
Intel Reveals Post-8th Gen. Core Architecture 10nm+ Ice Lake - bauta-steen
http://www.anandtech.com/show/11722/intel-reveals-ice-lake-core-architecture-10nm-plus
======
majidazimi
Hmmm. It seems Atom/Electron devs need to work hard to slow down new
generation processors...

~~~
jrs95
Atom has actually gotten significantly faster recently. It seems they've
started to rewrite some core components of it in C++ for performance reasons.
I've also used some Electron apps that are very lean. I think it's more of an
implementation issue. Slack is pretty terrible at resource usage, for example,
but Zeit's Hyper is very efficient & it's resource usage is comparable to
iTerm in my experience.

Slack's issues with their electron app shouldn't be particularly surprising,
either, considering it was their head architect that published an article on
Medium advocating for PHP on the basis of it's concurrency model...

~~~
old-gregg
> Zeit's Hyper is very efficient

Ladies and gentlemen! I present you the efficient terminal application, which
only needs:

    
    
             Process        Memory      Threads
             -------        ---------   -------
             Hyper	        40.8 MB	    32
             Hyper Helper	51.9 MB	    15
             Hyper Helper	18.8 MB	    12
             Hyper Helper	15.2 MB	    4
    
             Total:         126.7 MB    64
    

On a serious note, I think the insanity will stop when the operating systems
will start shaming badly written applications and nudge users to get rid of
them. It is in Apple/Microsoft interest, because users will blame their
computers ("My Windows is getting slow...").

The phones already show the list of power hungry apps responsible for your
battery life reduction, having this on a desktop would be nice too. If even a
terminal needs 64 threads and 126MB of RAM now... looks like some wrist-
slapping is in order...

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jrs95
That's a lot more threads than iTerm uses for me, but it's less memory.
Typically my work computer (a 2015 15" MBP) tends to be bottlenecked on RAM,
too. 16GB sadly is pretty much the minimum viable amount of RAM for me to do
full stack development these days.

~~~
inetknght
I've maxed out my 64GB a few times and have seriously weighed upgrading to
128GB. Running _all_ the development environment on my localhost (where I'm
the actual sysadmin) is _really_ handy if your sysadmins are too busy to help
you with their business side of things.

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nullnilvoid
As a consumer, it's great to see competition picking up in the CPU market.
Intel does not seem to be able to hold the edge in node process as tsmc and
Samsung are matching intel. It has to resort to architecture design.

~~~
kakwa_
Well actually I think it's more a case of "increase in performance is becoming
harder and harder, the technology leader (Intel) is slowly becoming stuck and
the competition (AMD) is catching up". Everybody will be more or less at the
same level as it requires huge investments to only get a marginal advantage.

Apart from games, I would not be that afraid to install recent pieces of
software (browser, office suit, os) on a 10 years old computer (2007 core 2
duo). But in 2007 I would not have thought for a minute that I could do the
same on a 1997 computer (Pentium II), and installing 1997 software on a 1987
computer (80386), just no.

Last time I replaced my CPU (i5-6500 in place of i5-2500), I only saw a
marginal improvement.

Even at my former job, I worked with some decent servers (32 to 48 cores,
128GB of RAMs) to build Linux masters from scratch (Gentoo based). The oldest
server of the bunch (which is 5 years old now) is still the fastest to build a
master from scratch, it has less cores but faster clock and even on parallel
tasks like compiling stuff, clock is still a more determining factor than
cores.

There are still tons of things to improve in CPUs: power consumption, cost,
embedded functionalities (SoC)... but performance improvements seem a huge
cost for low gains adventure right now and for the foreseeable future.

~~~
std_throwaway
Gains in instructions-per-clock start to flatten out. And that's where the
gains were coming from in the last years. Some time ago a paper was posted
here that showed how even if you have an infinite amount of transistors, you
will still be limited in the range of 3-10 instructions-per-clock for typical
programs.

Clock speeds seem to have leveled and IPC will only see another gain of
50-100%. Single threaded performance is close to the limit. What after that?
Is this the end?

~~~
nostrademons
GPUs:

[http://michaelgalloy.com/2013/06/11/cpu-vs-gpu-
performance.h...](http://michaelgalloy.com/2013/06/11/cpu-vs-gpu-
performance.html)

[http://www.anandtech.com/show/7603/mac-pro-review-
late-2013/...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/7603/mac-pro-review-late-2013/3)

This is behind much of the interest in machine learning these days. Deep
learning provides a way to approximate any computable function as the
composition of matrix operations with non-linearities. It does this at the
cost of requiring many, many times the computing power. But much of this
computing cost can be parallelized and accelerated effectively on the GPU, so
with GPU cores still increasing exponentially, at some point it's likely to
become more effective than CPUs.

