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Intel Launches 11th Gen Core Tiger Lake

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Re: Intel Launches 11th Gen Core Tiger Lake

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually think Tiger Lake is the most exciting thing Intel has released in years. I know that's a pretty low bar, but I'm still surprised that the reaction has been this meh.

Is that because it's the first time they've said they'll be able to do a widespread production run of 10nm? I notice they're still going for their smallest core count chips first. No desktop, no HEDT, no Xeon. Nothing more than 4 cores. That's about half of their business that's still stuck on 14nm, and what should be their highest margin SKUs.

I only really care about their consumer stuff--I'm not involved in server products or really even heavy desktop/workstation/XEON stuff.

I think it's interesting/exciting because it looks like they're starting to get higher quality results out of their 10nm node. Ice Lake was decent, but it was limited on clocks and was clear they were trying to get something viable on 10nm out the door. Almost proof of concept for all the 10nm stuff they'd been talking up and failing to deliver on for years.

But these Tiger Lake parts actually looks like higher quality 10nm running at much better frequencies. It's Intel finally delivering on their 10nm promises.

The Xe graphics are also fairly interesting. Ice Lake Gen 11 graphics was an improvement over older integrated parts, but Xe is another solid step forward. As a laptop consumer I'm always happy to get more graphical oomph so that multiple high resolutions displays can be comfortably run when I'm docked into an at-home setup (which is kinda always in this COVID world).

All in all, none of this is mind blowing, but Intel has been so... whelming... these last handful of years, that I think it's fair to be a little excited when they've finally taken a legitimate step forward.

Re: Intel Launches 11th Gen Core Tiger Lake

#112
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually think Tiger Lake is the most exciting thing Intel has released in years. I know that's a pretty low bar, but I'm still surprised that the reaction has been this meh.

But they didn't release pricing information, so how exciting it will be isn't exactly clear.

Ehh it's Intel. I think we can reasonably assume it'll be a little more expensive than it should be, but less expensive than it would have been in a pre-Ryzen world.

Re: Intel Launches 11th Gen Core Tiger Lake

#113
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

4. If they previously had a 60Hz monitor, and upgraded to 120Hz or better. This improves both motion quality and latency. When poorly designed software makes you wait multiple frames, halving (or better) the frame time makes a noticeable difference.

I find this one hard to swallow. On 60Hz software is already the bottleneck even on high end hardware. If anything, it’ll drive a perfectionist mad because crappy software that the high end hardware allowed to operate just over that threshold (say 64Hz) would suddenly be exposed. I think jitter is more important than FPS and until software has caught up (likely never) I would rather cap the frame rate at 60 FPS and e…

120Hz is incredible for gaming. Unity and Unreal Engine dynamically scale tessellation and many other things to accommodate hardware performance, so as to maintain FPS on high-refresh screens. The polygon counts, texture detail, AI complexity of modern games is bonkers, but multiple moon landings of engineering time has gone into keeping solid 100Hz+ frame rates.

However, you are definitely correct when it comes to GUI productivity applications. Drawing text in boxes is apparently much harder than rendering an immersive world in real time. The implications are too disturbing to consider, so I do not.

Re: Intel Launches 11th Gen Core Tiger Lake

#114
post #15

The contrast in community enthusiasm between this and Nvidia's 3xxx announcement could not be more severe.

It's a low power mobile part, that's just not relevant for any of my use cases and I'm guessing that's true of a lot of HN.

Intel 10nm desktop CPU's are what I'm actually interested in.

Re: Intel Launches 11th Gen Core Tiger Lake

#115
post #70

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The 15W processors don't turbo to 4.8Mhz (Oops! Ghz), though.

The i7-1185G7 [1] has a 15W TDP and it will hit 4.8GHz, although maybe for a short time. So yeah, it's 100MHz slower than the i7-10810U [2] (I don't know if you can even buy that) but actual performance should be higher. [1] https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/208664/... Intel appears to have eliminated the concept of a "standard" TDP and now it sounds like the laptop maker can set it anywhere within…

For a while the i7-10810U was an option on the late 7th gen X1 Carbon, though you could only order it with the 1080p display. It was also an option on the 8th gen X1 Carbon[1], but it looks like they've since pulled it. The fastest CPU you can get on it now is the i7-10610U, which turbo boosts to 4.9GHz but only has 4 cores instead of 6.

