Skylake: Intel’s Longest Serving Architecture | Hacker News Reader

Skylake: Intel’s Longest Serving Architecture

chipsandcheese.com

67 pointsingve26 comments

Been rocking a 6600k for years now. Still powerful enough for my needs.

Same, but planning on upgrading

I finally upgraded from this a few months ago. Served me very well till the end.

Still gaming on AMD FX-6350 (3C/6T), paired with Nvidia GTX 1060 3GB. Kids are playing the latest MMO with no complain.

I'm still surprised myself whenever I realized this. I did buy it with the intention of using it for as long as possible, but 10 years is beyond even my expectation.

I'm posting this from a ~11 year old desktop computer with a i7 2600K. It is one of the very few components I haven't replaced.

Not sure if you're just remarking on running an older generation but to be clear the 2600K is Sandy Bridge.

My CPU is still good but my X99 motherboard is not doing too well and I can't seem to find any good replacements for it online. Bunch of dodgy ones on Ebay from China that are probably no better than what I already have. I wish I could find a brand new X99 motherboard at a reasonable price.

I'm still working and gaming on an i7 6700k (4C/8T @4.5 GHz) coupled with 16GB of 3200 MHz memory and it's doing a pretty good job at keeping my "I want to upgrade my PC"-money in my pocket. It'll eventually happen but as of now, I don't really miss the extra cores while playing "older" games.

I have to say I feel a bit guilty I am about to upgrade a couple machines at the house - My ancient i3 Linux laptop, my almost as ancient Windows desktop and my slightly less ancient i5 Mac Mini are all going to be remissioned in 2023. The Mac can't get macOS Ventura, the PC can't have Windows 11, and the laptop is showing some signs of wear (but still going strong, if slow, and doing what I need from it).

I'm still going strong with an i7-5960X (Haswell-e). Sure single threaded performance is not great compared to a brand new Ryzen or Alder lake, but it at least has 8 cores and is able to handle a beefy 30% overclock. Still runs fine with the vast majority of games and can handle my compiling needs well enough.

Biggest jump would be AVX512 support on the newer CPUs.

Still so surprised how much faster the Ryzen 5000 series was, and now the 7000 series and Intel's offerings are absolutely crazy. PCIE5 and gobs of RAM is a data nerds dream.

> Biggest jump would be AVX512 support on the newer CPUs.

Didn't this get removed from the "consumer" 12th gen Intel models?

Regarding the speed of the AMD 5000 series, I have to agree. I only touched a laptop part, and an U at that, but it was the first new CPU that impressed me. My daily driver before that was a 3rd or 4th gen Xeon, and it was faster than the i5 desktops we had a work.

They're very power-efficient too, which is great for a laptop if you hate fans like me.

I got a 5700U, and I still haven't heard the fan spin up on it, except for a 1s burst when you first turn it on.

Desktop (6700) and laptop (6600 U) is Skylake - still good enough for my needs although Microsoft might disagree on that for Windows 11.

In theory, yes. In practice, it works fine.

I've been running win 11 for my gaming needs on an even older Xeon (sandy bridge, so 4th gen, IIRC - the first one with pcie 3) with no issues. It has no TPM at all. I've updated it to 22h2 the other day. Works like a charm, and I almost enjoy using the latest update. I find it much less annoying than win10. In particular, the animations feel quicker.

Regular updates are showing up and installing through windows update. For the upgrade to 22h2 I had to make a usb stick with rufus (tick "disable win11 checks" or similar) and run the upgrade from there.

I updated my server to Windows 11 (Dell SFF hexacore i5 Intel 9800T) and it looks rather good.

I will give the unofficial upgrade a go once I have done boot drive backups.

It does seem speedier!!!.

„AMD is back again after more than a decade of struggling behind Intel, and more competition means better prices and better products.“

Except that new Ryzen platform cost is so high that Intel wins the bang-for-buck race, at least in the low-mid end. We didn’t get lower prices, but at least we got technological progress.

For a brief time with Ryzen 3000, AMD held the bang for buck. AM5 is a bunch of new tech all at once with the good OR of AND being a multithreaded king. It'll be interesting to see what there answer to p/e cores is..

I'm curious how much of the swing of pricing for Intel is better "material sourcing/economics of scale", or just digging into the war chest built up after a decade on top to counter the bad PR of locked features and high TDPs (thermals).

I wonder if the P/E core thing is here to stay. Sure, we had it for a while now on phones, but I'd say they are still a different target when it comes to the desire for power saving.

Overall they cause additional complexity for the chip itself, the OS scheduler, and software developers. See the whole AVX512 debacle. It seems like a quick solution, but once the performance race slows down again it might just make more sense to focus on making the fast cores more power efficient when under light load.

Power efficiency isn't actually the point on desktop. The point is that a Gracemont cluster is around the same size as a Golden Cove core, while being faster in multithreaded workloads. However, because they're slow at lightly threaded work you still need some really fast cores too.

Because Gracemont is so small, a chip can pack more MT performance for the same price.

Early adopter tax. DDR5, PCIE5, new CPU design was never going to be cheap for the first iteration.

It was a smart move of Intel to still support DDR4 with the latest gen, letting AMD take the hit for the initially high prices of a new DDR generation. Let's hope AMD at least got to simplify their chips a bit by going 5 only.

Comet Lake is not faster in most, if not all games than an 11900K with Adaptive Boost enabled. ABT was added post launch. Not to mention all the Skylake bugs that were finally fixed with Rocket Lake. It’s a much better CPU unless you’re coming from Reddit. Not to mention the platform finally got PCIE4 and TB4 among other overdue improvements.

When you add in the fact that it’s the only Intel desktop chip that supports AVX-512, Rocket Lake is pretty uniquely situated.

The overclocking crowd may have turned up their nose (to be fair Comet Lake can have excellent memory latency and speed with some tweaking), but folks who like to tinker with software and not worry about which thread scheduler the OS is running are well served by Rocket Lake.

I agree on all counts. I’m not sure why people are disagreeing with me without presenting evidence though. I have both a 10900K and 11900K. The 11th gen has better minimum frame rates and does better in 4K. They’re both good enough at 1080P. It also beat out my 5950X in single core while not as far back in multi threading as you’d think.

I’m skipping 13th gen because it appears it won’t have native Intel PCIE5 storage. But once they have that and add AVX512 back I’ll be upgrading one of these systems.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com