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dom0
I don't think GPUs are a particularly good solution for these, they aren't the
future and won't be around for mass-deployment that much longer.

~~~
chillydawg
That's quite a statement - what will replace GPUs for the ever increasing
amount of ML work being done?

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bitL
TPU-like chips; though they can be (partially) included on GPUs as well as is
the case with the latest NVidia/AMD GPUs.

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shaklee3
There's nothing special about the tpu. The latest gpus are adding identical
hardware to the tpu, and the name "GPU" is a misnomer now since those cards
are not even intended for graphics (no monitor out). Gpus will be around for a
very long time, just not doing graphics.

~~~
monocasa
Yep. Simply the core idea of attacking memory latency with massive
parrelization of in flight operations rather than large caches makes sense for
a lot of different workloads, and that probably isn't going to change.

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bitL
In retrospective, Intel should have bought NVidia when they had the chance;
GPUs is the only area making huge progress year to year now.

~~~
SSLy
Even better course of action would be AMD merging with Nv instead of ATI.

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Yizahi
They couldn't, their logo colors doesn't match.

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asniper
What? Nvidia = Geen, AMD = Green :S

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nodesocket
Is this Intel's response to AMD Threadripper and EPYC?

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wmf
No, that would be Cascade Lake-X and Cascade Lake-SP.

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GuiA
According to the table in the article:

\- 2011: 32nm

\- 2012: 22nm

\- 2014: 14nm

\- 2018?: 10nm

I don't know much about foundry processes, but it seems that it's taking more
and more time for lesser and lesser gains, right? At this rate, how long until
we reach sub nanometer? What are the physical limits on these processes, and
does it have any implications for end users? Will we be using 2nm CPUs for 50
years?

Would love to hear the thinking of anyone educated on the topic.

Edit: very intrigued by the sustained downvotes on this ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

~~~
jacquesm
The step from 14 to 10 nm is _huge_. Both from a technological perspective on
the manufacturing side as well as on the effect it will have to the number of
transistors on a die and the power consumption of those transistors. Remember
that power consumption and the number of transistors are related to the
surface area so there is a square factor in there. 14 nm ^2 = 196, 10 nm ^2 =
100, so that's almost a doubling of the number of transistors and
approximately a halving of the power required per transistor for a given die
area.

~~~
deepnotderp
Okay, so the node names are effectively useless at this point. They used to
refer to gate length, but no longer, even for Intel. Oh, and Intel's 10nm will
actually have lower performance than their 14nm.

Besides, it matters not, the bottlenecks today are in memory and
interconnects.

~~~
Dylan16807
> Oh, and Intel's 10nm will actually have lower performance than their 14nm.

Less than 14++, sure, but 10+ and 10++ will fix that.

~~~
deepnotderp
Yes, but I was just pointing out that scaling is now neither a panacea nor
free.

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turblety
I wonder if this one will come with free backdoors and spyware installed,
thanks to the wonderful Intel Management Engine (Intel ME) backdoor. [1][2][3]

Intel (and AMT) keep pushing more and more proprietary code that can not be
read, changed or removed. No one knows exactly what it does and it has built
in screen and key recording. It's my advice and the advice of privacy
advocates that no one should purchase or use any processor made by Intel or
AMD until they address these serious issues.

1\.
[https://libreboot.org/faq.html#intel](https://libreboot.org/faq.html#intel)

2\. [https://puri.sm/learn/intel-me/](https://puri.sm/learn/intel-me/)

3\.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14708575](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14708575)

~~~
sspiff
I'm not sure this should be discussed in this thread.

Also, I don't know of any alternative that doesn't have large unauditable
blobs integrated into the chip.

All ARM SoCs come with radio processors that are running a non-trivial piece
of software with full access to the system memory, which is responsible for
power management, boot sequence and wireless communications. It is by
definition network connected.

AMD has a technology it calls the Platform Security Processor (PSP for short)
which does basically the same thing.

To have a processor that doesn't have this kind of technology, you have to
give up on decades of advancement in compute power, or buy a very expensive
and non-portable POWER8 or POWER9 system.

~~~
turblety
Why should a serious backdoor, privacy concerns and ethical problems with a
monopolies new product not be discussed in a thread about that product? Not
sure I get your point on that.

But yeah you are totally right on the alternatives. Nothing quite matches
Intel and AMD, and a lot of those ARM SoC's have proprietary code running on
their bootloader too. But you can get some processor from 7 years ago that are
usable.

OpenPOWER is fantastic though and has real potential. There were a few
projects out there looking to implement a laptop and personal desktop computer
using it, but unfortunatly didn't reach it's funding goals.

I think the more people that know about Intel and AMD's shading practices that
more funding open hardware projects can get, and maybe in the next few years
we can replace Intel and AMD with ethical and open solutions.

