

Intel’s Skylake Core i7-6700K reviewed: Modest gains from a full Tick-Tock cycle - smackay
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/08/intel-skylake-core-i7-6700k-reviewed/

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lpsz
At the risk of being off-topic, an honest stupid EE question:

What physical innovations actually drive the processor releases, or even flash
storage sizes? I understand that each generation shrinks the transistors. But
what tangible things were invented in 2015 to make the transistors smaller? Is
it that in order to make them smaller, Intel has to run some kind of circuit
optimization calculations that weren't possible the year before? Or are there
advances in manufacturing (e.g. physical inventions of new molding processes,
new chemical processes, something else?) Or is it simply market forces driving
the prices and the specs?

~~~
whazor
Disclaimer: because my university is nearby ASML, I get bombarded by their
information... also I'm not an EE student

The actual progress of technology is in lithography. The lithography machines
are produced by ASML and used by almost all major chip producers[1]. Currently
ASML is building their new line of machines, namely with extreme ultraviolet
lithography instead of what the line of current machines use.

What I do not know, if the machines are currently used for Intels 14nm or that
the old machines are still used (or maybe both). What I do know, is that ASML
and Intel are having problems with getting to 10nm. That is because they have
to improve the current machines, you observe this from the delay in the Tick-
Tock from Intel.

Which brings us to the Tick-Tock of Intel, this is the improvement of the chip
structure itself. They do this because they have to wait for the smaller
transistors.

At last, what I heard is that the ASML machine is getting more and more
complicated. Especially because they are having troubles with the laws of
nature.

[1]
[http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014241278873238093045784288...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887323809304578428850807241388)

~~~
lsorber
To add to this: it's not just developing new lithography processes such as
EUL. A large part of the recent improvements are due to optimization of
existing litography processes by improving sensor accuracy, minimizing the
error, and improving the throughput speed among others.

------
iolothebard
Skylake was more about mobile/watts from what I understood. Desktop has been
stagnating since Sandy Bridge for the most part.

~~~
clw8
That's how I understood it as well, though I was still disappointed that my
expectations weren't exceeded. I am eagerly awaiting the day that new AAA
games are playable at low quality settings on a MacBook Pro but I guess that's
still a few years away.

~~~
vardump
For my definition of playable, for example Bioshock Infinite is perfectly
playable on 2015 Macbook retina 13".

But personally it doesn't really matter. I don't have time to play anyways.
Nor really so much desire either nowadays.

------
_stephan
It's a pity that the new AVX-512 SIMD instructions will only be available on
Xeon Skylake chips.

~~~
twotwotwo
AVX-512 looks kind of nuts: 32 registers of 64 bytes each, so 2KB of just
registers, and apparently gate area to do eight 64-bit multiplies/divides at
once. Also adds masking (only run this xor instruction on these three of the
eight 64-bit words) and other stuff.

One other interesting feature for the long term, apparently in regular Skylake
too, is a bounds-checking assist (MPX): instructions and registers and
address-lookup hardware to make bounds checks cheaper. (The bounds check
instructions are effectively NOPs on older hardware, I think.) I don't know
what the economics of supporting it are, but I like anything that might lead
to more code deployed with more safety belts.

Finally, I wonder when Skylake server is coming out. The process delays threw
off their usual tick-tock rhythm; I wonder if it means large Skylake server
chips will come out with less than the usual delay after the top of the
Broadwell server line (which isn't out yet), or, less likely, if Intel will
skip large Broadwell Xeons entirely.

------
bane
Despite all the talk about Moore's law and all that, what this really means is
that user-experience has gone all the way down to silicon. Raw performance
just isn't important to most people these days. They want a small, light,
just-works, good power consumption, doesn't have annoying hickups or laggyness
experience.

Intel's trying to build the chips that can support this and not trying to
enable regular consumers to fold proteins or factor primes.

~~~
agumonkey
Needs have plateau-d too. Remember when transcoding a CD in mp3 was an hour
thing that may fail ? Most of the mainstream needs have been addressed in term
of compute power. What's missing, as you said, is global "perf", low Wattage,
smooth UI, simple and fast enough peripherals. We'd love easy printers but
Intel is only Intel.

~~~
bane
Heck, even my 6 year old spare desktop can transcode highdef video on the fly.
That used to be the stuff of dreams.

I think the implications are clear, it's time for software developers to start
thinking about performance if their work is slow, you can't just expect
consumers to go out and throw more hardware at it.

~~~
agumonkey
Yep, everythins is amazing yet nobody's happy.

Things are messy nowadays (web, native, crossplatform, gpgpu, opencl) and
people can't apply their brain to performance as it was in the old days when
there was simply no other choice.

I bet in a few years a lot of cruft will vanish. OpenGL removed a big part of
it for clarity. The web and native will gather (see how dynamic languages are
jit compiled, and take low level into account). Hopefully overall efficiency
will improve, for builders and customers.

~~~
SG-
People's happiness have started to shift with size and battery. People are
willing to even get something a bit slower now if it means half the size (new
MacBook, MacBook Air and other small laptops based on Intel's Core M
Broadwell).

~~~
agumonkey
I have yet to use a laptop not from before 2009. I fail to see how even Core M
are significantly slower.

------
CyberDildonics
I realize now that these skylakes are not really about enthusiasts.

