Intel Lakefield deep dive: the first x86 hybrid CPU | Hacker News Reader

Intel Lakefield deep dive: the first x86 hybrid CPU

anandtech.com

66 pointssadiq30 comments

>Intel has paraded its new ‘Lakefield’ processor design around the press and the public as a paragon of new processor innovation. Inside, Intel pairs one of its fast peak performance cores with four of its lower power efficient cores,

This is Intel in a nutshell. That was an innovation ARM made a decade ago. So why in the hell is Intel marketing touting it as Intel innovation. They clearly have some understanding of their customer base as morons. The atom cores are basically an expensive failure, doing a bad job of immmitating their larger cousins and a great job of reminding everyone that Intel hasn't designed a new CPU architecture since Itanium.

Read the full sentence. It includes the fact that the die stacking is also an innovation, and using them together is an innovation.

Those are mechanisms that enable innovation, in and of themselves, they are a curiosity. This moves the needle zero when it comes to competing with AMD.

I believe Intel could do it, but they would have to figure out what they really want.

> there might be a need for a high power, high performance design where cooling is of no consideration

Ha, there's a reason IBM z chips were the first commercial CPUs to break the 5GHz barrier with the zEC12 at 5.5 GHz back in 2012. 300W CPU, who cares, it's going to get a tailored water cooling system anyways in a tailored chassis. Cooling is one of the lowest priority problems when designing a mainframe CPU ...

Well, you still need to prevent it from melting. Coefficients of heat transfer are not infinite.

For a mainframe, you could probably get away with using liquid nitrogen if you needed to.

Sadly, IBM has not the same penchant for striking design as Seymour Cray had.

Well... Their quantum computer is quite striking. I wish they did that with the more mundane machines.

> Cooling is one of the lowest priority problems when designing a mainframe CPU

That's not true at all. Next to power deliver, power removal--aka HVAC--is next in line of recurring costs (after one-time costs of building the facility and the initial server BOM).

For example: https://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2008/11/cost-of-power-in-l...

Unless by "mainframe" you mean specialty compute-server farm for a supercomputer (with massive IO) then perhaps.

IBM z chip is for mainframe and it's too expensive and normally not massively scaled out compared to cloud servers.

Also, not to beat a dead horse :), but saying "cooling is ... lowest priority" is misinformation so I want to put this here for future readers:

I spent most of my career working on power and cooling for CPUs and MCUs and have presented on the subject at ISSCC since the 90's. I can tell you with absolute certainty that modern CPU power concerns have never NOT been a problem. Power, area and timing are the three competing constraints that all CPU manufacturers struggle to balance. And it is not easy since fixing timing can hurt power and area, and vice versa for the other two components. Finding a solution that doesn't impact the other two is hard (and very, very valuable).

Recall the early 1990's when PowerPC dinged the Pentium for being a 16W TDP part ("TDP" didn't even exist as a term in datasheets at the time, that came along once Intel added throttling with the P4). Ahh the good old days.

> Recall the early 1990's when PowerPC dinged the Pentium for being a 16W TDP part

PowerPC...

Up until the series 9672 (1994) when IBM changed from bipolar to CMOS mainframes had water cooled CPUs (although the ES/9000 had air cooled options). Water cooling returned as an option with the zEnterprise in 2010 and the zEC12 CPU made it mandatory a few years later. These were not 16W parts. Not even 160W.

Interesting, I didn't know that. I have very little historical knowledge pre-1990 about mainframes, and by the time I started working in the field the term "server" replaced "mainframe" exclusively. In fact, during my graduate years, the mainframe & TTY terminals were replaced with IBM AIX workstations, and a big honkin file server, so I never really got to dive into it before it was gone.

They were not called big iron for nothing. They are not measured in racks but metric tons and such :) In 1991, a Hungarian university installed its mainframe by partially removing the roof and craning the thing in place. I am not kidding. Hard to find photos. http://hampage.hu/nosztalgia/netto/ursus/ursus.jpg here's a small section of it.

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/hi... look at that dainty hard drive in the back :D

from the conclusion :

As far as Lakefield goes, this first generation is going to be a rough challenge for Intel – they are pitching a low performance product in a high-cost segment based on technology

Yeah, looks like the power of four atom core in an high end ultrabook is gonna be a though sale.

Honestly, I think it is fascinating that Samsung is selling a laptop where you choose between an 8-core heterogenous ARM chip and a 5-core heterogeneous x86 chip, both running Windows. With the built-in LTE, it seems like the ultimate niche computer.

LTE is plenty fast for most business tasks. I have an LTE modem in my laptop and can pull it out in a busy airport and get work done even online. At LTE speeds you probably don't even need Wifi except as a way to get on the local network.

A bit random but I'm hoping that Apple will be adding an LTE modem or at least offering it on their new ARM "Apple Silicon" devices. I wish they would do that as well as having something like "internet modes" so apps could check if they should try to use less bandwidth or can use as much as they want.

Would be beautiful in EU with $20/mo unlimited LTE, and horrible in Canada with $50 for 5 gigs, overages at $30 per gig

Frankly it's to us Canadians to start asking our lawmakers to force better pricing, at least in metro areas where the population density is similar to Europe.

Don't you think, forcing pricing by lawmakers cold be not the best choice? Could it be a lack of competition?

Lack of competition is forced by lawmakers.

Needing to manufacture and assemble several components in this fashion must be awful for yields. I'd imagine AMDs chiplet process is much more forgiving.

This type of design seems very unforgiving to defects. I think the only place they can get away with a bad core is in the GPU portion.

Mind you it’s pretty small at 82mm^2.

Still waiting 7nm process...

Have you seen a 10nm product from Intel with your own eyes?

The current MacBook Air is 10nm. While I've never actually seen one with my own eyes, I certainly believe that they exist.

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/196586/...

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/196589/...

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/196596/...

Any Ice Lake processor, available in many different laptops, from all the major OEMs.

I own one.

You've been able to buy Ice Lake laptops since late last year. So I'm not sure if this is supposed to be a "gotcha", because it's not a good one.

Ice Lake lacks vPro feature weirdly so some laptops for business (like ThinkPad) don't adopt Ice Lake.

I believe intel marketing teams will sweat a lot in the coming years.

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