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Ask HN: Why are modern Intel CPUs not getting a lot more cores?

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Re: Ask HN: Why are modern Intel CPUs not getting a lot more cores?

#61

Post by onli »

geezerjay wrote: post #58
onli wrote: post #30

AMD tried and failed. Multiple cores is what the FX is all about. What's the one type of application that drives processor sales on the desktop? Right, games. What's one of many types of applications that do profit more from fewer stronger cores than from more slower ones? Right again, games. That said, over the last 5 years processors did get beefier. They just did not got more cores. The i5-2500K (from 2011) is slo…

> AMD tried and failed. What's your personal definition of "failed"? AMD may not be the market leader but for the same price, their multicore processors are far better than Intel's offering. Old games that haven't been properly designed to take advantage of more than 2 or 3 cores don't benefit from AMD's 8-core processors, but calling a marketing issue a failure, particularly a technical one, is simply disingenuous.…

> What's your personal definition of "failed"? AMD may not be the market leader but for the same price, their multicore processors are far better than Intel's offering.

They are not. I talk mainly about gaming performance here, because it's the one thing where cpu performance actually matters for a relevant market. Have a look at http://www.techspot.com/review/991-gta-5-pc-benchmarks/page6... as an example. The i3-4130 (that wasn't even their fastest i3 at that time) as fast as the FX-6350, the FX-8350 slower than the old i5-2500K. AMD has not one processor that can compete with an i5-6600K in current games. It's not like you can't play modern games with an FX-8370, but with that you pay as much as with intel, you get worse FPS and your processor uses more energy. Ah, and you buy into a dead socket.

Other criteria for failure: Market share. AMD has a little bit more than 20% of the PC-gaming market, http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/processormfg/. It gets less and less since the disastrous FX started.

> Inefficient software isn't a hardware problem.

If you want to sell your hardware of course it is.

> Why would video game developers spend their resources designing software that take advantage of the available computational resources provided by AMD's 6 and 8-core line of processors if this only impacts less than 2% of the gaming community?

Despite all, the FX-6300 is a popular processor. I highly doubt that number. The FX line can't have sold that bad.

> But this is by no means a technical failure on behalf of AMD.

I'm not talking technique. I'm talking about performance, both in real existing applications and on the market. In both the FX was a disaster for AMD, and I really hope the coming Zen-Architecture can make AMD relevant again. A Intel-Monoculture would be horrible, as is already visible in prices and customer-friendliness of the offerings.

Re: Ask HN: Why are modern Intel CPUs not getting a lot more cores?

#62

Post by brudgers »

If the desktop has four cores now, then it has double the cores of a few years ago when two was standard and that was double the number of cores 'anyone' had ten years ago: desktop Conroe chips started shipping in 2007. Which means the number of cores has quadrupled in less than ten years.

Re: Ask HN: Why are modern Intel CPUs not getting a lot more cores?

#63

Post by onli »

dogma1138 wrote: post #49
mtgx wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an issue yes, but it's not the main reason why Intel isn't offering more cores for decent prices, otherwise we would've never even moved to two cores or four cores. The main reason is Intel doesn't feel like it needs to because AMD doesn't offer much competition with its current architecture, even with twice as many cores. But that will change when Zen chips arrive. http://www.extremetech.com/computing/233453-…

>Not when AMD is going to offer 8-10 core chips for less than half that price soon, with similar performance. This has been touted every year since the initial Athlon 64 came out and knocked intel's teeth out until it came back with the pentium pro based Yona and Nehalem chips and buried netburst. It's still yet to be determined of Zen has anywhere near the SCP IPC that Skylake/Haswell based CPU's do so far there was…

There was a launch of some more modern AM3+ boards. Like https://www.asus.com/Motherboards/970-PRO-GAMING-AURA/specif..., those boards support USB 3.1 Gen2, they bring M.2 slots and NVMe (on PCI-E 2.0 of course).

Re: Ask HN: Why are modern Intel CPUs not getting a lot more cores?

