Intel Rolls 14nm Broadwell in Vegas | Hacker News Reader

Intel Rolls 14nm Broadwell in Vegas

eetimes.com

67 pointsmatt4254 comments

Jesus. When I worked at Intel, .18 to ~.14 MICRON chips were a big deal. (I think that was the jump then... I am a bit foggy, this was in 1998).

I also recall when I was there having conversations and hearing the questions of "Why don't we just stack multiple processors on a single die?" -- and how some people thought that was going to be impossible.

When I started building computers in '04, I remember the old Newcastle AMDs were 130nm, and the new Hotness was Venice/San Diego 90nm. Now we have 32nm in Haswell, 14nm in Broadwell.

This is interesting:

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2012/05/14/intel-proce...

(For anyone fuzzy on the units, that's 180nm to 140nm.)

Notable: these are all just low-power ultrabook range CPUs.

If you want high-power Broadwell CPUs that go into regular faster notebooks (e.g. Macbook Pro, workstation Thinkpads, all gaming notebooks like MSI, Gigabyte, Asus, Clevo, Alienware, etc), you will need to wait at least till mid 2015.

Basically if you do anything non-trivial with CPU (gaming, rendering, compiling), Broadwell CPUs launched so far are not interesting for you, you will need to resort to old Haswell CPUs.

Intel's marketing managed to downplay this pretty well, most of news didn't really notice this.

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Source: Intel Broadwell presentation slides

http://www.notebookcheck.net/fileadmin/Notebooks/Sonstiges/P...

My Macbook Pro Retina 13" comes with a 28 W TDP processor which the slides you cite promise at end of Jan.

http://ark.intel.com/products/75990/Intel-Core-i5-4258U-Proc...

Hopeful to see rMBR 13" soon thereafter.

> "2/3 of the processor are dedicated for graphics"

That makes me sad. I would like to see a desktop version that instead puts in more cores or whatever as when combined with any video card (GTX XXX or AMD XXX) 2/3 of the processor are simply not used!

Not me; I want a thin retina laptop with long battery life...

Agreed, Imagine an MBP in an Air form factor with the same battery life. I'd buy that in a heartbeat.

All of the products on sale now are amazing - stop chasing that dragon :-)

The latest Airs are way more powerful from the MBPs of yesterday.

As long as "retina" means "high pixel density" and not necessarily an Apple product, how about the new Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon? http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/01/hands-on-new-lenovo-t...

I'm under the impression that Apple is the only company with decent software support for "high pixel density." Is that not the case?

High-DPI PCs have been out for a couple of years. I don't have firsthand experience, but it's my understanding that while the Windows world had to play catch-up, it's fairly decent today. Linux support for high DPI varies depending on the desktop environment (I've heard it's abysmal to mediocre).

Windows support for high DPI (4k) is absolutely terrible! I recently tried setting up an MSI Ghost GS60 4k [1] for a client. By all means it was the greatest laptop I'd ever seen, until we came head-on with Windows 8's terrible (absolutely terrible) support for 4k screens. Scaling was inconsistent and several business applications did not scale at all, rendering them unusable with no viable alternative (apart from using an external monitor).

[1] http://usgaming.msi.com/Product/2014/Notebook/GS60-Ghost/

Oh wow, Lenovo finally got out of its own way. At least from a quick surface glance. I spent a few days looking for something for me to just type on. I gave up and got a new SSD for my X201 last night. But the heat is unmanageable (under warranty I had the fan replaced thrice, to no real avail).

Still, one can hope this is a good sign and I'll be able to get a non-suck, non-Apple, 12 inch machine this year.

Edit: Apparently it's a max of 8GB RAM which would be a huge sacrifice. FFS, Lenovo.

I'm still rocking my T410. With 8 GB of RAM and an SSD, it does quite well. However, I really want to get a lighter laptop with a high-DPI screen. Before Lenovo's recent announcements (the T-450 also looks quite good) I wasn't sure where to turn when my T410 no longer sufficed.

Yeah the older ThinkPads are perfect if they just had a tech refresh. The screens are useless, and the limit on CPU and RAM in them hurts, too.

I'm really annoyed. I went on to Lenovo right now to buy the new X1 - best news I've had all year. I go to select RAM, and it's capped at 8GB. Just to run my two dev machines I need at least 12GB (full Linux GUI + full Windows, dev setup in both). Pretty lame. (The new X250 is also capped at 8GB, doesn't offer a high-def screen. The new T450 fixes RAM, but apparently has only 1600x900 pixel screen, much less a proper 3K display. The T550 offers high-def screens, but has an offset keyboard. It's like Lenovo is just flailing around because there's no competition. ffs.)

I might get it anyways as my secondary in-bed laptop just to jot notes and code on, but at $3000 ($3388 with 3yr warranty) properly kitted, I expect more.

I've found 8GB to be acceptable for me, but it does seem strange that they would cap it at 8GB. And at this point, they should be offering high-DPI screens as an option on every ThinkPad model (or at least the T, X, and W series). My $400 phone should not have a better-looking screen than my $2000 laptop.

Have you seen the new xps13? 13.3in 3200x1800 screen, in an 11in form factor has been announced.

