
Bringing Intel Xeon to notebook PCs - intrasight
http://blogs.intel.com/technology/2015/08/bringing-intel-xeon-to-notebook-pcs/
======
louwrentius
If this also means ECC memory in laptops, that's friggin' amazing.

I sometimes dream of a world where consumer equipment has ECC memory. Some
say: total overkill. I say: the stats on servers are so that you are probably
hit multiple times a year with bit-flips in memory. You'll never know because
it's not registered anywhere. But those apps hanging, this strange crash, a
corrupted document. All these small things.

Servers aren't desktops/laptops, but I do wonder.

~~~
Freaky
Absolutely. Memory errors are insidious because they can look like just about
anything - driver bugs, software bugs, disk errors, power issues, media blips,
or even nothing at all, just some silent bit of data corruption you don't even
notice. It's easy to dismiss the risk when you have no idea how big it is.

It's eye-opening once you've managed a few machines with ECC and seen first
hand how common correction events are.

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danparsonson
I'll go ahead and ask the newbie question - what's the benefit? I can see how
more cache and better multiprocessing would be important to a server but how
does a Xeon improve a single user system? Do they have some other secret
sauce? I'm assuming they're not expecting anyone to build a laptop with more
than one of these in it?

~~~
jlawer
The big one is ECC memory.

~~~
tacticus
There really is no good reason intel keep removing this from the consumer
cpus.

~~~
dogma1138
Many server vendors are dropping ecc as the performance hit isn't worth the
additional reliability in many cases. I don't see the point of ecc today for
most applications also...

~~~
justin66
> Many server vendors are dropping ecc as the performance hit isn't worth the
> additional reliability in many cases.

Bullshit on both counts. (even the low-end Lenovo, HP and Dell servers I see
sometimes on Slickdeals still have ECC, so what brands are you even talking
about?)

~~~
edoloughlin
_Bullshit on both counts_

Hey, how about keeping it civil and polite? It's been pretty good here for the
last year, following a relentless drive to call out bad behaviour. It'd be a
shame to see it backslide.

~~~
justin66
I'm not sure if you're familiar with the idiom "calling bullshit" but I'm
pretty confident it doesn't mean what you think it means.

It is an old enough expression that an urban dictionary reference shouldn't be
necessary, but here you go:

[http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=I+call+bullsh...](http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=I+call+bullshit&defid=5686440)

~~~
edoloughlin
_I 'm not sure if you're familiar with the idiom "calling bullshit"_

I am familiar with it and, to me, it's rude. I might say it to a friend if
we're just bantering, but I'd never say it to a colleague. Clearly, I'm in the
minority here.

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chx
Oh my god if this would power the retro ThinkPad: classic keyboard, ECC
memory, hi-res screen, Thunderbolt, powerful CPU... All the good stuff :)

~~~
lsc
with the old keyboard? It sounds like someone figured out how to get me to
spend more than two grand on a laptop.

~~~
chx
Yeah, seems Lenovo after releasing three generations of laptops every ThinkPad
fan hated finally gets to its senses. [http://blog.lenovo.com/en/blog/retro-
thinkpad-time-machine/](http://blog.lenovo.com/en/blog/retro-thinkpad-time-
machine/)

~~~
mst
I so want one of those but for the record my X61 worked fine for me and I love
my Tablet 2.

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nextos
I think this is related to a Lenovo leak:

[http://i.imgur.com/7ZorPrq.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/7ZorPrq.jpg)
[http://i.imgur.com/AnP4eVU.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/AnP4eVU.jpg)

~~~
SamReidHughes
That looks like a 17" Thinkpad! Probably only has one screen though.

~~~
nextos
Yes, it looks good.

Aside, we started emailing Lenovo 2 years ago, when they ruined the touchpad &
keyboard, to express our discontent. Seems that they will finally get back on
track: [http://blog.lenovo.com/en/blog/retro-thinkpad-
survey-4-misce...](http://blog.lenovo.com/en/blog/retro-thinkpad-
survey-4-miscellaneous/)

They might even support Coreboot. This is good. As a developer, I hate bad
quality hardware. Apple is good quality, but some stuff is too consumer
oriented: glossy screens and fragile alu+glass. And since Tiger I dislike
their software.

~~~
walterbell
What makes you think they could support Coreboot? That would be a huge
differentiator, but would need unpredecented Intel cooperation.

~~~
nextos
At least there's huge pressure from the community. Who knows. Thousands of
people requested it in the survey. It's hard to tell, but I think Lenovo might
be steering in the right direction after realising techie users are a very
good niche.

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protomyth
I would love for a Xeon in a Mac Book Pro (or in my dreams a Mac mini server),
but I worry they will put it in the next Mac Pro.