#64

Post by gpderetta »

pjc50 wrote: post #46
grabcocque wrote: post #22

The move over the last few years has been towards mobile, and decreasing power consumption. So over the last ten years or so, Intel has responded to this realisation by, inter alia, using the extra transistor budget afforded by Moore's Law to move more and more of what was once on the chipset on die. This is, practically, a much better use of silicon than simply adding more cores.

Intel has responded to this realisation by .. giving up on mobile, for the time being. (The integrated graphics are getting quite acceptable and we're starting to see PC-on-a-stick and cheap Intel tablets as a result, but I'm not sure how big a market that is)

Laptops is usually considered mobile, and there Intel is king. The OP is right that low power has been Intel focus for the last few years which benefits both laptops and servers.

Re: Ask HN: Why are modern Intel CPUs not getting a lot more cores?

#65

Post by dogma1138 »

onli wrote: post #63
dogma1138 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Not when AMD is going to offer 8-10 core chips for less than half that price soon, with similar performance. This has been touted every year since the initial Athlon 64 came out and knocked intel's teeth out until it came back with the pentium pro based Yona and Nehalem chips and buried netburst. It's still yet to be determined of Zen has anywhere near the SCP IPC that Skylake/Haswell based CPU's do so far there was…

There was a launch of some more modern AM3+ boards. Like https://www.asus.com/Motherboards/970-PRO-GAMING-AURA/specif... , those boards support USB 3.1 Gen2, they bring M.2 slots and NVMe (on PCI-E 2.0 of course).

Those aren't supported natively via the chipset, these are implemented using extensions which result in poorer performance and eating quite a bit of the PCIE bandwidth available. The lack of USB 3.1 support is also the problem I have with Haswell-E, I have an X99 motherboard for my Broadwell-E setup and USB 3.1/TB is only available via the ASUS extension card which eats up 4 PCIE lanes and doesn't perform nearly as well as the "native" Skylake Z170 series chipsets.

As PCIE3.0 is not supported on AM3+ motherboards because this requires native CPU/Chipset support so you are overloading a potentially already contested PCIE (especially if you are running multiple GPU's) bus which has overall less bandwidth to offer which can yield even worse performance than what is available on X99 chipsets currently which lack some of the same features but at least support PCIE3.0.

Re: Ask HN: Why are modern Intel CPUs not getting a lot more cores?

#66

Post by onli »

dogma1138 wrote: post #65
onli wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a launch of some more modern AM3+ boards. Like https://www.asus.com/Motherboards/970-PRO-GAMING-AURA/specif... , those boards support USB 3.1 Gen2, they bring M.2 slots and NVMe (on PCI-E 2.0 of course).

Those aren't supported natively via the chipset, these are implemented using extensions which result in poorer performance and eating quite a bit of the PCIE bandwidth available. The lack of USB 3.1 support is also the problem I have with Haswell-E, I have an X99 motherboard for my Broadwell-E setup and USB 3.1/TB is only available via the ASUS extension card which eats up 4 PCIE lanes and doesn't perform nearly as w…

That's correct of course. But, do you know of some benchmarks showing the real world problems those AM3+ boards can have? I'd really be interested in a proper source.

Re: Ask HN: Why are modern Intel CPUs not getting a lot more cores?

#67

Post by dogma1138 »

onli wrote: post #66
dogma1138 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those aren't supported natively via the chipset, these are implemented using extensions which result in poorer performance and eating quite a bit of the PCIE bandwidth available. The lack of USB 3.1 support is also the problem I have with Haswell-E, I have an X99 motherboard for my Broadwell-E setup and USB 3.1/TB is only available via the ASUS extension card which eats up 4 PCIE lanes and doesn't perform nearly as w…

That's correct of course. But, do you know of some benchmarks showing the real world problems those AM3+ boards can have? I'd really be interested in a proper source.

There aren't any "universal" benchmark since each motherboard will implement those features differently, different chipset, differently bandwidth allocated to it (USB 3.1 supports from 1 to 8 or 16 PCIE lanes IIRC) even things like the length of the traces can affect the performance.

