Intel Reveals 10th Gen Core Lineup For Laptops and 2-in-1s (venturebeat.com) 64
Intel's new generation of processors is nigh upon us, and it promises to be a doozy in several respects. VentureBeat: The Santa Clara chipmaker today launched 11 new 10-nanometer 10th Gen Intel Core processors (code-named Ice Lake) designed for slim laptops, 2-in-1s, and other high-end mobile form factors. In addition to capable new integrated graphics and enhanced connectivity courtesy Wi-Fi 6 and Thunderbolt 3, the chips feature tweaks intended to accelerate task-specific workloads like AI inference and photo editing, as well as gaming. Intel expects the first 35 or so systems sporting Ice Lake-U and Ice Lake-Y chips to ship for the holiday season. Several that passed the chipmaker's Project Athena certification were previewed at Computex in Taiwan, including the Acer Swift 5, Dell XPS 13-inch 2-in 1, HP Envy 13, and Lenovo S940.
No matter which processor in the 10th Gen portfolio your future PC sports, its four cores (eight logical cores) paired with a 6MB or 8MB cache will support up to 32 GB of LP4/x-3733 (or up to 64GB of DDR4-3200), and they'll sip 9W, 15W, or 28W of power while clocking up to 4.1GHz at maximum Turbo Boost frequency. Each chip has 16 PCIe 3.0 lanes for external use, and their memory controllers allow for idle power states for less intensive tasks. With respect to AI and machine learning, every laptop-bound 10th Gen processor -- whether Core i3, Core i5, and Core i7 -- boasts Sunny Cove cores with Intel AVX-512-Deep Learning Boost, a new instruction set that speeds up automatic image enhancements, photo indexing, media postprocessing, and other AI-driven tasks.
No matter which processor in the 10th Gen portfolio your future PC sports, its four cores (eight logical cores) paired with a 6MB or 8MB cache will support up to 32 GB of LP4/x-3733 (or up to 64GB of DDR4-3200), and they'll sip 9W, 15W, or 28W of power while clocking up to 4.1GHz at maximum Turbo Boost frequency. Each chip has 16 PCIe 3.0 lanes for external use, and their memory controllers allow for idle power states for less intensive tasks. With respect to AI and machine learning, every laptop-bound 10th Gen processor -- whether Core i3, Core i5, and Core i7 -- boasts Sunny Cove cores with Intel AVX-512-Deep Learning Boost, a new instruction set that speeds up automatic image enhancements, photo indexing, media postprocessing, and other AI-driven tasks.
Question many will be asking (Score:5, Informative)
Intelâ(TM)s chips are still vulnerable, and the new Ice Lake wonâ(TM)t patch everything [digitaltrends.com]
Re:Question many will be asking (Score:5, Informative)
The Digital Trends article claims that unmitigated Spectre is not a problem for consumer hardware. Yet we have demonstrations of Spectre attacks in JavaScript. So unless you run all your browsers with NoScript, I believe this is still an issue.
The article doesn't mention ZombieLoad, so we can assume that you can keep your keys secret or you can use hyperthreading, but not both.
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Yet we have demonstrations of Spectre attacks in JavaScript.
Stop being dishonest. What we have is demonstrations of a perfectly controlled lab experiment executed in Javascript in a known environment setup from the beginning.
The actual benefit of being able to read some memory contents on a completely random and unknown machine are basically completely useless to any attacker which doesn't have a shitload of time and bandwidth to dump all memory and then proceed to carefully analyse the result. (i.e. never of any impact at all to any normal end user).
Additionally th
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The only people asking this question on a laptop are those who work for the NSA and those who don't have a clue what speculative execution is or how insanely difficult it is to pull off such an attack when you're not free to run whatever software you want on the hardware you're targeting.
Meltdown (Score:4, Insightful)
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Doubtful. Most likely these chips were well into the design phase before Meltdown was revealed as an issue.
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They fixed Meltdown in hardware. That's the worst vulnerability and it is only affected Intel.
Other Spectre variants and other speculative execution vulnerabilities may still exist. However AFAIK, they are much harder to exploit, less costly to mitigate in software and are not all Intel exclusive.
Didn't I already see that movie? (Score:2)
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So, did they fix Meltdown?
I hope not. Why take a performance hit for irrelevant security benefits?
