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Intel Hardware

Intel: We 'Forgot' To Mention 28-Core, 5GHz CPU Demo Was Overclocked (tomshardware.com) 165

Posted by BeauHD from the how-convenient dept.
At Computex earlier this week, Intel showed off a 28-core processor running at 5GHz, implying that it would be a shipping chip with a 5.0GHz stock speed. Unfortunately, as Tom's Hardware reports, "it turns out that Intel overclocked the 28-core processor to such an extreme that it required a one-horsepower industrial water chiller." From the report: We met with the company last night, and while Intel didn't provide many details, a company representative explained to us that "in the excitement of the moment," the company merely "forgot" to tell the crowd that it had overclocked the system. Intel also said it isn't targeting the gaming crowd with the new chip. The presentation did take place in front of a crowd of roughly a hundred journalists and a few thousand others, not to mention a global livestream with untold numbers watching live, so perhaps nerves came into play. In the end, Intel claims the whole fiasco is merely the result of a flubbed recitation of pre-scripted lines, with the accidental omission of a single word: "Overclocked." Maybe that's the truth, but there's a lot of room for debate considering how convenient an omission this is.
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Intel: We 'Forgot' To Mention 28-Core, 5GHz CPU Demo Was Overclocked More

Intel: We 'Forgot' To Mention 28-Core, 5GHz CPU Demo Was Overclocked

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  • Really? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by orlanz ( 882574 ) on Friday June 08, 2018 @07:50PM (#56753424)

    I was pretty sure it was way overclocked. Kind of thought it was obvious. They aren't working on anything in the 4GHz range so why would they suddenly jump to 5 for release?

    • Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Narcocide ( 102829 ) on Friday June 08, 2018 @08:04PM (#56753472) Homepage

      Pointy-haired bosses will nonetheless believe this is what they're getting when they buy their next round of office desktops without even considering AMD solutions.

      • PHBs seldom are buying from the 'tip' of the leading edge of processors. They buy what the PC vendors are integrating at a reasonable price, and based on a long term track record.

        • Nevertheless, they will remember to buy "Intel" because of this impressive 5GHz demo.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by JDeane ( 1402533 )

            Win on Sunday sell on Monday? I think it was NASCAR or something to do with racing. (not a race fan but I do remember that saying being said on TV or in a movie or something)

    • Re:Really? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by iggymanz ( 596061 ) on Friday June 08, 2018 @08:21PM (#56753534)

      well IBM power8 has 5GHz chip, what's Intel's problem

      • well IBM power8 has 5GHz chip, what's Intel's problem

        It's not Intel. It's those pesky customers who don't want a 190W TPD chip in their computers.

      • I mean, you can buy an AMD processor that runs at 4.7ghz with turbo to 5ghz right now at newegg:

        https://www.newegg.com/Product... [newegg.com]

        Released 5 years ago, June 2013.

    • Also, what could Intel possibly gain by lying? Of course the truth would come out, they would have to walk it back, look foolish, and apologize.

      It was mostly likely an unintentional omission, because that is the only thing that makes sense.

      Hanlon's Razor [wikipedia.org]: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence.

      • Updated: Intel's YEARS of insufficient management (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Futurepower(R) ( 558542 ) on Friday June 08, 2018 @09:36PM (#56753780) Homepage
        I've updated this from a comment I made before. To me, it seems like a more in-depth understanding of Intel's management in the past 15 years.

        Intel's insufficient management: Intel has had many years of insufficient management, in my opinion. [slashdot.org] (Jan. 22, 2018)

        Here is a comment of mine posted exactly 12 years ago: Lower prices are not the answer. Proposal. [slashdot.org] (June 9, 2006)

        Intel's poor marketing: It is not difficult to find other evidence of insufficient management at Intel. Since the beginning of this year I've gotten 40 poorly considered, poorly written marketing emails from Intel. Whoever writes those ads seems to have almost no technical knowledge and no ability with sophisticated communication. This is an amazingly foolish sentence from emails I got from Intel on March 6 and March 8, 2018: "Up your marketing game with segment-focused campaigns..."

        Recent background: Meltdown and Spectre: 'worst ever' CPU bugs affect virtually all computers [theguardian.com] (Jan 4, 2018) "Meltdown is currently thought to primarily affect Intel processors manufactured since 1995, excluding the company's Itanium server chips and Atom processors before 2013."