If they allow >8GB RAM and have a proper keyboard+trackpoint combo (with actual buttons instead of trying to copy's Apple's design) - sold.

Well, that's where the gains are still to be had (whether we want them or not).

I'd rather have a better GPU than 6 more CPU cores that would always be idle. It's great that Intel is taking integrated GPUs this seriously. Also keep in mind that these are not desktop CPUs, but ultrabook class CPUs.

"dedicated for graphics" may be a bit misleading considering the Execution Units (EUs) also do non-graphics computations using, say, OpenCL. This is especially true with the shared memory structure. Although, yes, most end-user software doesn't support heterogenous computing well yet.

They do. Check out, for instance, the i7-5820K/5930K/5960X (despite their names, those are Haswell though - Broadwell parts in that vein have, indeed, not been announced yet).

It's called a Xeon, and rest assured those will be coming as well.

Not even Xeon, 15W and 28W are mobile processors, not desktop.

I understand that the chips mentioned in the article are for the ultrabook market. But Intel will roll out the 14nm architecture to its entire line.

The comment I was responding to expressed a desire for no die space dedicated to graphics and perhaps a doubling of the cores. That is the recipe for a Xeon. The highest end i7s omit an iGPU as well, and go up to 8 cores currently, so I should have mentioned those as well, but a Xeon will go up to 18 (based on a quick check of their server CPU specs - I could have missed a larger one)[1].

[1]http://ark.intel.com/products/family/78583/Intel-Xeon-Proces...

> That makes me sad. I would like to see a desktop version

And you will see it once desktop versions are released. TFA is about 15W and 28W notebook parts. Haswell's desktop TDPs start at 35W.

While on average CPU's do not represent significant power draw anymore, it is worthwhile to remember the "on average" part. As soon as you load your system battery life drops down by at least half, so any kind of efficiency gains are awesome.

If you're already on Haswell, or even IVB, Broadwell isn't worth it. I'd wait for Skylake.

Why?

In general, Intel processors only improve about 5% per year. Thus it's not worth replacing an Intel PC if it's only 1-3 years old.

Skylake will be able to run external 5K displays, more (smaller) CPUs will be quad cores and it has support for DDR4. By then you'll also get a lot more machines with the new USB Type C connector.

So is this a breakthrough in transistor size? Why or why not? How did they overcome all the challenges they were saying in the 2000's that they would have to reach this size?

Billions of dollars and thousands of PhDs. Considering that 14 nm is about a year late, clearly there are some challenges left to fix.

Will Intel build any NUCs with these chips? I was thinking of buying one with the current generation and would rather wait if they have any plans.

http://www.techspot.com/news/59328-intel-updates-nuc-lineup-...

Intel's entire product line will be refreshed with Broadwell... eventually.

> While the new Core line has modest improvements in productivity, Intel hopes battery life gains will encourage users to buy new devices, said Karen Regis, director of notebook roadmap and strategy for Intel's PC Client Group.

It says right in the article that it doesn't have major improvements in performance (like all of its chips since SNB), so why would it matter that you have Broadwell in a NUC?

Intel is focusing on reducing power with all of its new generations for the most part, and is only slightly increasing GPU performance with each new generation (20 percent or so, for the same class of chips).

Lower power would be nice for the energy savings and reduced fan noise. I'd like to get one of these as a Linux home server.

They are already announced: http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/nuc/overview.html

I was hoping for deeper tech dirt and architecture commentary from eetimes. This article didn't say anything I didn't read in Ars Technica yesterday. :-/

No HEVC decoding?

From AnandTech's coverage (http://anandtech.com/show/8814/intel-releases-broadwell-u-ne...):

Support for HEVC is also present in terms of a combined (hybrid) hardware and software solution, just as it was on Core-M. Intel stated that as parts of the H.264 algorithm are near if not identical to those of the H.265, with a small tweak to the hardware it can be used for both. This is still not an all-encompassing hardware acceleration, but it does aim at some parts of the codec. I would speculate that if a full section of the silicon could be made for complete hardware acceleration, it might eat into certain power budgets.

Thanks. I'm not qualified to discuss this, but Apple did include hardware decoding for HEVC on the iPhone 6, and they're extremely power-conscious.

Everything is coming together for a new Macbook Air. I'm expecting a super thin Macbook Air with a radical new design. They are removing the Fn keys from keyboard to make it simpler. This is what I heard from someone inside.

> They are removing the Fn keys

Well that's going to be fun.

Maybe pressing fn+1 would produce a F1?

They would be removing the Fn key, which would mean the F-keys would go as well. So just brightness, volume, etc., along the top.

You could probably still switch to the old F-keys in Keyboard Settings though.

So then, there will be software you can't run without attaching an external keyboard?

Yeah. Well technically you'll be able to run it, and probably use it via menus and buttons, but some keyboard shortcuts won't be accessible.

Mostly cross-platform stuff I'd expect, can't think of any OSX software using function keys, but some of Firefox's developer tools are bound on F-keys for instance.

I expect the removal of the Fn key itself, and the function-toggling, but for the top row to remain (in a smaller format than the current one). That would be in keeping with Apple's moving of "function keys" to the background and hard-coded toggles (volume, media controls, …) to the foreground.

That's the point. They're taking away the fun keys.

Wow that's so radical! /s

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