Intel Unveils Roadmaps For Core Architecture and Atom Architecture (anandtech.com) 60
Intel on Wednesday surprised a number of people when it shared not one roadmap on CPUs, but two. AnandTech: For the high performance Core architecture, Intel lists three new codenames over the next three years. To be very clear here, these are the codenames for the individual core microarchitecture, not the chip, which is an important departure from how Intel has previously done things. Sunny Cove, built on 10nm, will come to market in 2019 and offer increased single-threaded performance, new instructions, and 'improved scalability'.
Willow Cove looks like it will be a 2020 core design, most likely also on 10nm. Intel lists the highlights here as a cache redesign (which might mean L1/L2 adjustments), new transistor optimizations (manufacturing based), and additional security features, likely referring to further enhancements from new classes of side-channel attacks. Golden Cove rounds out the trio, and is firmly in that 2021 segment in the graph. Process node here is a question mark, but we're likely to see it on 10nm and or 7nm. Golden Cove is where Intel adds another slice of the serious pie onto its plate, with an increase in single threaded performance, a focus on AI performance, and potential networking and AI additions to the core design. Security features also look like they get a boost.
The lower-powered Atom microarchitecture roadmap is on a slower cadence than the Core microarchitecture, which is not surprising given its history. The upcoming microarchitecture for 2019 is called Tremont, which focuses on single threaded performance increases, battery life increases, and network server performance. Based on some of the designs later in this article, we think that this will be a 10nm design. Following Tremont will be Gracemont, which Intel lists as a 2021 product. Beyond this will be a future 'mont' core (and not month as listed in the image).
Willow Cove looks like it will be a 2020 core design, most likely also on 10nm. Intel lists the highlights here as a cache redesign (which might mean L1/L2 adjustments), new transistor optimizations (manufacturing based), and additional security features, likely referring to further enhancements from new classes of side-channel attacks. Golden Cove rounds out the trio, and is firmly in that 2021 segment in the graph. Process node here is a question mark, but we're likely to see it on 10nm and or 7nm. Golden Cove is where Intel adds another slice of the serious pie onto its plate, with an increase in single threaded performance, a focus on AI performance, and potential networking and AI additions to the core design. Security features also look like they get a boost.
The lower-powered Atom microarchitecture roadmap is on a slower cadence than the Core microarchitecture, which is not surprising given its history. The upcoming microarchitecture for 2019 is called Tremont, which focuses on single threaded performance increases, battery life increases, and network server performance. Based on some of the designs later in this article, we think that this will be a 10nm design. Following Tremont will be Gracemont, which Intel lists as a 2021 product. Beyond this will be a future 'mont' core (and not month as listed in the image).
More pci-e lanes? (Score:2)
More pci-e lanes?
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you pay more for that or go AMD
The hell? (Score:5, Funny)
A Slashdot article that links to the very previous Slashdot article??
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intel's marketing department is on the hot seat..
perhaps they're of the belief that the more bullshit you shovel, the more you can cover up a decade of security woes and your more-recent production issues that allowed your only competitor to get a jump on you.
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10nm (Score:2)
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The Apple A12X Bionic is a 64-bit ARM-based system on a chip (SoC) designed by Apple Inc. It first appeared in the 11.0" iPad Pro and the third generation of the 12.9" iPad Pro, which were both announced on October 30, 2018.[88] It has four high-performance cores and four high-efficiency cores. The A12X is manufactured by TSMC using a 7 nm FinFET process, the first to ship in a tablet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A12X
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Apple / TSMC is already at 7nm in their Bionic 12, does that not count?
No, it doesn't. I mean, it does, but it only counts as 10nm. To be fair, their yields are better than Intel's, but their feature sizes are comparable so calling one 7nm and one 10nm is really 100% BS.
P.S. This comes up in literally every conversation on this topic because other people are making the same mistake you are. Most of them are Apple fans, too.
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I am an Apple and Linux fan and use both RHEL and OSX daily. Apple products work better for me than other OSs, and when I get home I don't have the patience to deal with Windows. YMMV and all that. We need OS options, a monoculture OS is as dangerous for everyone as a monoculture with seeds and for mostly the same reasons.
Is Meltdown addressed? (Score:3)
I wonder if Meltdown is fixed.
Re:Is Meltdown addressed? (Score:4, Informative)
I wonder if Meltdown is fixed.
