Ian Cutress, writing for AnandTech:
Intel's 8th Generation Core microarchitecture will remain on the 14nm node. This is an interesting development with the recent launch of Intel's 7th Generation Core products being touted as the 'optimization' behind the new 'Process-Architecture-Optimization' three-stage cadence that had replaced the old 'tick-tock' cadence. With Intel stringing out 14nm (or at least, an improved variant of 14nm as we've seen on 7th Gen) for another generation, it makes us wonder where exactly Intel can promise future performance or efficiency gains on the design unless they start implementing microarchitecture changes.
The hope is that RYZEN will be good
By Ecuador
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2017-Feb-10 10:35
• Score: 3
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The hope is that AMD's RYZEN will be good enough to compete with Intel in performance - not just price. That will wake Intel again, since they are always relaxing when there is no competition i.e. no motive to do something more.
Good Analysis
By Anonymous Coward
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2017-Feb-10 10:48
• Score: 4, Interesting
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Yesterday prices were leaked on AMD Ryzen. For equal peformance, the AMD parts are abot 70 percent cheaper. Intel has been goofing off for several years now. Tweaking process improvements is not innovation. Intel's Architecture is tired and needs to be rethought. I'm really surprised that Intel has been caught with their pants down.
Re:Translation...
By Glarimore
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2017-Feb-10 11:11
• Score: 4, Interesting
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Okay fine, so 4th gen isn't literally faster than 8th gen, but I agree with what OP is getting at... What the graph you posted is best at showing is that Intel CPU performance improvements have been paltry for the past six years.
According to your graph, the new Kaby Lake 7700k is only ~55% faster than my 2nd generation Sandy Bridge 2600k. Which means that between January 2011 and January 2017, Intel performance improvements for like-for-like CPU's has been about 7.5% per year, which is pretty shitty. It's not that 8th gen is going to suck as bad as 7th gen -- it's that both 7th gen and 8th gen suck as bad as everything Intel has released fort the past six years.
Re:Translation...
By alvinrod
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2017-Feb-10 13:10
• Score: 5, Interesting
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It's actually worse than that though if you're just looking at the architecture. The 7700k has a 20% clock speed advantage over a 2700k, which means that their architectural improvements aren't even 7.5% per year. Both of those chips exist within a similar TDP bracket as well (91W vs. 95W) so it isn't as though Intel has been using process improvements to offer the performance at lower power consumption levels either. And that's only certain benchmarks as there are others where Intel's older chips perhaps only fair worse by single digit percentages once accounting for clock speed differences. Sandy Bridge was a great chip for overclocking and it wasn't difficult to get as much as 4.4 GHz without putting a lot of effort into it. Some enthusiasts have been able to get up to 5 GHz with a good chip and cooling solution. The newer Core i7 chips usually require de-lidding since Intel uses a substandard TIM which doesn't transfer heat effectively enough.
Intel needs a new microarchitecture to replace Core. Core was an exceptional design, especially considering what it replaced and how much the early performance gains were like if you bought an early Nehalem CPU. Hell, even Core itself traces its roots back to the P6 microarchitecture after Intel abandoned Prescott (which was sold as the Pentium 4 back in the wild days of the clock speed wars) which goes back decades. It's pretty clear that Core is tapped out in terms of what can be squeezed out of it and Intel needs to go back to the drawing board like AMD did and use all of the lessons they've learned to make a new architecture.
Even if AMD's offerings aren't quite as good as Intel's, they'll still be closer than they ever have before and it will allow AMD to challenge Intel in their high-margin consumer market segments or in markets were AMD hasn't been relevant in years. Intel could afford to tread water while AMD was using their failed Bulldozer architecture, as Intel would just as gladly sell you a 4 year old CPU as a new one if the prices hadn't moved much, but now AMD is going to erode those price points or offer a competing product if they don't undercut Intel. Intel will still have a process advantage with their own fabs, but they need a new architecture to widen the gap if they want to have any hope of maintaining their profit levels.
Kinda bad news
By cfalcon
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2017-Feb-10 13:32
• Score: 3
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When Intel struggled to get Broadwell out, their die shrink to 14nm using the architecture that they made in Haswell, you knew that they were having at least some issues. When it turned out that Haswells almost exclusively didn't properly support the new "transaction memory", to the effect that the opcodes had to be patched out, that was also kinda depressing. Skylake, their next in line, and the newest architecture update, was the last time they have even vaguely been on schedule.
Right after skylake, they announced that, instead of a die shrink to 10nm, they would add a new "optimization" step, and continue to tweak skylake instead of shrinking it. This is kabylake, which just came out in desktop and laptop properly (Xeons lag behind normally: the full suite of Skylake Xeons should be launching in a few months). They redid all their slides to show a full new arrow, giving them effectively another year to do the die shrink. Now that we are getting close to seeing what would be the next guy ("cannon lake"), who properly should be launching later this year on 10nm, we first heard that they were going to insert a "coffee lake", which would be another optimization at 14nm, for desktop, and that only laptop and low power chips would actually be on the 10m "cannon lake". And now, we find out that the first 10nm will be out for datacenter, which means an even further push back.
Summary: their older slides used to show around a summer 2016 launch for their 10nm process. Then it became a summer 2017 launch, then that became only a partial launch, and now it is looking like a spring 2018 launch. The words change, but the message is the same: "We aren't close to having 10nm be actually profitable, or possibly even all that functional".