AVX-512 (Score:4, Informative)
This is what I have been waiting for. It was supposed to be widely available on Cannon Lake back in 2016, but they scrapped that platform due to low yields (I believe)
For the tasks they speed up, the AVX instructions make a pretty huge difference (mostly media encoding and manipulation.) The difference between SSE and AVX was major for certain tasks, and AVX2 sped things up even more. AVX512 promises to speed up some tasks by 2x to 4x. If the thermals look OK (AVX tends to peg the CPU) it might be time to finally upgrade my old Haswell desktop.
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"The proper upgrade path for a haswell desktop is a zen 3 processor, not yet another 14nm refresh from intel. "
Haswell was manufactured on an Intel 22nm process. These new SKus are on an Intel 10nm process. What are you referring to with "yet another 14nm refresh".
I miss the old naming convension. (Score:2)
--8088 (more popular but didn't follow the naming scheme)
8086
80186
80286
80386
80486
The Pentium started messing up the name. But that went up the Pentium V so.
80586 Pentium
80686 Pentium 2
80786 Pentium 3
80886 Pentium 4
80986 Pentium V
Then we had the Core lineup so
801086 Core
801186 Core 2
801286 Core 3
801386 Core 4
801486 Core 5
801586 Core 6
801686 Core 7
801786 Core 8
801886 Core 9
801986 Core 10
So I want my 1986 CPU (So I guess it would be the 286 or 386).
Re:I miss the old naming convension. (Score:4, Insightful)
None of those hundreds (thousands?) of new processor chips would have been necessary if not for Wirth's Law:
"Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster".
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re: I miss the old naming convension. (Score:2)
Does the 8088 really count? The whole arch is named x86. 80186 was another skipped generation (I think I only ever saw it in the Nimbus PCs at school, which also had Windows v1 or v2 on them). And PentiumPro.. a sneak peek of what was to come? I was very happy when I got that on my desktop instead of fighting for CPU on a shared and underpowered Sun system.
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80186 wasn't PC compatible in that it included hardware on-chip that conflicted with hardware built into PC/XT motherboards. It was possible to run MS-DOS on them, but some low-level things didn't quite work on them. Which was a problem back then since so much software used low-level hacks to work around the deficiencies of MS-DOS.
i686 = Pentium Pro, not Pentium II
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Well, on the mobile side it's a bit easier to follow. You had the Pentium III, then the Pentium M, which really was just an update on the Pentium III, then the Core Duo, which was a dual core Pentium M. The single core Pentium M was then rebranded as Core Solo. This was relatively short-lived, as they really needed a 64-bit mobile processor (they never bothered with trying to make mobile variants of the later 64-bit P4's) so they then updated the 32-bit Core processors with 64 bit instruction support, an
No High Performance Chips, Meh (Score:2)
What is really important to me (Score:3)
Does the new chip address any of the following critical issues?
1. Spectre
2. Meltdown
3. Row hammer
Really I'm looking for a chip with an architecture that tries to minimize covert timing channel attacks. Either by making them impossible or limiting their scope.
I left "removing Intel ME" off the list intentionally. I love the functionality of Intel ME and use it every day to manage headless systems and as part of my kernel development workflow. I don't like the security implications and opaqueness of the software Intel provides. (I weep for poor abused MINIX)
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rowhammer is a memory(ram) vulnerability, not cpu related
Modern CPUs contain the memory controller, it's no longer part of the north bridge.
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The memory controller could address the issue, for example by remapping the memory space so the physical memory address has no correlation to where the data is stored. Think something like what a modern SSD does for wear leveling, but for RAM.
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LPDDR4 chips include support for TRR which is an actual hardware mitigation.
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Really I'm looking for a chip with an architecture that tries to minimize covert timing channel attacks.
Why? No really. WHY? On a laptop specifically why are you worried about this? And are you interested in volcano insurance? If you want I'll throw in some asteroid insurance free too. You never know when you may get hit by one.
Seriously caring about side channel attacks on a normal PC is borderline insane. Caring about it on a laptop should get you locked up for the benefit of society.
(Yes I am aware that the NSA may want security, but if you are an NSA employee the above still apply to you, especially locki
Core generations have become meaningless (Score:3)
alt.sip.die.die.die (Score:2)
Many people find "moist"cringeworthy, but it's nowhere close to how the salty verb choices in the wanker soup above leave me needing to take a quick shower.
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Figuratively speaking, yes.