        Linus Torvalds Calls Intel Patches 'Complete and Utter Garbage' [slashdot.org]. (Jan. 22, 2018)

        Two previous errors in design of Intel processors: Pentium FDIV bug [wikipedia.org] (1994) and the Pentium F00F bug [wikipedia.org] (1997)

        More EXTREME evidence of insufficient management at Intel: Intel was aware of the chip vulnerability when its CEO sold off $24 million in company stock. [businessinsider.com] (Jan. 3, 2018)

        Will Intel be allowed to PROFIT from many years of producing processors with vulnerabilities? Will Intel be treated like U.S. banks in 2008, when many banks profited and many finance system managers got bonuses after the financial crash?

        If vulnerabilities are profitable, would Intel deliberately allow vulnerabilities in its products? Were the previous vulnerabilities deliberate? Did the CEO know about the vulnerabilities previously? Do others at Intel profit from the vulnerabilities?

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

          This would explain why they're going through bankruptcy proceedings. ~

        • Or perhaps we are simply hitting some technological roadblock. It seems to me that they (at Intel) are scraping the bottom of the barrel to stay on top, because the technological progress in the area (especially for the x86 architecture) is reaching a plateau.

        • Oh yeah Intel have a long history of management fuck-ups and their marketing is well and truly garbage directly contributing to killing some of their products.

          But take off that tinfoil hat for a second and look at the history of it's processor bugs:
          - The FDIV bug: A processor doing a normal operation can return an incorrect result. This is a breaking bug unrelated to a design feature and a recall was issued. Business as usual.
          - The F00F bug: While the result of the processor, it only happens when it is fed

          • I see some sense in what you said. However, when Steve Jobs was alive and healthy, he was good at making sure Apple was presented in a way that communicated well and efficiently. Part of the problem I see with Intel is sloppy communicating.

            Here is a discussion of the problems with the vulnerability called Meltdown, which you didn't mention in your comment: Meltdown and Spectre FAQ: How the critical CPU flaws affect PCs and Macs [pcworld.com].

            Quote: Meltdown "breaks the most fundamental isolation between user applic

            • Yes it does break that isolation. And it does so in a way that is almost impossible to exploit without someone having direct access to the computer already. Again if I were a cloud provider I would be pissed, general users, server administrators, and pretty much any scenario that doesn't involve handing your keyboard over to someone else while you leave them alone with your computer for a long time has nothing to worry about.

              And even if they were more seriously exploitable, side channel attacks are still fu

      • to lock people into Intel it's not like you can put an amd chip in an intel system or that your raid key will be needed.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by edwdig ( 47888 )

      They demoed the system in public. The case was open. There were large pipes running into it for the water cooling, and a large water chiller unit next to it. There were pictures of the setup included in the initial articles about it.

      They didn't explicitly state that it was overclocked because it couldn't possibly be more obvious.

      • As the manufacturer, Intel doesn't get the luxury of showing off overclocked perf. They are obligated to show what they can actually deliver and warranty. No consumer or business setup would run what Intel demoed. The chiller alone drew 1500 watts.....The PSU was rated at 3300 watts....https://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/news/event/1126665.html

        • Why? Overclock performance might be interesting to some use-cases, and if it runs stably, I'm not sure you can even say it is overclocking just because it's not running at the most efficient clock speed. Maybe the fancy high TDP setup is the design point and all the other uses are under clocking.

          Why shouldn't they demo whatever speed they want, as long as they don't try to hide the power and support infrastructure required to operate at that speed or use a specially-crafted use case that disguises stability

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by Anonymous Coward

            Maybe because it is unknown how long this system will be stable? You know - You can drive electronic devices like processors beyond their limits for a certain time, but operating all time beyond limits shortens the life expectancy dramatically. On top of that, the number of hardware faults will also increase. You certainly do not want to have that that in production/reliable environments.

            And third (and this is important) - If they do such a thing, it is obvious they choose a "perfect" sample from the batch

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Kjella ( 173770 )

        They didn't explicitly state that it was overclocked because it couldn't possibly be more obvious.

