thought that was perhaps the least consequential point in the article I linked. I'll gladly admit I was wrong about that number, because it doesn't matter to me. You're right, of course; 90 watts running full tilt for a year will only cost ~$80 depending on your price per kWh (according to my back-of-the-envelope estimate, not intended to be either specific or accurate; YMMV).
Here is an idea... next time, just dont be so damned worse than worthless. You do realize that your post was worse than worthless, right? It was misinformation. You did harm.
Again, confusion on my part. Harm? Is someone going to lose money or need hospitalization because of what I wrote? Psychic trauma caused by a throwaway value that the quoted author couldn't even be bothered to divide by two to make his point? And there was nothing else in my original or follow-up post of value that could balance that potential damage?
I think I'm having a Poe's law moment. Either you're sincere and have a wildly different perspective than mine on the value of precise data center operating cost estimates, or you're trolling me; I can't tell the difference.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 17 2015, @01:58PM
plan which consistently results in high power consumption
If you ignore that they have gone from 125W to ~5W for the same or better performance. Atom chips are on par with the performance of a pentium 4 from 10 years ago. (the charts do not lie)
I have an Intel NUC. To get that performance 10 years ago would have required a liquid cooled rig and lots of fans and a decent power supply. Now it is a power brick and uses around 20W total when running full out (3-5 idle) instead of 500W because of all the extra stuff and the CPU.
A chip from this year is consistently is better than the one from 2 years ago. And uses less power to do it.
I have hoped AMD would up their game. The only thing keeping them alive at this point is MS and Sony game consoles. It is a bloodbath on their financials. I even own some stock hoping they would do better. But alas they have not.
They do however have an interesting yield problem. You can tell because of the number of different chips they sell. They have it fairly fine grained though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haswell_%28microarchitecture%29#List_of_Haswell_processors. [wikipedia.org] The highest in that list is 145w. Which is high. But that is for 18 CPUs. Not sure where you get that their power requirements are going up. That is decidedly downward. Even 2-4 years ago that would have been a 300-800W beast of a box.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday July 17 2015, @02:22PM
Intel Core M seems to be a great chip with high performance and low power consumption, although it is very expensive. They have consistently improved power consumption and idle power on mobile (laptop) chips to the point where Atom and Core M might converge soon.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Katastic on Friday July 17 2015, @03:52PM
Intel doesn't use X86 anymore. X86 is just the executable format that gets turned into micro-operations and processed. The same micro-operations exist on all processors now. And the unit that transforms X86 to micro ops is tiny compared to the out-of-order scheduler and branch prediction units.
Power consumption is not something as simple as instruction set.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Sunday July 19 2015, @02:53AM
Why doe x86 still exist? Based on my meager experience with really low level work, it would be better to use RISC or similar to make a really simple but blazing fast general processor and move all of those convoluted instructions and optimization tricks to the compiler level. We're not working in assembly any more so we can let compilers handle any optimizations needed by the processor.
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