Think about what will make your parent's computer feel more powerful. A more
fluid GUI, higher resolution in windows, a higher framerate in windows and of
course peripherals going faster. Skylake has much better onboard graphics
(which take up half the die) and a lot more IO for USB 3.1, SSD storage and
display port from integrated graphics.

If Intel wanted to, they could double the cores by taking the integrated
graphics out. They could double the peak flops again by including the 512bit
SIMD instructions. They've already demonstrated they can do it.

They know their real money making market and it isn't anyone here.

~~~
lsorber
Two counterarguments to your realization:

1\. According to Anandtech [1], Intel is appealing to enthousiasts/gamers:

 _To go with the launch is a new look of Intel 's Core processor packaging, in
part to appeal to the gaming crowd. As the gaming industry is considered one
of the few remaining areas for potentially large growth in the PC industry,
Intel is increasing its focus on gaming as a result._

2\. The Skylake-K processors launched today are the unlocked versions geared
towards overclocking, again targeting enthousiasts. Skylake-S won't be out
until later this year.

This makes it all the more perplexing that they decided to ``use so much die
space'' for integrated graphics given their target audience.

[1] [http://www.anandtech.com/show/9483/intel-skylake-
review-6700...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/9483/intel-skylake-
review-6700k-6600k-ddr4-ddr3-ipc-6th-generation)

~~~
CyberDildonics
Maybe they are trying to market the first batch to enthusiasts but ultimately
designed it for the average home user? Who knows. What they have right at this
moment is awkward, but I have a difficult time believing that Intel doesn't
have a good idea of what they are doing.

------
Retric
Ouch, it might be worth it to upgrade a 4 year old CPU.

Considering I actually have a four year old 2600K @4Ghz, it would be nice if
they included an actual comparison.

~~~
CamperBob2
It's truly disturbing how long Sandy Bridge has spent near the top of the CPU
price/performance ranks, given how old it is. It's as if Intel just stopped
trying back in 2010 or so.

I guess everything interesting has to run on a GPU nowadays.

~~~
noir_lord
I have an i5-2500K at home and an i5-3570K at work, neither is overclocked and
neither is what you could call slow, moving to SSD was a much bigger upgrade.

In all my years of building PC's I can't remember a time when a nearly 5 year
old machine would still run all everything I wanted to run, on the one hand
that's cool on the other barring some shakeup it looks like the days of must
have upgrades every year seem to be halting (for now).

~~~
RobinL
Same. I was waiting for Skylake to upgrade but doesn't seem worth it; I'll
probably wait for a 2x performance boost on the i5-2500k, which seems to be
still a long way off. Although it seems disappointing perhaps I should be
grateful I got lucky and chose the right generation last time I upgraded.

------
arielweisberg
Is this going to create an opportunity for AMD to catch up? Would be great for
CPUs to no longer be a one horse race even if only on the desktop.

~~~
reitzensteinm
It seems like we're significantly into diminishing returns with single core
IPC, so AMD should largely catch up over the next decade (assuming the status
quo doesn't change). In this metric, a chip 90% as fast as state of the art
might be 1/10 the cost to develop by then. Or even less.

But even if Intel isn't seeing much progress in terms of single core
performance, they're beating the crap out of AMD in terms of performance per
watt, and by extension, absolute performance of the high end multi core parts.

Taking a look at the absolute insanity that are the 18 core Haswell-EP parts,
and comparing them to the 8 module Piledriver parts, and the die size of each
(i.e. the cost to make them), the gap is widening, not shrinking.

I think everyone here has known for a while that the free lunch is over with
respect to writing single core programs and speeding up their execution on
future hardware. That's going to take a while to filter down to building
programs that take advantage of large amounts of parallelism, but it's going
to happen. And when it does, consumer CPUs are going to look more like server
parts.

With the programs of today, you'd rather a 4.0ghz quad core. But with the
programs of tomorrow, a 2.0ghz 32 core will run circles around it. Amdahl's
law is ever present, but we are very, very far from reaching the limits of
what is possible.

If it gave a proportional speedup for everyday computing, I believe Intel
would already have an 8 core mainstream part, and maybe even higher. Right now
they can heavily price discriminate against the few that care about the bump
to 6-8 slower cores.

------
AceJohnny2
As an embedded developer, I'm pretty surprised to see good old SPI show up on
the block diagram, connected to the chipset.

I knew I2C was already in PCs for sensors and whatnot, and SPI has the
advantage that it can be driven at higher speeds, but I actually expected
something homegrown from Intel.

------
typon
The days of Moore's law are long dead. Intel's transistors haven't been
getting better since 5-6 years now. I wonder what direction the semiconductor
industry will go in. These are very interesting times.

~~~
CyberDildonics
Moore's law is about transistor density, not individual thread speed.
Transistor density continues to increase. Nvidia's Maxwell is supposed to have
over 8 billion transistors on 28nm.

~~~
rgbrenner
In 2012 Nvidia released Kepler, which had 7 billion transistors, also at 28nm.
3 years to increase transistor counts by 12.5%... Isn't that evidence that
Moore's law is in fact dead?

If it were not dead, that should be 28 billion transistors in 2015. Instead
you're talking about 8.

~~~
CyberDildonics
1\. 14nm, which obviously is a working technology now would mean 4 times the
transistors.

2\. The Kepler you are talking about was an outlier used in Tesla boards, it
is not indicative of the general trend at all.

3\. Two cherry picked data points don't mean a trend that has been sustained
for 40 years is dead.

