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Intel's Skylake-X line-up has been finalized, ranging from the i7-7800X for $389 to the i9-7980XE for $1,999. 18 cores for over $2,000 (after tax)? Someone will buy it:
Intel's high brass made a decidedly un-Intel move last August. During a routine business meeting at the company's Santa Clara headquarters, they decided to upend their desktop CPU roadmap for 2017 to prepare something new: the beastly 18-core i9-7980XE X-series. It's the company's most powerful consumer processor ever, and it marks the first time Intel hsd[sic] been able to cram that many cores into a desktop CPU. At $2,000, it's the sort of thing hardware fanatics will salivate over, and regular consumers can only dream about.
The chip's very existence came down to a surprising revelation at that meeting last year: Intel's 10-core Broadwell-E CPU, which was only on the market for a few months and cost a hefty $1,723, was selling incredibly well. And for Intel, that was a sign that there was even more opportunity in the high-end computing world.
"The 10-core part was absolutely breaking all of our sales expectations," Intel's Anand Srivatsa, general manager of its Desktop Platform Group, told Engadget in an interview. "We thought we'd wait six months or so to figure out whether this was actually going to be successful. But within the first couple months, it was absolutely clear that our community wanted as much technology as we could deliver to them."
[...] If you've been feeling nostalgic for an old-school computing hardware war, we're about to get one. AMD also announced its Threadripper CPUs for high-end desktops a few months ago, and, as usual, they're significantly cheaper than Intel's offerings. The 16-core AMD 1950X will cost $999, with speeds between 3.4GHz and 4GHz. That's the same price as Intel's 10-core i9 X-series processor, while the 16-core model will run you $1,699.
Obligatory Intel Management Engine / AMD Secure Processor comment.
Also at Intel Newsroom.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Tuesday August 08 2017, @03:38PM (6 children)
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday August 08 2017, @04:30PM
Last night, I was backing up an embedded XP install from an industrial PC over the network using Linux. Single core 1.6GHz atom so compression and ssh were out of the question on that dinky CPU. So I used netcat to send the ntfsclone image to my desktop with a core i7 and ran it through pbzip2 (parallel-bzip2). All four cores were loaded right up to 100% and the target disk was spinning rust. You want to tax a CPU? Run pbzip. The Little Atom PC sat at about 20-30% CPU.
Given that I haven't needed to upgrade my Core i7 from 2012, I think that could realistically last for 10+ years depending on the use case. I have yet to sit in front of that system and say "gee, I need a bigger CPU." Then again, I'm not rendering special effects scenes for a major film or compiling the microsoft office suite.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 08 2017, @05:09PM (2 children)
... then maybe your project is very badly organized.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 08 2017, @06:59PM
Not op here but you have no idea how right you are... I was overridden by our private sector partner, to use One blobbish fat war with over 2000 JPA mapped entities instead of using a proper design where the lower layers do not dependent on the upper layers.
Private public partnership for software, is the worst of both world....
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Thursday August 10 2017, @08:04AM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 09 2017, @05:45AM
Thats silly: my dev work flow has no use for that! I use Visual Studio, so waiting for the UI to respond takes longer than the builds, so 4 cores is easily enough. I have 12 cores so I can happily have 3 VS instances hung while doing a built in a 4th (and I won't run out of ram, since they are 32 bit, and get an out of memory errors before consuming a significant portion of my 32 GB of ram). The PCIe SSD is nice though.
I'd be much better off with a highly clocked i5 than my current 12 core, or this massive 18 core. I need to get the at most 2 threads Visual Studio manages to use done as fast as possible.
Now away from my work (at Microsoft, hence the Visual Studio), yes, those cores would be quite fun to play with.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday August 10 2017, @06:24AM
?!?!? If it's compute bound now - the CPU needs upgrading now.
(However, I disagree with the premise - we're still mostly IO bound for non-synthetic workloads.)
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