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Intel Businesses Hardware Technology

Intel Hits 50 Years and Its CPUs Hit 5.0 GHz (venturebeat.com) 161

Posted by msmash from the pushing-the-limits dept.
Intel will turn 50 next month, so to celebrate that, its CPUs are hitting 5.0 GHz for the first time, it said. At Computex event in Taiwan this week, the chipmaker announced the limited edition 8th Gen Intel Core i7-8086K processor, the first-ever CPU from the company with a 5.0GHz turbo frequency. From a report: Intel, of course, is the world's biggest chip maker, and its fortunes are wedded to the success of the personal computer. "As we transition to the data-centric era, the PC remains a critical facet of Intel's business, and it's an area where we believe there are still so many opportunities ahead," Bryant said. "Today, at Computex in Taipei, I shared our vision for the future of the PC and introduced a wide range of new technologies that will help us and the broader ecosystem make this future a reality. One that transforms the PC from a simple computer into a platform that can power every person's greatest contribution."
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Intel Hits 50 Years and Its CPUs Hit 5.0 GHz More

Intel Hits 50 Years and Its CPUs Hit 5.0 GHz

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  • Oracle already has a 5.0 GHz chip on the market (Score:5, Insightful)

    by NFN_NLN ( 633283 ) on Tuesday June 05, 2018 @10:45AM (#56730814)

    "SPARC T8-2 Server Specifications
    ARCHITECTURE
    Processor
      Thirty-two core, 5.0 GHz SPARC M8 processor
      Up to 256 threads per processor"

  • Skylake again (Score:3)

    by Artem S. Tashkinov ( 764309 ) on Tuesday June 05, 2018 @10:45AM (#56730816) Homepage

    It's the same Skylake uArch which debuted three years ago and naturally this particular CPU is affected by both Meltdown and Spectre. It's still an accomplishment though since it's the first ever consumer CPU to run at a such an insane clockrate.

    Oh, and it will be available in very limited quantities.

    • Re:Skylake again (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 05, 2018 @10:56AM (#56730884)

      and naturally this particular CPU is affected by both Meltdown and Spectre

      Yeah, but it does it faster. So....there is that.

    • I'm sure they shrunk it down to 7nm to hit 5GHz. And the very limited quantities is probably because they already anticipate production problems.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by EvilSS ( 557649 )
        These are just binned 8700K's which already run a 4.7Ghz boost. They didn't change die sizes for some one-off run.

        • Do they not create a die for an existing CPU when testing a new process? Seems like you wouldn't want to troubleshoot a new design and a new size at the same time. This might be just a die created for R&D.

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by EvilSS ( 557649 )
            Highly unlikely. They might base a new process of an existing design but there is still a bunch of retooling that needs to be done. I doubt they would release some one-off chip based on an existing design as their first chip. This is just a 0.3ghz increase in the base and boost clocks so it's not like it's a massive increase.

    • This still has the NSA-required flaws, so they are unlikely to actually 'fix' any of the pending issues until people stop buying servers.

      I'm done with intel for a while.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      5GHz is only the turbo frequency though, meaning it can only do it on one or two cores and only for a limited amount of time without extreme cooling.

      Given that it's crippled by Meltdown I think I'll take much cheaper Ryzen or Threadripper with more cores and especially more PCIe lanes.

      • Re:Skylake again (Score:5, Informative)

        by EvilSS ( 557649 ) on Tuesday June 05, 2018 @11:40AM (#56731204)
        Or you can get the Workstation Xeon they just showed off that runs 28 cores at 5GHz on all cores. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-cpu-28-core-5-ghz,37201.html

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by Entrope ( 68843 )

          You will almost certainly be able to buy two or even three nicely outfitted Threadripper 2 workstations for the cost of that CPU alone. Intel sells 28-core Xeons now, but they aren't anywhere near 5 GHz, and they cost about $10k each.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by EvilSS ( 557649 )
            Probably, but if you are looking at 28 core CPUs, it's because you have a highly multi-threaded workload and nothing AMD can currently touch this new chip. It's not always about price.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Entrope ( 68843 )

              To be honest, nothing Intel can currently touch this new chip either, because they won't be selling it for about six months.

              If your workload is that parallel, there's a reasonable chance you can farm it out to multiple machines.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by EvilSS ( 557649 )

                To be honest, nothing Intel can currently touch this new chip either,

                How so? Since this is just a unlocked 28 core Xeon re-purposed for workstations. A chip you can buy today if you have $10K burning a hole in your pocket.

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by Entrope ( 68843 )

                  Intel's current 28-core Xeon runs at 2.1 GHz (3.8 GHz turbo), not 5 GHz. Intel said that this CPU would be released in Q4 of this year. Take off your fanboi hat for a moment and pay attention.

