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

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.

Thoughts: - Diminishing returns in performance per core because some tasks are truly serial, not parallel. - It costs money - putting stuff on silicon costs money. The only justification for spending more money is that you will make it in revenue. - The PC market imploded. Lenovo has killed the laptop and PC market, and soon will be entering the server market. Expect the end of the server market in the next 5 years or so. There is a lot less money to go around. - Moores 1st law (there are several) is hitting a wall, that is what drove the multi-core approach. They couldn't double the clock speed, so they effectively added to the clock-count. - There is on-die architecture including routers and memory busses. They have capacity limits and tend to be the performance limiters for max temperature. They might be the limiting technology. - Low power is important, as is low heat. More cores (aka more ALU's means more heat and higher power use. - The more components, the easier for something to go wrong. - Gartner says the next big money is in IoT, not massively parallel on the PC. (It seems google beat Intel to a machine-learning ASIC, and deep learning seems to be a decent market right now - but because Gartner didn't say it the Intel leadership can't hear about it).

I am the proud owner of a Xeon 12/24 3.0Ghz. It's the best one!

Some people like hot-rod cars.

I don't use a GPU like normal people do. Graphics are great for parallel execution. (Obviously)

If everybody owns a Xeon 12/24 then you can make real-time software that requires it. There's not a chance any software will be written until most people have it.

They actually are doing more cores... For now, they integrated the Phi chip into a real cpu. Give it another 2-3 years then this tech will come to consumers (very likely I think).

http://www.anandtech.com/show/10553/asrock-rack-launches-2u4...

And I completely disagree with that consumers don't need many cores... That would be paramount to saying that consumers don't need GPUs. One of Intel's core arguments for bringing Phi to the masses is realtime raytracing (something for which normal GPUs suck bad). Also NVidia is working on a Phi-kind-of-thing as their next generation GPU. So we are getting there, but it was a long journey from 2006.

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 slower than the i5-6600K, both have 4 cores though. But if we go back 10 years, we are looking at the Core 2 Duo, those had only two cores.

And games are also changing. Not too long ago you could still play games (like Fallout 3) with a single core. New games (like Fallout 4) rely on the processor having multiple cores, some don't even start with a dual core (Hyperthreading is needed then and saves the i3). And games supporting DX12 (and probably Vulcan) work better on the FX processors than those using DX11. More cores become more useful now, and processors will have to add more of them also in the consumer desktop area soon.