        True, but they also announced they'd bring it to market. It's a bit like demoing a customized race edition car and saying it's going on sale, while not explicitly saying that the street version will be much slower. If you search the net you'll find lots of false headlines like Intel to launch a 28-core monster CPU running at 5GHz later this year [techradar.com] which makes it a PR goof. Some think it was done with malice to steal AMD's thunder but I doubt the backlash is worth it, but those who do are now trying to make as

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Megol ( 3135005 )

      Simple: overclocked = clocked higher than specified as the normal operating range. Specified is the important part.

      So if Intel said that their processor could run at 5GHz when kept at (let's say) 20 degrees Celsius maximum and still be within specifications it wouldn't be overclocked.

      That's what everyone was thinking this was about, cherry picked processors from the very top bin deemed reliable if coupled to some extreme cooling system.
      The difference here is that Intel failed to mention that despite their h

    • Here are our thoughts on the whole scenario. It looks like Intel was caught off guard with no previously planning for a reveal because they weren't prepared to show a new CPU for future launch. It also looks like they are scrambling to design a processor so they can show something in Q3 when AMD decides to launch its new CPU line. In the process of this Intel decided to use a bit of a smoke screen with an 8176 Zeon processor to boast similar stats. It would have been more adventitious for Intel to state th

  • And it was a 32 core machine ... (Score:5, Funny)

    by perpenso ( 1613749 ) on Friday June 08, 2018 @07:50PM (#56753426)

    We 'Forgot' To Mention 28-Core, 5GHz CPU Demo Was Overclocked

    They probably also forgot to mention that it was a 32-core device with 4 faulty cores. ;-)

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Ecuador ( 740021 )

      And that you can't use it to divide floating point numbers if you care about the accuracy of the result ;)

    • Re:And it was a 32 core machine ... (Score:5, Informative)

      by alvinrod ( 889928 ) on Friday June 08, 2018 @08:40PM (#56753596)
      I would have assumed this was the case as well, but this is almost certainly one of their Skylake XCC (Extreme Core Count) chips that are used for the high-end Xeon processors that retail for around $10,000 depending on clock speeds. The cores are laid out on a 5 x 6 grid, but two of the spots are used for the memory controller. Here's a site with a good shot of the die [wikichip.org] and a diagram of the parts of the chip.

      I don't know what they intend to charge for this thing, but it's a full chip and utterly massive at almost 700 mm^2. I don't expect it to normally run anywhere close to 5 GHz as one of the tech sites pointed out that Intel was using a stand alone water cooler rated for about ~1700W and that the power supply for their demo was a 1600W job, but even having 28 cores at 3.5 GHz is an insane amount of computational power. I expect it to be priced similarly.
      • I agree with "an insane amount of computational power" but I think of it more in terms of a highly specialized application. For most users diminishing returns as you add cores will likely make the more powerful/expensive CPU not worth it. And for things that could benefit from highly parallel computation a GPU may have a better cost/benefit. Perhaps a virtual machine host would be an appropriate specialized application? Just speculating.

        • Re:And it was a 32 core machine ... (Score:4, Insightful)

          by Ramze ( 640788 ) on Saturday June 09, 2018 @04:14AM (#56754532)

          This wasn't a new chip -- it was a rebranded server chip overclocked to 5 Ghz using external -10 C (14 F) temp cooling system and a modified motherboard that could use non-ECC memory.

          No one would seriously purchase that abomination. It was meant as a distraction and a bit of marketing to compete with AMD's upcoming 32 core Threadripper 2 that was announced shortly after. It was literally a "hey, we got something that can compete with that!" pony show where no one talked about the cooling system needed to overclock it that high -- or even that it was overclocked. Inexperienced reporters ran with a headline that this was a new desktop CPU we might be seeing in the near future. Nope.

          They are already now fessing up that if this thing sees daylight, it won't be stock clocked to 5 Ghz -- you'd be lucky to see it at 3.7 Ghz with boost to 4.2 Ghz on some cores. It's literally nothing new and worse than AMD's threadripper model with more cores and made with a better manufacturing process.

          It's beyond BS when you take a chip already in use in servers, cherry pick one that has the best (almost miracle perfect) overclock capability and use what was basically a refrigerator to cool the water cooling system and hype it as a DEMO for some upcoming product. Tis vaporware to compete on paper with a soon-to-be shipping AMD product.

