Intel Confirms 8th Gen Core on 14nm, Data Center First to New Nodes
anandtech.com
anandtech.com
This can be very interesting especially if this can be expanded to other products. TSVs increase the pricing of certain products by a substantial margin and have pretty high failure rates, they also increase the internal resistance of components and can cause thermal issues.
HBM and 3Dxpoint built on EMIB can reduce the price of these components substantially, it can also make it viable again to split the dies of the IGP and the CPU allowing Intel have SKUs with different IGP configuration including EDRAM/SRAM without having to have multiple die designs.
If you can't produce reliable SRAM at 10nm no problem, if you want to integrate FPGAs that are build using a different process no problem, you want to scale up the same basic core design of 4 core clusters again just make the same small dies and interpose them based on market demands. This will allow Intel to sell Xeon SoCs/CPU's with 128 to 256 core which isn't viable if you put them all on the same die, it also means that they don't have to disable cores for different SKU's now if they want to make a 10 core CPU they just put 10 cores and not 12 with 2 of them disabled.
People also overlook the cost of the masks, a set of master masks cost a lot of money even their copies cost a small fortune and as we go into more and more intensive processes as far as radiation goes the lifespan of these masks shrinks in an ever increasing pace.
It sounds like a move from "Do we assume the next node will be ready for our most important chip in X years?" to "What parts of chips is the next node currently ready for?"
Fabbing smaller dies on lower-yield, leading edge processes would also be nice. Curious what the trade-offs will look like in terms of power/thermal vs a monolithic die design.
The difference between Sky Lake Celeron and Kaby Lake Celeron is small, but it's not like it's a big difference for i7 either. I don't think a lot of people are tossing out their Sky Lake CPUs and putting in Kaby Lake at any part of the performance curve; it's just if you're upgrading from something older (maybe Sandy or Ivy Bridge) or buying something new that you may want to go with the newer core design. Eg: Celeron G3920 (Skylake) vs G3930 (Kaby Lake) are both 2.9Ghz but G3930 is about $10 cheaper and may have a slightly nicer GPU.
It also might mean large-core chips could be available sooner on new manufacturing processes (which tend to have a high failure rate until they're thoroughly debugged).
Also, it allows Intel to increase the rate of innovation - for example by specifying how each silicon die(memory, interconnect, rf?, acceleration, etc) connects to the EMIB, and letting internal and maybe external groups work independently and maybe compete on better modules.
Shame this would be wasted on someone as close as Intel though.
No more IGP for high end Desktop CPU. Can easily mix and match CPU / GPU or even FPGA according to customer's requirement. I wonder why will this be on the market.
Another Point is Data Center First for new node. Why? What push them to make this decision? They literally have 95% market shares with healthy margin.
I think there is a real risk if AMD deliver superb performance and value with Zen, Intel will lose a little bit of the shine and a lot of consumers will not perceive them as innovative anymore.
The sheer number of skus itself shows Intel has been on a bit of a downward spiral towards becoming something of a 'marketing company'. Kabylake has negligible to no gains over skylake making it a pure branding exercise. Risky move for reputation. Time to focus on innovation and value.
Intel already failed to get off of 14nm with Kaby Lake, and now they're pushing it back another cycle?
Let's hope this encourages Intel to discount their current and future chips. More competition is always good for the consumer.
[0] http://m.hexus.net/tech/news/cpu/102322-uk-us-prices-amd-r7-...
For at least my task, compiling large amounts of C++, the difference between the different i7s is huge. I get a new expensive laptop every two years (and a cheaper machine for portability or other purposes each off year). I have a high end 1st, 2nd, 4th and 6th gen i7 each machine is measurably faster with the oldest machine taking almost 10 minutes and the newest taking just about 2 minutes to build the same codebase.
Every machine has a raid 1 of "high performance" SSDs. Most have Corsair force3 GTs. The 4th gen is an untrabook with room for only one SATA3 ssd, so I put a Mushkin M3 drive in in for the raid. The Newest machine some other SSD that is just slightly faster. The read speeds are something like this 1st gen -> 1.2GB/s, 2nd gen -> 1.2GB/s, 4th gen -> 1.1GB/s (the M3 drive slows it slightly), 6th gen -> 1.3GB/s.
Each machine is faster than the previous by a wide margin, far more than the proportional speed difference from the slowest to the fastest. There is almost a whole minute between (3m to 2m) from the 4th to 6th.
