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posted by mrpg on Friday January 13 2017, @12:50PM   Printer-friendly
from the 8-is-enough dept.

Some of Intel's cheapest dual-core CPUs will now have four threads enabled rather than just two, in what may be a move to compete with AMD's upcoming Ryzen CPUs, which all have two threads per core:

The Pentium series traditionally consists of low-power, dual-core offerings with no [Hyper-Threading (HT)]. Pentiums serve as the low-end alternative to the i3 series, which features dual-core offerings with HT enabled. The addition of HT to the Pentium series expands its range, but there are still a few key differentiators compared to the i3 series.

[...] The HT-enabled Pentiums create a challenge to AMD's line of low-end processors, and of course, some will speculate that it appears that Intel is bolstering its low-end products in the face of AMD's pending Ryzen onslaught. In either case, the HT-powered Pentiums add a welcome new wrinkle to the low end. The processors are listed on Intel's ARK but are currently available only for preorder.


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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by takyon on Friday January 13 2017, @01:30PM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Friday January 13 2017, @01:30PM (#453276) Journal

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVX-512#CPUs_with_AVX-512 [wikipedia.org]

    https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Intel-Cannonlake-Clang [phoronix.com]

    Ignoring the Skylake Xeons, it looks like we will see support for AVX-512 in Cannonlake (I'm assuming mainstream chips). In late 2017. And as the 10nm shrink, it will actually have some kind of performance benefits over Kaby Lake. We can also expect the 2 core, 4 thread Pentium trend to continue.

    I haven't looked much into this until now, but on the higher performance side it looks like Intel will continue 14nm for a 4th gen (H2 2017) instead of making all the chips 10nm Cannonlake. That's Coffee Lake [wikipedia.org]. So we may see Cannonlake Pentiums and mobile chips, but the higher-end CPUs will remain on 14nm. That's where the rumor that Intel will launch a "mainstream" 6-core Cannonlake CPU [guru3d.com] comes in. Instead of repeating the mediocrity of Kaby Lake, why not throw Intel fans 2 more cores without significantly jacking up the price?

    News to me: Not only is Intel pushing 6 cores, but they will do it for the laptop CPUs [digitaltrends.com] too.

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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Friday January 13 2017, @01:58PM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Friday January 13 2017, @01:58PM (#453290) Journal

    Sorry, meant to say "mainstream" 6-core COFFEE LAKE CPU.

    All these damn *lakes.

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    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 13 2017, @02:13PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 13 2017, @02:13PM (#453302)

      Lakes, Wells, Bridges. Informally I used the unofficial codename Gesher so as not to mention the name of Hurricane Sandy in conversation. Gesher, Ivy, Haswell, Broadwell, Skylake, Kaby works for me.

    • (Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday January 13 2017, @09:50PM

      by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Friday January 13 2017, @09:50PM (#453478) Journal

      A lake of coffee sounds damn good right about now...

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      • (Score: 2) by tibman on Monday January 16 2017, @02:16PM

        by tibman (134) Subscriber Badge on Monday January 16 2017, @02:16PM (#454374)

        Probably has less scum on the bottom than my current coffee cup.

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