So you'll have to check for benchmarks for individual motherboards by make and model, not all reviews cover USB 3.1 or NVME since many of the reviewers don't even understand that those features can behave substantially differently so googling AM3+ USB 3.1 testing or something would be your best option some reviews do include those tests for example: https://nl.hardware.info/reviews/6106/5/msi-990fxa-gaming-am...

Overall considerably lower performance and that's against older intel motherboards that do not have native USB 3.1 support either, mostly because of PCIE 3.0 support and substantially better PCIE latency over both the PCH PCIE bridge and the native CPU PCIE lanes.

Based on the numbers from this benchmark I can tell you that the USB 3.1 10gig performance on newer motherboards is considerably better than that, just by comparing my X99 (which is also tested in the aforementioned benchmark) to my high end Z170 motherboards with the same storage peripherals. Overall I'm getting slightly better speeds on my X99 setup than they had (probably slightly faster storage) but the Z170 offers anywhere between 20 to 30% better performance depending on the benchmark with the same SSD based external storage.

Re: Ask HN: Why are modern Intel CPUs not getting a lot more cores?

#68

Post by dogma1138 »

valarauca1 wrote: post #59
dogma1138 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Not when AMD is going to offer 8-10 core chips for less than half that price soon, with similar performance. This has been touted every year since the initial Athlon 64 came out and knocked intel's teeth out until it came back with the pentium pro based Yona and Nehalem chips and buried netburst. It's still yet to be determined of Zen has anywhere near the SCP IPC that Skylake/Haswell based CPU's do so far there was…

Also it's yet to be seen what chipset we are getting, atm you shouldn't buy AMD not because the CPU's are utter garbage, but the chipset is utter trash. Zen is going to have an integrated memory controller/PCIe root complex on dye. So this should help with IO concerns (no north bridge). Ofc this is gen 1 tech so who knows it could be crippled for certain tasks.

Intel does the same, there is still a "north/south bridge" (AMD had on die memory controller since the Athlon 64 days IIRC) which adds "additional" (via a bridge, you aren't getting additional bandwidth unless you are using QPI with multiple CPU's) PCIE lanes and centralizes I/O in Intel's case it's the PCH. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_Controller_Hub

AMD will have something similar even if the CPU will control most of the PCIE lanes in the system (usually GPU + high speed storage is over the CPU, the rest of the IO is over the PCH).

Re: Ask HN: Why are modern Intel CPUs not getting a lot more cores?

#69

Post by dr_zoidberg »

pjc50 wrote: post #46
grabcocque wrote: post #22

The move over the last few years has been towards mobile, and decreasing power consumption. So over the last ten years or so, Intel has responded to this realisation by, inter alia, using the extra transistor budget afforded by Moore's Law to move more and more of what was once on the chipset on die. This is, practically, a much better use of silicon than simply adding more cores.

Intel has responded to this realisation by .. giving up on mobile, for the time being. (The integrated graphics are getting quite acceptable and we're starting to see PC-on-a-stick and cheap Intel tablets as a result, but I'm not sure how big a market that is)

Actually, the Iris branded GPUs are quite impressive, considering that they are essentially a co-processor inside the chip and they pull over 800 GFLOPs of compute power.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_HD_and_Iris_Graphics#Sky...

Re: Ask HN: Why are modern Intel CPUs not getting a lot more cores?

#70

Post by frou_dh »

Vexs wrote: post #50
frou_dh wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the normal Intel Core CPUs, they seem to often have a huge amount of their chip area / transistors taken up by integrated graphics. Which could be a bit depressing if someone gets one and doesn't use the IGP.

IT seems to me a lot more enthusiast desktops are using xeon processors instead of cores, this being one of the reasons people are making the swap- you gain a lot of performance/$$ because loosing integrated graphics saves a fair amount of money. The average user still needs integrated graphics though, so I don't see the core ever going away. Who knows though, they might come out with some enthusiast grade core proce…

Hopefully said enthusiasts take the opportunity to now use ECC RAM! It's rather hostile that the consumer lines are fenced out from correctness-promoting technology.
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