Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Intel Reveals Post-8th Gen. Core Architecture 10nm+ Ice Lake

anandtech.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 247 posts

Re: Intel Reveals Post-8th Gen. Core Architecture 10nm+ Ice Lake

#61

Post by jrockway »

iainmerrick wrote: post #48
zanny wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Libreoffice has OpenCL acceleration for some spreadsheet operations. With the advent of NVME storage, and the potential bandwidth it yields, I would expect to see database systems emerging that can GPGPU accelerate operations on tables to be way, way faster than what a CPU can handle.

What on earth are people doing on spreadsheets that needs GPU acceleration??

People use spreadsheets for anything that you'd use a "normal" programming language for. When I worked at a bank, a real-time trading system was implemented as an Excel spreadsheet. There were third-party and internally-developed libraries to do the complicated stuff (multicast network protocols, complicated calculations that needed to be the same across all implementations, etc.) but the bulk of the business logic and UI were Excel. It's easy to modify, extend, and play with... which also makes it easy to break functionality and introduce subtle bugs. Though the same is true of any software development environment -- things you don't test break.

Re: Intel Reveals Post-8th Gen. Core Architecture 10nm+ Ice Lake

#62

Post by slededit »

IntelMiner wrote: post #56
slededit wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to believe that, until I started to get into cryptocoin mining. There were algorithms that were specifically designed to be GPU resistant and they all were ported and saw significant gains. It was that experience that pushed me to learn how to program these devices. The tooling isn't good enough yet, but there is no question in my mind practically everything will run on a GPU like processor in the future. The…

"GPUs are only good at _very_ specific workloads." Let me detail you a completely specific workload citing my own personal experience over objective facts with citations Oh and let me also take a swipe at Intel again without any verifiable evidence

Primecoin is a good example. If you look at the implementation it requires generating a tightly packed bitfield for the sieve and then randomly accessing it after. Lots of synchronization required so you don't overwrite previously set bits are required and the memory accesses are random so its suboptimal for the GPU's memory subsystem.

It took under a year for a GPU miner to come out. Having optimized it for Intel in assembly I was convinced it wasn't possible for a GPU to beat it - and yet it happened.

It turns out even when used inefficiently a thousand cores can brute force its way through anything.

Re: Intel Reveals Post-8th Gen. Core Architecture 10nm+ Ice Lake

#63

Post by jcranmer »

iainmerrick wrote: post #48
zanny wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Libreoffice has OpenCL acceleration for some spreadsheet operations. With the advent of NVME storage, and the potential bandwidth it yields, I would expect to see database systems emerging that can GPGPU accelerate operations on tables to be way, way faster than what a CPU can handle.

What on earth are people doing on spreadsheets that needs GPU acceleration??

Don't think of spreadsheets as glorified tables. Think of them as the world's most-commonly used business logic and statistical programming language. A competitor to R, if you will.

Re: Intel Reveals Post-8th Gen. Core Architecture 10nm+ Ice Lake

#64

Post by zerohp »

ktRolster wrote: post #59
deepnotderp wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, so the node names are effectively useless at this point. They used to refer to gate length, but no longer, even for Intel. Oh, and Intel's 10nm will actually have lower performance than their 14nm. Besides, it matters not, the bottlenecks today are in memory and interconnects.

At some point, maybe we'll start seeing RAM put onto the CPU itself. I mean, more than it already is (with cache).

You will see stacked memory and silicon interposers, but you won't see main memory on the CPU die. DRAM is based on an array of what is called "trench capacitors." The fabrication process is sufficiently different that they don't even make these in the same facility, much less on the same die process. An array of trench capacitors will always be smaller than transistor based memory (SRAM.)

Re: Intel Reveals Post-8th Gen. Core Architecture 10nm+ Ice Lake

#65

Post by deepnotderp »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #57
deepnotderp wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, so the node names are effectively useless at this point. They used to refer to gate length, but no longer, even for Intel. Oh, and Intel's 10nm will actually have lower performance than their 14nm. Besides, it matters not, the bottlenecks today are in memory and interconnects.

> Oh, and Intel's 10nm will actually have lower performance than their 14nm. Less than 14++, sure, but 10+ and 10++ will fix that.

Yes, but I was just pointing out that scaling is now neither a panacea nor free.

