Intel Discloses Detailed Skylake Architecture Enhancements 53
MojoKid writes: Intel is still keeping a number of details regarding its complete Skylake microarchitecture and product line-up under wraps for a few more weeks, but at a public session at IDF, some of the design updates introduced with Skylake were detailed. Virtually every aspect of Skylake has been improved versus the previous-gen Haswell microarchitecture. I/O, Ring Bus, and LLC throughput has been increased, the graphics architecture has been updated to support DX12 and new eDRAM configurations, it has an integrated camera ISP, support for faster DDR4 memory, and more flexible overclocking features. All of these things culminate in a processor that offers higher IPC performance and improved power efficiency. There are also new security technologies dubbed Intel Software Guard Extensions (Intel SGX) onboard Skylake, which support new instructions to create and isolate enclaves from malware and privileged software attack, along with Memory Protection Extensions (Intel MPX) to help protect stack and heap buffer boundaries as well. A new technology, dubbed Intel Speed Shift, also allows Skylake to switch power states faster than previous-gen products, controlling P states fully in hardware, whereas previous-gen products required OS control. The end result is that Skylake can switch P states in 1ms, whereas it takes roughly 30ms with older processors.
Motherboard compatibility? (Score:1)
I recently bought a socket 2011-v3 motherboard and put a "low-end" 6-core CPU on it. I wonder if this Skylake can be considered an upgrade path..
Re:Motherboard compatibility? (Score:5, Insightful)
I wonder if this Skylake can be considered an upgrade path..
That would violate Intels strategy, which is never allow a realistic upgrade path.
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It's socket LGA 1151. New motherboard likely.
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I wonder if this Skylake can be considered an upgrade path..
That would violate Intels strategy, which is never allow a realistic upgrade path.
I'm not even entirely sure you *need* one any more. I'm writing this on a first-gen i7-920 - not overclocked - I put together in 2009. It's STILL "fast enough" for pretty much anything, even without a GPU upgrade in the past three years. And I use it primarily for games (the only one that utterly crushed it was ARK:SE).
I am planning to upgrade within the next few months, now that Skylake and Win 10 are here, but the primary driver for that is moving from spinning disks to a good NVMe-based system, not becau
Re: Motherboard compatibility? (Score:1)
No it's not. You'll need to wait for Skylake-E or whatever they will call it. IMO it won't be worth it.
Re: Motherboard compatibility? (Score:5, Funny)
You'll need to wait for Skylake-E or whatever they will call it.
Sheesh. Skynet. They're going to call it Skynet.
Re:BMI/BMI2 (Score:4, Interesting)
From the errata:
Executing CPUID with EAX = 7 and ECX = 0 may return EBX with bits [3] and [8] set, incorrectly indicating the presence of BMI1 and BMI2 instruction set extensions.
Attempting to use instructions from the BMI1 or BMI2 instruction set extensions will result in a #UD exception.
and in the errata summary, its currently labeled NO FIX so they dont even have a fix that will trap the exception and emulate the instructions (which would perform terribly anyways... but hey, working is better than not working.)
No G.P.P., no deal. (Score:2)
Wow. Really? It's taken less than a generation (Score:2)
Sorry Intel, not enough (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Sorry Intel, not enough (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds like the last few generations - lots of incremental improvements and excellent technology but wont amount to much of a difference in general performance.
Actually they've made quite substantial improvements, but Intel is using that to deliver 105% of the last generation's performance with far less resources. A 32nm Sandy Bridge (i7-2700k) is 216 mm^2, a 14nm Skylake (i7-6700k) is 122.4 mm^2. So on the same wafer Intel can produce 75% more processors. By letting AMD pave the way with APUs they've force-bundled integrated graphics killing low-end discrete chips without an antitrust whimper, almost 20% on Steam now game on Intel and Skylake adds 25% more shaders with 20 vs 16 EUs on regular desktop chips.