        • From your link:

          "EDIT: According to this image we sourced from Engadget's compressed keynote video on YouTube, Intel apparently was running some sort of closed-loop cooling that required insulating material around the tubing. This could be a multi-stage phase cooler (sub-zero cooling), or possibly a more mundane water chiller, under the table."

          Either way, it's probably not even close to ready for deployment in actual servers at 5 ghz across the board if they need a cooling system with insulation on it to get

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by EvilSS ( 557649 )
      Coffee Lake, not Skylake. It's most likely just a binned 8700K with slightly higher factory clocks. Also, again, this is just the single-core turbo boost clock speed, the base clock is 4GHz.

    • Oh, and it will be available in very limited quantities.

      I guess that's a good thing considering there's going to be very limited demand.

    • I mean, except for the AMD 9590 from June 2013...

      https://www.amd.com/en/product... [amd.com]

  • Yay! Progress! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by NoNonAlphaCharsHere ( 2201864 ) on Tuesday June 05, 2018 @10:47AM (#56730826)
    Intel celebrates 50 years, and the 8086 Instruction Set Architechure celebrates 45 years.

    • Re:Yay! Progress! (Score:4, Insightful)

      by religionofpeas ( 4511805 ) on Tuesday June 05, 2018 @11:12AM (#56730986)

      Compatibility is a nice feature, and it's a testament to the design that they could remain compatible for so long.

      • While true, computer chips today would likely be significantly higher-performing if Motorola had came ahead in the early microprocessor days, with its 68000 series processors. A good fraction of modern x86 designs is dedicated to instruction translation. The Motorola 68000's instruction set was much more forward-looking, and requires less translation. If the research and money that had been dumped into x86 had instead been dumped into improving the 68000, computing might be pretty different today.

        But tha

        • Myself, I was a big fan of the Z8000 ISA. Orthagonal, well thought out, great register set, almost pre/early-RISCish, word-sized instructions, not some random mixture of 1,2,3,4,8-byte instructions, none of that REPNE SCASB bullshit...

  • Turbo frequency (Score:5, Funny)

    by MrL0G1C ( 867445 ) on Tuesday June 05, 2018 @10:51AM (#56730854) Journal

    Will I need to hit the turbo button on the front of the PC to get this 'Turbo frequency'?

    • I'm both old enough to remember those and young enough to remember how I thought it was a dumb idea. Thankfully processors change clock speed based on actual load now.

      • Re:Turbo frequency (Score:5, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 05, 2018 @11:30AM (#56731136)

        I'm both old enough to remember those and young enough to remember how I thought it was a dumb idea. Thankfully processors change clock speed based on actual load now.

        Turbo button was for legacy compatibility, A lot of old games used cycle based timing, so on a faster cpu the game ran too fast. Hit the turbo button to slow down cpu and voila, scaling based on load wouldn't work for that use.

        • This makes sense. Cycle based timing. What a quaint concept.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by ledow ( 319597 )

          Lots of games did a lot of similar things, right into this decade.

          Go run the original C&C or Red Alert on a PC. Despite being available for Windows 95 (and thus much faster chips than anything a Turbo button was designed to cope with), you still have to play with "scroll speed" at the very bottom and "game speed" somewhere about half-way (top is way too fast, and the graduations are enormous between settings)

          The timing was nowhere close to actually being based on wall-clock time, despite things like pr

          • A while ago, Origin (I think they owned it at the time), released the original C&C for free. So if you're getting nostalgic, you can get your fix for free.

            With that said, the game did run much better on my old 700MHz Celeron system than it did my more modern system, though part of that may have been because that computer has Windows 98SE on it. As it was, I originally played the game on a Pentium 75, and while that was a long time ago, I don't remember any performance issues.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by ledow ( 319597 )

              That's the EXACT re-release I'm talking about.

              No, it still needs patching to even run on some systems, using the some 10+ year old third-party patches, and still has the speed problems.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by dfghjk ( 711126 )

          This is true, but legacy compatibility also meant hardware support. Peripheral hardware would frequently not work at higher speeds either, including hardware supported in the BIOS.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by sconeu ( 64226 )

          Similarly, the old SCO Unix (back when SCO was merely stodgy and not evil) had a timing loop in the Adaptec 1540 and 1740 drivers, and would fail on boot on a 486/DX-66 (and probably others, but I'm just going from personal experience)

          The fix was to take the system out of turbo mode, boot from the floppy, patch the driver image; reboot in turbo mode and install. Patch the driver image on the hard drive and relink the kernel; and then reboot in turbo mode.

          The key thing is that the turbo switch was necessary

  • In 2000, when I was still getting used to saying Gigahertz instead of Megahertz, and they'd bounded up from triple digits to quadruple digits in the span of just a couple of years, it seemed like 3, 4, and 5, GHz processors ought to be just around the corner. I can remember being mystified and disappointed as the path to 2 GHz became increasingly asymptotic. That had been the key metric for so long, watching computer manufacturers re-spin their marketing to talk about other features, or start plugging dual

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Octorian ( 14086 )

      Oh, they got up there quite quickly. But they had to make some bad architectural shifts to do it (the P4), which actually hurt overall performance. When they finally recovered from that, the march became a lot slower.