  • Because Chipzilla would never .... (Score:5, Informative)

    by UnknownSoldier ( 67820 ) on Friday June 08, 2018 @07:50PM (#56753430)

    /sarcasm Chipzilla would never [extremetech.com] resort to benchmarking shenanigans ... Oh wait.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      "Intel will pay affected consumers $15 if they purchased a Pentium 4 system between November 20, 2000 and June 30, 2002."

      LOL. Thats like getting a voucher to buy the next overpriced thing by the same company that just ripped you off.

  • Even then it is doubtful it can run at 5 ghz. It also is skylake technology and a 2 year old server chip. My citation is here [youtube.com].

    • Re:And cooled to -10C (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 08, 2018 @09:16PM (#56753710)

      No need to cite anything - one of Intel's engineers involved with the demo admitted as much already [youtube.com].

    • Even then it is doubtful it can run at 5 ghz. It also is skylake technology and a 2 year old server chip. My citation is here [youtube.com].

      Wouldn't be the first time someone got suckered by a modified demo. My citation is here [wikipedia.org].

    • Even then it is doubtful it can run at 5 ghz. It also is skylake technology and a 2 year old server chip. My citation is here [youtube.com].

      Even today Skylake is still the newest and fastest architecture Intel has. Kaby Lake is Skylake with upgraded process and slightly upgraded GPU. Coffeelake is Skylake-E and thus with slightly higher core count.

  • Totally a marketing stunt (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    To try and underplay AMD's 32 Core announcement.

  • I recall getting a turbo 486 back in the 90s, was shipped oveclocked. But didnâ(TM)t require a freaking mini fridge to make it sustainable

    • I accidentally overclocked my first 486 motherboard, back when a 486 motherboard was leading edge hardware. Basically, I hadet up the ISA bus clock multiplier wrong, so that the ISA bus was running at 12 Mhz. Because the cards I happened to have in my system worked, it made my system run with much faster bus i/o. (This was back in the era when motherboard settings had to have adjustments so that the isa bus would run at the correct 8 Mhz with varying CPU clocks)

      Eventually I acquired a card where it crashed

    • I remember those too! Turns out they were needed for backward compatibility with software expecting slower processing [homeip.net]. So, it would be more accurate to say your computer back then had more of an underclock feature.

      Of course, marketing made a hash of that.
  • Was the secret water chiller covered by national security?

    In Soviet Union Siberia cool smuggled western CPU for you.
    In Capitalist west secret water chiller design use kept from you.
    • Cool fact (no pun intended), the cooler tech used for Intel's overclocked Pentium chip uses the same tech invented in the early 1900's to cryogenically preserve Rasputin's penis in a secret vault in the Kremlin
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • leave Burger King alone, the deep fried fries taste better

    • macdonalds forgot to mention 100% beef meant they used the entire cow. which is why their burgers taste like sh1t.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        How do you know what sh1t tastes like?

        • 90% of taste is the smell.

          • You definitely have NOT tasted shit, if you think it's only 10% worse than a fart.

            • you actually taste with your sense of smell/nose for the most part. Your mouth/tongue is only capable of very basic senses ,sweet/sour/salty/bitter/savoury. Not that I want to try it but if you block your nose then I imagine shit would actually be in difficult to differentiate from many other foods you actually enjoy.

              • Re: in other news (Score:1)

                by Anonymous Coward

                I can tell you from (now ex) pals im the SM world, that blocking the nose is not enough, as the gases will slightly creep up into the nose from the back of your throat.
                You need to be drunk as fuck too, literally numbing your senses ;)
                But honestly, it was actually scientifically shown, that horniness raises the bar on what you find disgusting. Which is why all those dirty things become OK during sex.

                The hurt starts, when you remove the nose blockage before washing your mouth thoroughly. ^^

                Yeah, never do it t

    • walmart "forgot" to mention the picture on the box was only representative and not the actual product. Flag as Inappropriate

      Video game cartridges of the 1980's. Disappointment haunted all my dreams.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

        Let's face it, 99% of 8bit games were dreadful cynical throw-togethers with some fancy artwork on the cover to sucker people into buying them. A bit like what Steam is becoming with their refusal to do anything about asset-flips and the like.

