>"As mentioned, 10th Gen Comet Lake is, by and large, the same CPU core design as 6th Gen Skylake from 2015. This is, for lack of a better explanation, Skylake++++ built on 14++. Aside from increasing the core count, the frequency, the memory support, some of the turbo responses, and enabling more voltage/frequency customization (more on the next page), there has been no significant increase in IPC from Intel all while AMD has gone from Excavator to Zen to Zen 2, with sizable IPC increases and efficiency improvements. With Intel late on 10nm, Comet Lake does feel like another hold-over until Intel can either get its 10nm process right for the desktop market or backport its newer architectures to 14nm; so Intel should be trying its best to avoid a sixth generation of the same core design after this."
Intel iterates more on its naming scheme than CPU's these days. At least it fits well with the "its over 9000" meme, which would make a great commercial for these chips. It is impressive they managed to make a chip that uses 250 watts, I never managed to get my overclocks that high.
And I guess all those warnings they gave us about "overvolting" for decades were bullshit ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ . Everything comes overclocked from the factory now. They're using the same tech as the Haswell days. Back then they told us core voltages over 1.2 were unsafe and now they run 1.3 from the factory. Lol
Sorry I just love throwing shade on Intel, they've been a predatory monopoly for ages. Purposely turning off ECC on everything except ungodly expensive server chips. Changing sockets on a schedule to force you to buy more shit, sometimes by moving a single pin. Forcing vendors to sign agreements not to use AMD. Allying with MS to corner the market with Wintel. "Management Engine" can't be shut off. Attempted to segment 64 bit market with Itanium, leaving consumers on 32 bit seemingly forever. Encouraging developers to use their compiler that purposely cripples non-intel CPUs. Showing demos at shows that are secretly water cooled and overclocked.
Intel is a shitty company. I'm glad their foray into mobile devices flopped. I hope they lose tons of market share
While true, I am still impressed by Intel engineers in terms of performance they are able to extract out without arch and process change. i9-10900k beats i7-6950x by a good margin for most tests, both being 10C CPUs.
6950x was Broadwell-E not Skylake.. usually the prosumer chips on the bigger socket are the last gen architecture (or a generation ahead branding wise, depending on how you look at it). So despite 6700k being Skylake, 6950x was not.
The 7900x is a 10c/20t Skylake part and would be a better comparison in this case.
This is true in a way, but at the same time they mostly achieve it through overclocking. The cost is massive power consumption. I'm curious how one of their brand new chips would perform next to one from 5-7 years ago overclocked to the same core speed.
I would imagine that this is what Jim Keller is working day and night at Intel to avoid. I’m really looking forward to what comes out of his work at Intel. Competition is good.
Interesting! Do you have any anecdotes that you can share about his recent roles at AMD and Tesla? From public information, he was the designer of the Zen microarchitecture at AMD.
I don't think so. Intel's problem here is not that they were unable to design new architectures with all the cool features. Intel's problem here is that they were unable to actually manufacture that design.
Jim Keller is a chip designer. But even if he manages to design something that is leaps and bounds ahead of everyone else, it won't matter if Intel is unable to manufacture it.
Totally understand that Intel's manufacturing problems are a really important factor here, but GP was talking about their lack of IPC gains, which is exactly the kind of thing I would imagine they hired Jim to solve.
I think the confusion is because the chip design is tied to the manufacturing process. Intel likely has IPC gains in their new architecture for 10nm, but they can't manufacture that yet, and they can't just build it on 14nm instead without significant work to port the design to the new process node.
Thanks for clarifying things; as a software guy this is all in the realm of "magic" to me :) Do you have any pointers to layperson things that I can read about microarchitecture design improvements and process nodes?
For beginners, just go through the list of article on Anandtech would be good enough for most. From IPC, uArch to Fab, that would take at least a few weekends to get a meaningful understanding. After that Wikichip is a more intermediate+ level site.
I just want to add additional information to your parent, it is not quite Intel cant manufacture it yet, they have it on mobile, called Ice Lake, and Tiger Lake coming later this year. So that is 2 generation ahead of its desktop counterpart.
Well, this has been the discussion about porting it to 14++, but presumably they need a higher density to cram a bunch of extra transistors into the design. Hindsight at this point, but a big rich company like intel, should have had a fallback plan to port it to 7nm (or whatever) at TSMC a couple years ago to keep the pipeline full.
It would have been a huge black eye, but at least they would have been moving forward while they straighten out their own manufacturing story.
>"As mentioned, 10th Gen Comet Lake is, by and large, the same CPU core design as 6th Gen Skylake from 2015. This is, for lack of a better explanation, Skylake++++ built on 14++. Aside from increasing the core count, the frequency, the memory support, some of the turbo responses, and enabling more voltage/frequency customization (more on the next page), there has been no significant increase in IPC from Intel all while AMD has gone from Excavator to Zen to Zen 2, with sizable IPC increases and efficiency improvements. With Intel late on 10nm, Comet Lake does feel like another hold-over until Intel can either get its 10nm process right for the desktop market or backport its newer architectures to 14nm; so Intel should be trying its best to avoid a sixth generation of the same core design after this."