~~~
TheWeirdStuff
They currently run Xeons, so that probably won't change.

~~~
protomyth
Apple has this weird history of using laptop CPUs to make their machines
smaller or thinner. I'm hoping they update the Mac Pro soon, but I can see
them letting it continue to languish (no updates since December 19, 2013) or
coming up with a smaller form factor (thus using this CPU).

I do wonder how these CPUs would do as processors for blades?

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miahi
It would be interesting to know if the number of CPU types we have right now
is because of hardware issues (binning) or just plain market segmentation.
Because many of the features could be enabled in software/firmware, I think
they could just do a "custom" CPU where you just license whatever features you
use. Do you want ECC and AVX-512 on your i7? Do you need a GPU on your Xeon?
Just pay $50 (or whatever) for the key to enable these features.

~~~
gtirloni
Then they have to worry about licensing and avoiding hacks, two problems they
don't have today.

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happycube
Will this have AVX512...?

~~~
twotwotwo
I'm curious too. They talked about it appearing in "Skylake server", and this
is branded as Skylake server, so maybe not impossible.

~~~
Sanddancer
Unfortunately, I'm kinda really doubting it. Gut instinct is saying that the
AVX-512 thing is Intel trying to keep companies doing high end data crunching
buying their many-cored xeons. Given the performance boost that the features
are going to give, it's not inconceivable that Intel doesn't want people
buying their cheap quad core chips instead of a pair of their more expensive
8+ core Xeons.

~~~
vardump
They'll also need to drop some to developer systems. Then again, I'll probably
get a brand new workstation when new AVX-512 Skylake Xeons arrive. Intel SDE
emulator is goes only so far...

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rayiner
Apple get me this in an MBP stat.

~~~
derefr
Would Intel even be putting in features like "Thunderbolt 3 over USB-C" for
anyone other than Apple?

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Thunderbolt is Intel's baby, of course they'd include it.

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Osmium
Any chance of getting > 4 cores in a notebook with one of these chips? Would
love a 6-core or 8-core MacBook Pro, even if it had to be run at lower
frequency or aggressively throttled while on battery.

~~~
coldtea
MacBook Pro's are not gonna get these chips. They'll get the normal Skylake
stuff, with the lower heat emissions.

~~~
Osmium
Thought it might be a possibility given that these support Thunderbolt 3 over
USB C, which I'd expect them to be pushing pretty hard.

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tvmalsv
I think I read somewhere that the Skylake chips will have support for the new
xpoint 3d memory. I would be surprised if it became commercially available
this soon, but it would be great to have a MBP with the new xeon and xpoint
memory instead of the SSD. The xpoint memory is supposed to be as much as
1,000x faster than SSD while drawing less power and having a lot more write-
cycles.

~~~
stefantalpalaru
Why would you need special support for it in the CPU?

~~~
vardump
Memory latency is high, it's preferable to do transfers to and from CPU L3
cache.

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frozenport
Would be more impressed if this was the Xeon that can be used in a dual socket
configurations.

~~~
brianwawok
For laptop? Xenon has server chips with 20 cores. That seems a bigger upgrade
than just two standard 4 core i7s for the really crazy parallel workload. Not
awesome for many workloads of course.

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zupa-hu
OMG I desperately want a powerful portable PC!!! I'd even buy a big ugly
"notebook" without battery. Who needs a battery? There's our phone for the go.

These days I'm playing with the idea of syncing a VM between my notebook and a
powerful desktop PC for at desk use. Anyone tried it? Would it work?
Virtualbox, maybe Docker?

~~~
simcop2387
I actually have done a lot of that with one of the gigantic gaming laptops. an
Alienware M18X r2 in my case. I'd love to have gotten ECC ram in it but that's
the only real issue I have with it. Weighs about 20ish lbs (9kg for you non-
yanks). But I've run database clusters with qemu/libvirt to learn how to set
them up, but my main use of that kind of setup has been to test builds of
software on other operating systems.

~~~
zupa-hu
17 lbs, wow! :D

Interesting, thanks for the input!

~~~
simcop2387
It's been a really interesting laptop for a lot of stuff. 3 internal 2.5"
bays, you can convert the optical bay into a 4th. An mSATA bay for flash, and
an express card slot that can take any pci-e 1x compatible card (pretty much
everything) with the right enclosure. 2x graphics card slots with adequate
cooling for everything. it's definitely a beast but i bought it entirely for
that purpose. it's been great for doing CAD (though i plan on making it
better) for 3d printing and also for being able to keep it up to date (aside
from cpu and ram, those are already maxed out for its generation).

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jmspring
Interesting discussion on the thread, re memory type, ECC, etc. but
fundamental question is -- how does this benefit consumers?

~~~
coldtea
They get fucking faster chips, made for server workloads, and with safer
memory modules.

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roflchoppa
Xeon in my phone plz.

~~~
kjs3
I like being able to make calls longer than 8 minutes.

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TazeTSchnitzel
It's Skylake-based, so we won't see this for at _least_ two years, and that's
assuming Intel isn't forced to delay _again_.

~~~
wmf
Desktop Skylake was released a few days ago and the mobile version is rumored
to be coming in less than two months. [http://www.cpu-
world.com/news_2015/2015052101_Launch_schedul...](http://www.cpu-
world.com/news_2015/2015052101_Launch_schedule_of_Intel_Skylake_processors.html)

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
...somehow I confused Skylake and Cannonlake.

My bad.