        • Most if not all the 8-bit systems of the 80's had so little ram that it was actually not easy to write even bad games for them.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

            Bubble Bobble, Bards Tale, Repton, Chuckie Egg & Chuckie Egg 2 and Magic Mushrooms are some of the ones I can remember as being good.

            • Some were so bad they were good, like "Caber Toss" (from some Scottish Highland Games collection, iirc). It's weird the stuff you can find at yard sales...

  • So will the new CPU come with a bottle of two stroke oil so you can gas up the chiller and try it out right away?

  • Since we've been stuck just below 4GHz on production consumer CPUs for like 15 years now, getting above that would be a pretty significant achievement worthy of a Nobel Prize or something (exaggerating), omitting saying it's over clocked is pure marketing trickery. Fucking marketers, I hate em.

  • Intel just wants a PR win so bad

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by HiThere ( 15173 )

      It probably works. The question is at what price and for how long.

    • Intel doesn't care much. The 'opponent' AMD may produce a fine product, but not in a significant enough market segment for Intel to bother caring about. I am not some big Intel fan saying this, just a disinterested observer (the first x86 processor that I can remember noticing I was running that was an AMD part was an 8088 chip).

      AMD/Intel fanboys in threads like this are like dogs in the street chasing motorcycles. Get a clue, just get on an Intel or AMD bike and go for a ride. It's much more fun than huffi

  • I forGOT.....that robbing the liquor store is illegal

    -Steve Martin

  • Halfassed SPARC (Score:5, Insightful)

    by nbvb ( 32836 ) on Friday June 08, 2018 @10:25PM (#56753898) Journal

    So, Intel demos a halfassed SPARC chip.

    Even freakinâ(TM) Oracle can ship a 32-core, 5GHz monster of a chip ...

    Intel needs a gigantic cooler for a one-shot demo of a chip with less cores and no DAX accelerators.

    My how the mighty have fallen.

  • Hashtag No Shit (Score:3)

    by Chas ( 5144 ) on Saturday June 09, 2018 @03:29AM (#56754452) Homepage Journal

    Is AMD REALLY causing you to fill your drawers that badly?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Khyber ( 864651 )

      *looks in desk drawer, full of AMD CPUs*

      Well, yea, until I can get some nitric acid to strip the gold off these bitches.

  • Looks to be the same "leaving a word out" flub that left the "a" out of "One small step for "a" man...etc." But I don't buy it. Was the word used in any written data on what they were doing?

    Just an aside: Who says the transistor concept has to be implemented in the physical world? Do switches and amplifiers actually have to be physical? Just wondering. It is a thought that occurred to me several years ago. Are there already non-physical "transistors" out there?

  • I'll take an AMD EPYC 32 core and overclock that bitch!

  • How absurd. First off, what's with the "one-horsepower" nonsense? That's 750 watts, quite a bit for a cooling solution but well within what a single wall outlet provides and really not surprising. Second, what does "industrial" mean here? What would be "industrial" about any cooling equipment able to be powered off a residential wall outlet? Third, why call it a "water chiller"? They know what it is, down to the exact model, and it's not called that. It's not "industrial" either, it's a PC-class prod

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by LWATCDR ( 28044 )

      "This is standard overclocking stuff and has been for many, many years."
      No, you are wrong.
      "The attempt here is to suggest that abnormally massive cooling equipment is required when that is not supported by the facts."
      No, you are still wrong.
      Can you config it on PCPartspicker? Can buy it on newegg?
      Let's just march down the line of overclocking, shall we?
      Level 1. Aftermarket air cooler like the Cooler Master 212.
      Level 2. Massive aftermarket air cooler like the NH-D15
      Level 3. AIO water cooler like the H100. Ye

  • Anyone could have made it.
  • The entire "controversy" around the initial presentation of the system before the details were known was a complete non-issue. Anyone who follows current pc hardware and CPU trends and news knew immediately that it was an overclocked system, or at least they should have.

    There were of course a bunch of wishful thinking fanboys and ignorant forum warrior types who immediately started with the "omg I can't believe this, I can't wait to buy one!" crap, but they were all just being delusional. Intel had just

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