Re: Intel Reveals Post-8th Gen. Core Architecture 10nm+ Ice Lake

#66

Post by deepnotderp »

zerohp wrote: post #64
ktRolster wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At some point, maybe we'll start seeing RAM put onto the CPU itself. I mean, more than it already is (with cache).

You will see stacked memory and silicon interposers, but you won't see main memory on the CPU die. DRAM is based on an array of what is called "trench capacitors." The fabrication process is sufficiently different that they don't even make these in the same facility, much less on the same die process. An array of trench capacitors will always be smaller than transistor based memory (SRAM.)

There are alternatives on the horizon, e.g. STT-RAM, MRAM, memristors, PCMs, ReRAM (same as memristors according to some...), spintronic devices, etc.

There are also other attempts such as FBRAM to replicate DRAM structures without the need for insane A/R trench capacitors.

I believe that such solutions are necessary to continue scaling.

Re: Intel Reveals Post-8th Gen. Core Architecture 10nm+ Ice Lake

#67

Post by hossbeast »

Skunkleton wrote: post #58
msh wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have fallen a long way since Adnan ran the site...

Adnan is the guy who may or may not have killed his girlfriend in the 90's. You are thinking Anand. As in AnandTech. And even without Mr. Shimpi AnandTech is still one of the best sources for in-depth reviews of hardware.

This is a reference to the Serial podcast, for anyone wondering. Recommended (both seasons).

Re: Intel Reveals Post-8th Gen. Core Architecture 10nm+ Ice Lake

#68

Post by ijidak »

GuiA wrote: post #10

According to the table in the article: - 2011: 32nm - 2012: 22nm - 2014: 14nm - 2018?: 10nm I don't know much about foundry processes, but it seems that it's taking more and more time for lesser and lesser gains, right? At this rate, how long until we reach sub nanometer? What are the physical limits on these processes, and does it have any implications for end users? Will we be using 2nm CPUs for 50 years? Would lov…

This is a sensible question. Not sure either why the downvotes. I'm curious as to the answer myself. Although, I don't know if we'll ever see sub-nanometer. Maybe that's the reason for the downvotes, that sub-nanometer is not really in the realm of what's possible with current CPU architectures and the physics of silicon. Although, that's simply based on today's physics. Who truly knows what the future will bring.

Re: Intel Reveals Post-8th Gen. Core Architecture 10nm+ Ice Lake

#69

Post by raverbashing »

jerf wrote: post #22
spyhi wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's rare these days for Intel to talk more than a generation ahead in CPU architectures. This, to me, looks like the PS2 vs Dreamcast move, where Sony blocked Dreamcast sales with PS2 hype. We've been waiting for 10nm for a while now, and now Intel is essentially confirming "yes, it's really coming this time" where they might not have otherwise--it's hard to not see that as a reaction to Threadripper. At least on…

The Osborne effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect Although it has been deliberately deployed many times now, as you note one example of.

And people keep falling for it

See:Itanium

Never compare an existing product to one that is not yet being sold. Never

Re: Intel Reveals Post-8th Gen. Core Architecture 10nm+ Ice Lake

#70

Post by kakwa_ »

nullnilvoid wrote: post #4

As a consumer, it's great to see competition picking up in the CPU market. Intel does not seem to be able to hold the edge in node process as tsmc and Samsung are matching intel. It has to resort to architecture design.

Well actually I think it's more a case of "increase in performance is becoming harder and harder, the technology leader (Intel) is slowly becoming stuck and the competition (AMD) is catching up". Everybody will be more or less at the same level as it requires huge investments to only get a marginal advantage.

Apart from games, I would not be that afraid to install recent pieces of software (browser, office suit, os) on a 10 years old computer (2007 core 2 duo). But in 2007 I would not have thought for a minute that I could do the same on a 1997 computer (Pentium II), and installing 1997 software on a 1987 computer (80386), just no.

Last time I replaced my CPU (i5-6500 in place of i5-2500), I only saw a marginal improvement.

Even at my former job, I worked with some decent servers (32 to 48 cores, 128GB of RAMs) to build Linux masters from scratch (Gentoo based). The oldest server of the bunch (which is 5 years old now) is still the fastest to build a master from scratch, it has less cores but faster clock and even on parallel tasks like compiling stuff, clock is still a more determining factor than cores.

There are still tons of things to improve in CPUs: power consumption, cost, embedded functionalities (SoC)... but performance improvements seem a huge cost for low gains adventure right now and for the foreseeable future.

Post reply on HN