I have the i5-10210U which turbo boosts up to 4.2GHz. Intel lists its TDP as 15 watts, but if I stress test it in s-tui[2] it spends several seconds at 47 watts before being throttled due to thermal constraints.

1. https://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-Core-i7-10810U-ThinkPad-...

2. https://github.com/amanusk/s-tui

Re: Intel Launches 11th Gen Core Tiger Lake

#116
post #110
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The labeling on that image is... approximate. You can see the orange L3 blocks inside the area labeled as cores and it's still shared.

> it's still shared Right, that was really my main question: besides the labeling (which is of course approximate), the positioning sure looks like each core would have its own "favorite" section of the cache. And being shared, it seems like this could make for some interesting performance behaviors. Ah, interesting, this topology was introduced with Sandy Bridge. I'm just out of date: https://www.anandtech.com/show/…

Yeah, you need something like that to scale to large core counts, and especially if you wanna pull off some chiplet goodness (like AMD did with Ryzen). I think that's why it got lumped with the Fabric Interconnect layer in one of the block diagrams.

Re: Intel Launches 11th Gen Core Tiger Lake

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find this one hard to swallow. On 60Hz software is already the bottleneck even on high end hardware. If anything, it’ll drive a perfectionist mad because crappy software that the high end hardware allowed to operate just over that threshold (say 64Hz) would suddenly be exposed. I think jitter is more important than FPS and until software has caught up (likely never) I would rather cap the frame rate at 60 FPS and e…

120Hz is incredible for gaming. Unity and Unreal Engine dynamically scale tessellation and many other things to accommodate hardware performance, so as to maintain FPS on high-refresh screens. The polygon counts, texture detail, AI complexity of modern games is bonkers, but multiple moon landings of engineering time has gone into keeping solid 100Hz+ frame rates. However, you are definitely correct when it comes to G…

Some of it is deliberate:

https://github.com/GNOME/vte/blob/master/src/vte.cc#L10543

It's another harmful effect of mobile-first design. A trivial power saving gives measurably improved battery life, but the horrible latency is ignored.

Re: Intel Launches 11th Gen Core Tiger Lake

#118
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. But I think 4 cores at 50% higher base single thread vs 8 cores is actually a pretty reasonable tradeoff for many workloads. If they managed 6 cores though... would have been pretty awesome. I hope this delivers. I'd hate to see Intel go down in flames.

Right, that's perhaps a glaring omission. Last year's (Ice Lake) i7-10710U was a 6-core, 12-thread part with a TDP of 25W. https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/196448/... But it's entirely missing from this announcement. Seems like a regression.

That is not an Icelake chip. IceLake and Comet Lake are both "10th Generation" Core. Icelake was limited to more premium offerings and was only 4 cores and lower.

Re: Intel Launches 11th Gen Core Tiger Lake

#119

Coffee Lake's i5 had 6 cores. Now it's down to 4 with HT. How is that an improvement?

Tiger Lake is more a replacement for Ice Lake, not necessarily Coffee Lake. I suspect 10710U will stay around for larger laptops, especially those with room for a dedicated graphics processor. The laptops too small for dedicated graphics will probably prefer Tiger Lake.

Re: Intel Launches 11th Gen Core Tiger Lake

#120
Not too interesting for those interested in high performance desktop and server offerings. The fact that Intel's only new releases on 10nm are AMD did a really smart thing with their processor designs. Instead of doing a large monolithic multiprocessor like Intel (which may be able to eek out some extra performance due to optimized wire placements), they use smaller chiplets. This results in requiring no manufacturing errors on a much smaller area of the die (which becomes exponentially less probable as the area increases). Even if AMD was using Intel's 10nm process, their yields would be better because of their modular designs that get soldered together after the lithography. Intel can still bin out some errors (the 10300-10900k are all the same chip with different parts turned off due to manufacturing errors), but the less modular design likely makes this less efficient.

That's my understanding, anyway -- correct me if I'm wrong.

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