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Comment by guardiangod | Hacker News Reader

i7-10700K to the i7-11700K

    Single thread floating point: +19.0%
    Multi-thread floating point: +19.5%

    Single thread integer: +13.0%
    Multi-thread integer: +7.3%

Jesus. Just overclocking the RAM for the 10700k would give a similar performance increase. Along with 291W, this 10nm->14nm backport is not working out well for Intel.

PS My work desktop died on Wednesday afternoon during the SpaceX SN10 flight. I rushed to my local computer store to replace it. Out of the entire store, only 2 motherboards models with Intel's LGA1200 are in stock. All the other motherboards on the shelf were for AMD.

I picked the i5 10400f as it's under deep discount. I asked around and everyone agrees that Intel is competing only on price point right now.

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Why didn’t you just go with AMD?

just a guess, but if he went to the store looking for an LGA1200 socket motherboard, he wasn't planning on purchasing a new CPU as well

In his last paragraph, he said he bought a new processor. Or at least, he suggested a purchase by referring to its discount using present tense.

Assuming that you're thinking they'd be looking at a R5 3600 ($179.99). For gaming the 10400F ($109.99) is basically on par with the AMD. AMD is only worth it for productivity related task, and only then it's a ~15% performance hit.

> Why didn’t you just go with AMD?

It's out of stock everywhere..

I think Ryzen 5000 series' stock situation is getting better, both 5600X and 5800X has been consistently in stock in Belgium and Netherlands for about 2-3 weeks.

OP is implying the i5 was Pareto-optimal in terms of price and performance.

Exactly. In 2020 the 10400f was about 40% more expensive; now Intel is forced to lower the price of their entire lineup to compete against AMD. These days, at most performance tiers, Intel+mobo combo are slightly cheaper than AMD's equivalent.

Of course, Intel's CPUs have less PCIE lanes, no ECC support, lessor upgrade path, generates more heat, etc.

Finally my old desktop was Intel and I am working on a lot of kernel/VM stuff. I don't want to switch architecture halfway. I did that before and it was painful.

> Finally my old desktop was Intel and I am working on a lot of kernel/VM stuff. I don't want to switch architecture halfway. I did that before and it was painful.

What? Aside from edge-cases resulting from slightly divergent microcode implementations you should not be dealing with that. They are both x86-64. (Forgive me if I am missing an elephant in the room.)

my memory is that the some of the Intel and AMD architecture extensions (including the various virtualization extensions) are incompatible.

> These days, at most performance tiers, Intel+mobo combo are slightly cheaper than AMD's equivalent.

> Of course, Intel's CPUs have [...] lessor upgrade path

One big + for AMD is their socket system, and keeping it the same for multiple generations via a roadmap so people can plan. Contrast that with intel, who comes up with a new socket every generation forcing you to buy a new motherboard and likely new ram if you want to upgrade. AMD's Socket AM4 was released in 2016 and works with Zen+, Zen 2, Zen 3 and Excavator microarchitectures. If you upgraded every 2 years, that's 3 motherboards and memory sets you would have had to purchase if you went with Intel vs a single motherboard/memory and upgrading only the cpu with AMD. That's quite a premium.

Just a small correction, most of the AM4 motherboards released in 2016 and 2017 do _not_ run Zen 3. Only few vendors (I think ASRock is the only one?) added support for Zen 3 on B350 / X370 / A320. The rest only added support on B450 (2018) / X470 (2018) / B550 / X570 / A520. If you were one of the original Zen buyers in 2017, you are unfortunately limited to Zen 2 CPUs, unless if you had an ASRock motherboard.

Generally true but Ryzen 5000 series is expected to last gen runs on AM4 platform due to DDR5 is coming.

Is it a backport? I read somewhere that it's a continuation of Skylake evolution and not a new architecture.

According to the article,

"The new generation Rocket Lake is the combination of two different backported technologies. Intel took the Sunny Cove core from 10nm Ice Lake, and re-built it on 14nm, calling it now Cypress Cove. Intel also took the Xe graphics from 10nm Tiger Lake and re-built those on 14nm, but these are still called Xe graphics."

So, yes, it appears to be a backport.

Rocket Lake was designed for 10nm, but Intel couldn't get 10nm to work, so they backport Rocket Lake to 14nm.

https://semiaccurate.com/2020/10/29/intels-palpable-desperat...

Just filter out Charlie Demerjian's grudge against Intel.

Companies don’t backport because a core is designed for a process. It’s efficiency and architecture is based on the transistors that it will use from the design start, caches are sized based on the process too, and a lot of the architectural gains are due to the added transistor counts. If you backport a CPU you lose the efficiency of these new transistors so the energy use goes up and the clocks likely go down as well. Cores take up 2x the size, or at least a lot more than the older core did on the older process, so costs go up too. You can either cut out bits of the core and lose performance or eat it on area and therefor cost. Backporting a design not made for portability isn’t a lose/lose proposition, it is a lose/lose/lose/lose proposition. But Intel is desperate so…

Grudge or not, it's not like he's been wrong the last few years. Turns out all the negativity is well justified...