~~~
krambo
I agree, this has to be allowed to be discussed about, it's literally about
the product.

Haven't heard about OpenPOWER, I hope more people are made aware of
alternatives to get funding and spin.

There are some ARM processors that live without blobs, I think Olimex produces
what they call open-source hardware (OSHW), is this an acceptable product?

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bhouston
What will be the clock when single threaded? Can we get above 5GHz finally?

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zanny
We have been over 5ghz for a decade, it just takes ln2 to do it.

We aren't going to see ludicrously high clock rates for the foreseeable
future. There are a lot of compounding factors as to why, but the biggest ones
are the pressure for efficiency driving designs that aren't dumping higher and
higher voltage to get frequency, the diminishing returns on voltage vs
frequency (see Ryzen, where a 20% improvement in clocks costs about a 50%
increase in power draw across all skews, and similar situations happen with
Intel).

That being said, a 4ghz Skylake core crushes a 4ghz Core 2 core. Depending on
your benchmark used it can perform anywhere from 80% to upwards of 170% faster
per clock. You don't get as dramatic year over year improvements increasing
the the per cycle performance, but innovations leading up to ~2004 (or 06 for
the multicore boon) were just stuffing power hungrier and hotter transistors
on smaller dies.

~~~
bhouston
> That being said, a 4ghz Skylake core crushes a 4ghz Core 2 core.

Core 2 Duos were slower per clock than Pentium 4s, I think by quite a bit. It
was a real set back for performance when they came out.

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YSFEJ4SWJUVU6
That can't obviously be true except for some certainly specific workloads.

Core 2 was _the_ breakthrough that left AMD in the dust from which it still
hasn't recovered to parity. Even if I can't recall the numbers, I fail to
remember how the very energy-intensive (high clocked) Pentium 4 could have
been faster per clock.

Are you sure you're not thinking of the Pentium 3 to 4 change? After all, Core
architecture had more in common with P3, didn't it?

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verroq
Anyone else get redirected to malware?

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sjtrny
Yes! I thought it was my DNS or something. It only happens on mobile.

~~~
mappu
Anandtech have great content, but their advertising can be... aggressive.

I assume you have an adblocker on desktop but not on mobile?

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msh
They have fallen a long way since Adnan ran the site...

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Skunkleton
Adnan is the guy who may or may not have killed his girlfriend in the 90's.
You are thinking Anand. As in AnandTech. And even without Mr. Shimpi AnandTech
is still one of the best sources for in-depth reviews of hardware.

~~~
PaulKeeble
They have fallen behind in CPU and GPU testing methodology especially around
games. Their testing of databases was pretty awful (it fit in memory) and a
variety of other obvious limitations to their testing I would argue they are
not only worse than they were when Anand ran the show but now significantly
worse than a lot of the places they compete with.

Pcper is a significantly more capable review site these days.

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readams
They used to go Process, Architecture, Process, Architecture, which was styled
as Tick, Tock. Recently they switched to Process, Architecture, More
Architecture.

I like to call it Tick, Tock, Clunk.

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slededit
At this point real compute happens on the GPU. I think we'll see a shift to
major apps being driven by GPGPU.

The CPU's performance has started matter less and less.

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ant6n
I've never run a piece of software that used a GPU for anything other than
rendering. I believe I'm part of a very large majority.

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zanny
Libreoffice has OpenCL acceleration for some spreadsheet operations. With the
advent of NVME storage, and the potential bandwidth it yields, I would expect
to see database systems emerging that can GPGPU accelerate operations on
tables to be way, way faster than what a CPU can handle.

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iainmerrick
What on earth are people doing on spreadsheets that needs GPU acceleration??

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jrockway
People use spreadsheets for anything that you'd use a "normal" programming
language for. When I worked at a bank, a real-time trading system was
implemented as an Excel spreadsheet. There were third-party and internally-
developed libraries to do the complicated stuff (multicast network protocols,
complicated calculations that needed to be the same across all
implementations, etc.) but the bulk of the business logic and UI were Excel.
It's easy to modify, extend, and play with... which also makes it easy to
break functionality and introduce subtle bugs. Though the same is true of any
software development environment -- things you don't test break.

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iainmerrick
Right, but most things you do in a "normal" programming language don't run on
a GPU either.