The first gen has 2 cores with hyperthreading (looks like 4 in gnome system monitor), the quad cores with hyperthreading where far out of my price range. All the rest, the 2nd, 4th and 6th gen have 4 cores and hyperthreading (looks like 8 in gnome system monitor).
For reference each of these was around $1,600 plus or minus $200, except the 6th gen. The 6th also has an nVidia 980 (not the normal mobile version) and 4 total hard drives. The other two drives are large mechanical disks that I only mount when I am doing stuff with movies or other large offline data, I do not believe they have any impact on the benchmark. This machine cost $3,200 after all the crap I did to it.
You are comparing various mobile CPUs for each generation which isn't quite the same thing most people are likely talking about. Desktop and Mobile CPUs aren't the same thing (usually).
I suspect you are comparing the improvements along the lines Intel says it can still improve (lower power chips) but its simply because you keep buying laptops vs. desktops. If you had been buying desktops, I suspect you wouldn't notice the improvement.
My desktop I built 4 years ago compiles within ~20% as my desktop at work with its shiny new Xeon.
I've considered getting a new PC for SATA 600 and USB 3.0 more than I care that I could have a new machine that's only twice as fast.
The stagnation in desktop single-core performance is taking a toll on my productivity as software continues to bloat. Yes, I have a massive number of cores in my desktop workstation, but most are idle at any given moment. With CPU-wasteful single-threaded software, there are far too many applications that routinely fail to keep up with my input.
I know it's popular to advise new programmers to avoid concurrency because it's a "hard problem," but the wasted cores of my CPU keep screaming for something to do. They yell: "It's a shame so few people write multithreaded applications! Alas, back to sleep for me."
From my vantage point, I remain amazed that people have fled concurrent programming in an age where the hardware for doing so has not only thrived, but which may also be the only path forward from here.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/02/08/remar...
(Also, the White House is probably not a great source for semiconductor roadmaps.)
e: Though yes, it wasn't reasonable for me to read having no 10nm plans into his statement.
I honestly don't see Moore's law progressing beyond 3nm, maybe even stopping at 7nm or 10nm.
As far as shrinking transistors further, isn't 7nm the physical limit?
Edit: I'm mistaken. Transistors as small as 1nm have been developed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_nanometer#Technology_demos
- the R&D and the fabs would probably cost a zillion dollars, in a shrinking market for high-performance CPUs
- yields would probably be very low, even as the process matured - this problem is becoming more and more pronounced with the latest generations
- the advantages over the current chips would not be great; note svantana's comment about diminishing returns with the most recent process shrink
It is??
There's still plenty of people who want more speed badly enough to pay for it, but my impression is that there aren't as many as there used to be.
Upgraded to an i7-4790K almost 2 years ago, and while not willing to drop another $1500 to upgrade to the latest CPU/MB, I have been keeping an eye open.
The hyperscale folks care about how much physical space given performance takes, but that's likely more energy/performance than chipcount/performance constrained.
7 companies provide Intel with 36% of its profit...
And that's not even dealing with the demon of quantum tunneling which IMO will likely kill node shrinks even harder.
Finally, the other comment is right, Dennard scaling is dead, and thermals have become the primary constraint in chip design. FinFETs have somewhat helped with this, but it's not enough.
Computing things still get cheaper as more tech gets included. For example, Someone working in AI or video games can drop a $1000 on a Cuda enabled GPU and get more than a 10x more performance increase then they could reasonably get with that $1000 3 years earlier. This is much more than the two doublings some interpretations of Moore's law predicts.
Not all performance increases are going to be inside the most complex part.
At that size, defects of just a couple silicon atoms (approximately 0.2nm diameter) starts to become an issue. Photo lithography requires higher frequencies of "light" for smaller features, which also becomes more of a pain to deal with.
And that doesn't even get into the quantum effects at that scale, which is whole 'nother barrel of headaches.
I'm still surprised at the (seemingly to me) lack of research in molecular nanotechnology. We're rapidly approaching the point where we do need to precisely control the placement of each individual atom for these products.
You'd think the boards of directors and major investors would be pushing these companies harder to develop the next generation technologies. Though Wall Street itself barely cares about the next three months.
in the presence of competition the Broadwell chip would have double the number of cores of the Haswell chip it was replacing, and thus the modern multithreaded benchmarks would have shown double the performance. Current situation clearly showcases what happens when there is no competition (the experience very familiar to anybody who saw/rode/drove a USSR/Russian made car or aware of the Russian presidential elections history of the last 17 years :)