Should be according to the PCWorld article:
"Sunny Cove will also be the first CPU cores to include hardware mitigation for Variant 3 and L1TF side-channel attacks that goose data by exploiting how CPUs prefetch data to improve performance."
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I have a hard time parsing th last 3 lines, the CPU seems to be running below its minimum frequency!
Most software is signle thread. (Score:5, Insightful)
The biggest problem I see that most software is build around single threads. Back in the day I took Parallel processing course as an elective for my undergrad. It was a small class, (As its time conflicted with the graphics class, which was much more popular) however it really opened my mind on the actual power of Parallel processing. However most application that are running just use one thread, and you can see only one CPU doing all the work, so while the process may take a long time, it doesn't get split up.
I am happy to see more focus on single core speed because unfortunately that is still needed.
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For performance single threaded speed isn't that important for many applications. More threads and PCIe lanes is likely to help more, especially with NVMe and 5/10 gigabit network interfaces.
Software development: Multi-threaded compilation is pretty common.
CAD: All the major software is multi-threaded or not CPU bound now.
Video encoding: Multi-threaded and offloaded to the GPU.
Gaming: Well optimized games are heavily multi-threaded.
Servers: Textbook multi-threaded application.
Browsers: Since Firefox Quantum
Web Workers (Score:2)
Servers: could be multithreaded, but in practice many loads are not.
At least for web servers, PHP runs in a multiprocess model, and the PostgreSQL or MariaDB server runs in a separate process.
Browsers: JavaScript.
Script is multithreaded by operating in multiple documents, and even script within one document is multithreaded through Web Workers.
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Since all modern games consoles and all modern gaming PCs are multi-core all modern games are optimized for multiple threads.
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Put it in the libraries / servers, and use them (Score:3)
Most applications spend most of their time in standard libraries, or should. (Some silly developers implement sort themselves, repeatedly).
If popular libraries used parallel programming, applications would get most of the benefit for free. Sorting is a good example because it's expensive, but like many expensive operations it's already implemented in the library.
A huge percentage of code is now run behind a web server, as a web service / microservice / whatever, or some other type of server. The developer
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My system on
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Threads are not always the only answer to parallelism. With tools like OpenCL that takes advantages of GPU cores we can take more of a SIMD (Single Instruction Multi-Data) approach to coding.
In many ways this makes it easier, because there is less of a timing issue and conflicts that can go on. Because you are sending one instruction at a time, however it in parallel are doing it with multiable data sets.
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Most complex software is multithread. (Score:2)
The biggest problem I see that most software is build around single threads.
That's not a big problem, because most single-thread software doesn't consume much CPU. Most software which does need a lot of CPU is parallelizable, and in fact that has already been done. CODECs, compression algorithms, compiles, renders, photoshop filters... all are already multithreaded.
For the average user, literally the only thing they are doing which would benefit from more single thread performance is gaming. Ultimately gaming still comes down to single threads for single jobs, like rendering. That'
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The biggest problem I see that most software is build around single threads.
And we haven't run one piece of software in a long time.
*Posted from a machine that currently is using 30% CPU in another application on it's own single thread for a virus scan.
Atom (Score:2)
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So, nothing really new until 2021 (Score:4, Interesting)
So, until Golden Cove shows up, it will be tweaks and adjustments to what is currently out there, which hasn't been much of an improvement in over three years now. The people at AMD will probably be celebrating, because that means they have 2019 and 2020 where Intel won't have a significant design improvement to compete with their Zen2 based products that will be out in the next quarter(exact timeframe should be announced at CES).
Cache improvements....yea, it will help, but won't be a significant redesign of the CPU design.
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RISC-V is going to revolutionize everything.
It might, but at best that revolution is probably a decade away.
Does Intel sound a bit desperate? (Score:3)
No matter. They screwed over their customers the last few years, and hence I will not even remotely consider buying from them now.
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Both my newish miniture media server and pretty old desktop use AMD, on purpose, to avoid Intel's lies. And to encourge competition. (It does help they were also not too expensive...)
Unfortunately my laptop has Intel inside. Mostly because good or in-expensive AMD laptops did not exist in early 2014 when I bought it. Of course it's taken a huge performance hit when I do the Gentoo Emerge update. So my next laptop will almost certainly be AMD. And if not, it must not have Intel hyper-threading wit