SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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, 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.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(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.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(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