Perhaps the most important part of the Skylake announcement has gone largely unnoticed because we haven't seen it in any actual product yet is that Skylake will go up to 72 EUs, as opposed to 40/48 on Haswell/Broadwell. Since Broadwell quad core chips only launched a few months ago, the real comparison is Haswell which means a 72/40 = 80% increase in shaders, clearly Intel is planning to take the midrange laptop graphics too. A fully stacked Skywell seems to be a nVidia 950m-class competitor, both around 1100 GFLOPS and 26 times more powerful than "Intel HD Graphics" from five years ago.
Basically, we're being used. I think Intel knows as well as we do that no matter how fast they released processors people aren't going to throw away their three year old computer anymore. They'll sell new processors when the old go out of service or the market expands, not because it's outdated. So they're using their strengths for profit and market gain, because what's your high end alternative? It's either Intel or an extremely old FX processor or a severely under-powered laptop chip. They know your business is not going anywhere, it's only a matter of how long they need to wait.
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Depends on who's performance you're talking about. As a user of intense image editing software I would welcome more, bigger, better and faster and look forward to upgrading my several generations old system to this.
As a gamer I couldn't care less.
Re:Slower in games, faster in vector maths (Score:4, Insightful)
Intel's pricing (and refusal to offer 6-core mainstream parts) is a consequence of Intel's effective MONOPOLY in the x86 space. AMD's current CPU offerings are a BAD JOKE, offering around 50% per core of Intel's core performance. No serious PC gamer would opt for anything less than a true 4-core i5. AMD isn't even in the picture.
So why did I pay less for my i7 a couple of years ago than I did when I bought my Pentium-4 back in the days when AMD was actually competitive?
Intel's current competition is ARM, not AMD.
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It's AMD not ARM. ARM is not competing in the desktop world.
Nor is AMD.
The difference is that ARM could compete there, and replace the 90% of desktop systems that don't need much CPU power.
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Historically and hysterically stupid post.
Yes, yours is. But what about mine?
Why would Intel not be charging more for a current i7 than they used to charge for a Pentium-4, if they had no competition? AMD has nothing in that market, and, even in lower-end markets, they barely compete on performance and are vastly more power-hungry.
If Intel started charging $1000 for an i3, the market would be flooded with ARM desktops by Christmas.
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HOWEVER, what gamers want is a decent priced (sub 200 dollar) mainstream i5 with SIX true cores.
6 isn't enough of a jump over 4...
Give me 8 true cores and 16 threads, remove the IGP which I don't need for such a CPU...
Yes, yes, I know, Xeon and Haswell-E, but the reality is that the "need" for 8 core chips won't really happen until more of them hit the desktop market, and what AMD sells as 8 core doesn't count.
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Re:Slower in games, faster in vector maths (Score:5, Informative)
If there was ever a true multi-threaded application AMD would take the prize. As such Intel dominates because of single threaded applications.
There are embarrassingly well-threaded applications where AMD does well. The x264 encoder does a fantastic job and hammers all 8 of the cores in my FX-8320 at >90% utilization, and it was cheerfully faster at that than the i5 3570K I used to keep around. But IPC does ultimately win out, and Haswell's AVX2 support is sufficient to let an i5 4690K generally pull out ahead of my FX. That's especially true on interlaced media, where the deinterlacer's essentially single-threaded and the rest of the chip's basically waiting for that single core to finish before tackling the rest of the workload. For most other uses it's somewhere around a Nehalem quad core: certainly fast enough for what I do, but the overall performance outside of niche applications isn't impressive in absolute terms. At least it took to undervolting well, and it's a friggin' behemoth for virtualization.
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There are embarrassingly well-threaded applications where AMD does well. The x264 encoder does a fantastic job and hammers all 8 of the cores in my FX-8320 at >90% utilization, and it was cheerfully faster at that than the i5 3570K I used to keep around. But IPC does ultimately win out, and Haswell's AVX2 support is sufficient to let an i5 4690K generally pull out ahead of my FX.
Try that same task on a i7 4790k and see even more speed... that is exactly the task that hyperthreading is for.