      • It was only a few years between the 1 GHz PIII and the single core 3.8 GHz P4, which held the x86 clock speed crown for close to decade. Of course, that wasn't the plan. Intel knew the P4 wasn't very efficient, but they thought they could ramp it up to 10 GHz and beyond so it wouldn't matter than the initial sub-2.0 GHz P4's weren't that impressive next to the final generation PIII's. Obviously that didn't work out for Intel.

  • I though we got off the mhz (Ghz) myth. (Score:3)

    by jellomizer ( 103300 ) on Tuesday June 05, 2018 @10:58AM (#56730900)

    Is this the early 2000's where we were all drooling over the faster hertz speed of the clock.

    We have been parallelizing the chips and software for over a decade now to reach meaningful speed improvements, while not really caring much about the clock speeds. This approach actually has been a good thing, it allowed great improvements in mobile chip design which cannot draw tones of power and doesn't need a radiator to keep it from melting itself.

    • A doubling in clock speed is always better than a doubling in cores (all other things equal). The only reason we're focusing on cores now is because single-threaded speed hasn't been able to increase much.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

      Silicon is the limiter, other elements heat up less with current going through them and could potentially reach speeds up to 100ghz AFAIK.

    • Yea, but now I have to fire up my gas heating in winter all the time! You insensitive clod!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Raenex ( 947668 )

      while not really caring much about the clock speeds

      Speak for yourself. I'm still waiting for my 10GHz CPU. Decades of exponential clock speed improvements were a glorious thing.

      I'm typing this comment on a machine from 2008, and the only thing it really needs is more RAM. Of course I don't use it for gaming, as that would be a graphics card issue.

      It used to be desktop computers were considered outdated after 3 years.

  • Bah! (Score:2)

    by cruff ( 171569 )
    I remember when all we had was a paltry 1 GHz clock speed, and we were happy to have that. Get off my lawn!

  • They missed an opportunity (Score:5, Funny)

    by tadas ( 34825 ) on Tuesday June 05, 2018 @11:10AM (#56730966)

    I really wish they'd built a chip that ran at 4.77 GHz...

  • These are 6 core/12 thread CPUs running at 4.0ghz base clock and 5.0 ghz SINGLE CORE boost. Basically it sounds like they are binned 4700K's. Run is limited to 50,000 units. https://www.anandtech.com/show/12875/intel-announces-the-core-i78086k-coffee-lake-at-5-ghz [anandtech.com]

  • average cycles per second per second (Score:3)

    by sugar and acid ( 88555 ) on Tuesday June 05, 2018 @11:29AM (#56731126)

    Obviously the growth in clock speed has been exponential (moores law) and goes in major steps process and design changes, but for fun, the linear average increase in clock speed since the launch of the intel 4004 in 1971 (740khz) to the present top line chips (~4.3 Ghz) is 3 Hz per second. Or 3 more cycles per second per second.

    • no, clock speed the one thing that flattened out years ago, about 2004

      • Intel top line CPU speeds have gone from 3.8 to 4.3 ghz in the last 10 years. That is still 2 hz per second increase over the last 2 years.

        • of course the important thing is how much work a CPU can do, a phrase that could give a notion of that graph's increase over the years would be more meaningful

  • Thermal Loads (Score:3)

    by ytene ( 4376651 ) on Tuesday June 05, 2018 @12:38PM (#56731626)
    This is going back a bit, but the 5GHz threshold is important for another reason... I'm trying to find the exact reference, but back around the time that AMD first released the Athlon CPU, I recall someone from the technology press writing an article which extrapolated what would happen to processor TDPs as clock speeds increased. Obviously we have to bear in mind that die shrinks and improved lithography, better materials and the like all help to drive up the performance-per-watt scale, but this magazine projected that if CPUs [of the day] were ever to scale up to 5GHz, then the thermal-output-per-square inch, extrapolated from the CPU die size, would actually exceed what is found inside a fully-active nuclear reactor.

    The amazing thing, then, is not simply that Intel have managed to ship a 5GHz part, but they have done so whilst essentially keeping the thermal profile of the chips more-or-less uniform for a good part of the last few years. In some ways this thermal efficiency is even more impressive than the outright clock speed; it talks to the materials science, packaging design and overall cooling effectiveness, that we've now come to expect from our current crop of processors.
  • that these are the first Intel chips to come *out of the box* running at 5 GHz, but I've been running my i7 7700K Kaby Lake at 5 GHz stably for more than a year now, so somehow doesn't seem like that big of a 'wow' to me. Now run them at 6 GHz, now we're talking.

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