Yep, he's been saying the sky was falling for some time, and it turns out he was pretty accurate in his statements on Intel's problems.

This review makes it clear that unless Intel magically gets a process improvement they're entirely screwed.

This is precisely the same kind of design issue that hit with the latter end of the P4 era, where thermal limitations were so severe that they were crippling the chips. I'd have to do some digging, but I absolutely remember reading an interesting set of benchmarks that made it clear that you were 99% likely to thermally throttle those P4s even with proper thermal paste and an improved high-end heatsink/fan.

Are they really?

AMD will make gains for sure at this rate, but TSMC can't serve the whole market. Intel owns fabs, and these rocket lake chips will sell to the mainstream just fine.

I expect intel's fabs to be a big asset in these COVID times with sold out computers.

This chips really don't seem to be a good use of Intel's limited fab capacity. The CPU cores are substantially larger while offering basically no benefits other than AVX-512 support. It looks like Intel would have been better off pairing the upgraded IO and integrated graphics with their existing, smaller Skylake cores.

https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph16535/111160.png

Pretty much every Rocket-lake score is faster than Skylake across the board.

I'd definitely buy a Rocket Lake over any old Skylake based off of these reviews. Rocket Lake seems a wee-bit inferior to Zen3, but AMD Zen3 is pretty much sold out, so if you need a computer, Intel is still there.

But Intel doesn't need the incremental performance increase in order to sell their processors. With AMD so supply-limited, Intel should be trying to sell smaller, cheaper processors that they can produce in larger volume with higher margins.

> Pretty much every Rocket-lake score is faster than Skylake across the board

Except for gaming, where rocket-lake is across the board slower. Which is important since gaming was Intel's last holdout prior to the arrival of Zen3. So if you're gaming this is worse, and if you're not gaming why would you go with this over a 3900x at basically the same price? Even verse skylake if you're doing productivity stuff a 10920x seems likely to be consistently faster thanks to 50% more cores (and way way more pcie lanes if you're into that)

The only reason to get this seems to be if the unique combination of avx512, no ECC, and only up to 8 cores is somehow ideal for your use case.

Ignoring both sides of the performance debate entirely, Intel found a way to increase utilization of 14nm process in a time when sector-wide demand exceeds supply. It seems very smart to use 14nm because it presents a lower opportunity cost versus getting worse yield on 10nm process node and taking capacity away from laptop chips, an area where AMD has been struggling to meet demand.

TSMC is making huge investments into new fabs. And AMD doesn't have to take the whole market. They just have to take enough that Intel loses too much economy of scale to sell at profitable prices. Intel's fabs don't mean anything if their volumes are too low-- and they're dropping rapidly.

Their fixed costs & massive R&D requirements have to be paid for by shrinking revenue: Projected 1st quarter 2021 revenue is down about 12% over the same quarter in 2020. This isn't COVID-related: AMD's projected revenue for the same period jumped 80% year over year.

Intel is far from okay. They are far from having a safe path due to production bottlenecks by competitors: TSMC's 7nm capacity-- which is what AMD uses-- is on track to increase 18% in just the next quarter alone. I don't know how sustainable that production growth is, but it doesn't have to last long when they're bringing new fabs online and Samsung's fabs may be taking on some of Apple's M1 production, further freeing up TSMC capacity.

I don't think I'm saying anything particularly controversial or surprising or new when I say that Intel probably has about 2 years to figure out their own fab problems before they're well out of things for the next decade or so, having to claw their way back the way AMD has done.

Well he is also the guy who kept saying that the snapdragon 810 was fine well after everyone knew that it had major thermal issues.

If you read the first page, it'll tell you?

> My work desktop died on Wednesday afternoon during the SpaceX SN10 flight.

What happened? I’ve never seen a computer die during use.

Didn’t you see the video? It blew up

Spend enough time in front of a specific computer (or little time in front of a lot of different computers) and you'll eventually come across the same thing. In my (around) 20 years in the industry I've had (mostly laptops) die for various of reasons, most often the motherboard and screen giving out, but also the CPU and harddrives. Happened a few time with desktop computers that been 24/7 under stress as well.

>Just overclocking the RAM [..]

>My work desktop died [..]

Are these related, perhaps? I found the juxtaposition quite humorous.

For better comprehensibility, some Geekbench 5 avgs & another layout:

         10700K  11700K
  single  1,321   1,767  +33%
  multi   8,821  10,474  +18%

Geekbench 5 is skewed because the 11700K uses the AVX-512 unit for the AES test. It scores 4x over previous gen now, and that skews the whole end result.

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