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If there was ever a true multi-threaded application AMD would take the prize. As such Intel dominates because of single threaded applications.
Actually, it still generally doesn't...
An Intel Core i7 generally is faster than a 8 core FX chip, even in really, really well threaded applications.
The Intel chip is SO MUCH better per core and with the help of hyperthreading, it still wins.
Of course, this is all a moot point, if you're serious about such work, you're at least on Haswell-E with 8 true cores and 16 threads, or you're on a Xeon and this isn't even a conversation worth having.
For pure speed, it is all Intel.
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I agree with all of what you've said...
AMD has a problem in that I think they are serving an ever smaller part of the market, the middle...
People either now want low power draw with "enough" performance, or they want "give me all you've got" performance, while not being totally stupid about the power.
Keep in mind that Haswell-E draws 30% less max power than the top AMD FX chip does, while crushing it in performance. Granted, it costs 5 times as much, but frankly if you're buying a machine for 3 years of us
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HOWEVER, what gamers want is a decent priced (sub 200 dollar) mainstream i5 with SIX true cores.
6 isn't enough of a jump over 4...
For most home / personal computing (including high end video games) diminishing returns [wlu.edu] kick in hard past 4 cores. The problem is that in the few cases where tasks can be easily subdivided so as to utilize more than 4 cores, the cores will normally be stuck waiting for memory updates which continues to lag (speed / throughput wise) behind processor compute ability at an increasingly large gap which spans orders of magnitude. Of course the only known way to speed DRAM is to utilize more power, which goes aga
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I love fast computers, personally I have a 6 core i7-5930K, and the performance difference for most home/consumer applications is so trivial that I don't notice a difference over using a 4 core i7-4790K except for in parallel benchmarks.
Of course you don't, because you're at the bleeding edge...
The same was true when the Q6600 (Quad Conroe) launched, it simply didn't make a difference over the E6600 (Dual Conroe) due to the programs we were running at the time.
Windows 10 has much more potential than Windows XP did. Between OneDrive keeping it all synced, Cortana always listening, and the 20 other things running in the background, a core or 2 is busy quite often.
I have many machines used for production and testing, and I can now tell the d
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I haven't read all of Intel's releases this week, but one area I'm interested in is seeing how eDRAM (embedded DRAM) aka Crystal Well technology is going to end up being available and utilized across the Skylake line. In memory intensive benchmarks eDRAM has already shown considerably improvement in memory constrained benchmarks in Broadwell mobile processors, wheere it acts as an additional level of cache.
The lag in DDR memory hasn't improved in a long time. The speed is faster, once you get a transfer going, modern DDR3/4 memory is rocket fast. The challenge is that the speed to the first byte hasn't improved for a decade, largely due to the latency and distance of the memory from the CPU, among other things.
eDRAM is a welcome change and frankly I expect to see more such improvements in the future as they run into various walls of physics, ranging from the size of atoms to the speed of light.
Something tha
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My AMD system works just fine for games. Not sure what you're doing wrong.
Unless you're just trolling with the "no true Scotsman" argument.
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When I noticed my pc wa
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LLC? ISP? WTF? (Score:4, Informative)
"Limited Liability Corporation" and "Internet Service Provider" don't make much sense, but then again I'm pretty far behind the times on CPU architecture. Who knows what coprocessors they're spending their insane transistor budgets on these days.
OK, "ISP" appears to mean "Image Signal Processor". "LLC" could mean "Last Level Cache" or "Logical Link Control". "Last Level Cache" makes more sense in context, though this is the first time I've seen that phrase. Usually cache levels are explicitly numbered (first, second, third, etc).
It looks like they spelled out everything else except "IPC" which is obviously(?) "Instructions Per Cycle".
Good job there, author, submitter, and editor!
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Fuck Slashdot, I'm taking my eyeballs and clicks to an aggregator that provides a way to learn more about something if I'm interested. Like this new hyperlink thing I've been hearing about.