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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?

#41

Post by pjmlp »

detaro wrote: post #2

Because common desktop applications still don't do much with multiple cores, and thus a few fast cores are better (and techniques like TurboBoost are useful, where cores sleep to free the energy budget to allow a single core to clock even higher). And for many things, CPUs have been fast enough for quite a while now. So the common CPUs have only a few cores, people who really want more get to pay the premium for the…

You can still distribute processes across cores and there are lots of them on modern OSes.

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

#42

Post by soulbadguy »

elcct wrote: post #17

You can put Xeon in desktop motherboard like with X99 chipset. I myself recently got 22 (44 threads) core one, but for day to day tasks it doesn't make a difference and it is quite expensive. If there was a larger demand then perhaps we could see more of these.

what kind of workload did you intended to you use this beast for ? I really wish i had a use case to buy on of those :).

How did you decided to go with the X99 chipset instead of the c230/c236 (traditionally used with xeons)

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

#43

Post by pjc50 »

countryqt30 wrote: post #14
valarauca1 wrote: post #9

1) Nobody writes multi-threaded code For user applications multi-threading is overkill. It's hard to write, and there are very little benefits the average user will see. Good concurrency isn't even that important on servers. You can trash your cache and interrupt tables but you'll still handle 10million clients per node so nobody cares. Great concurrency is really only practiced in HFT and HPC. 2) Modern hardware/OS'…

1) I think this argument is plain wrong. It is incorrect that EVERY APP should use ALL CPUS. Rather, different apps use different cpus --> less interrupts --> speed up. 2) I think they are actually very good at what can be done by now. How do you think they are so bad?

Most people have a single, important foreground app which is the only one they care about latency of. The others are ticking over in the background, but because they don't have window focus the user doesn't care about their responsiveness so much.

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

#44

Post by valarauca1 »

imtringued wrote: post #34
valarauca1 wrote: post #9

1) Nobody writes multi-threaded code For user applications multi-threading is overkill. It's hard to write, and there are very little benefits the average user will see. Good concurrency isn't even that important on servers. You can trash your cache and interrupt tables but you'll still handle 10million clients per node so nobody cares. Great concurrency is really only practiced in HFT and HPC. 2) Modern hardware/OS'…

3) Depends on the scale. If the task was running for 60 minutes then you would only have to wait 1.87 minutes which is a massive difference. You are also forgetting the psychological impact that a few seconds can make. After 3 seconds of waiting without any progress indicator you've generally lost the attention of the user and they will do something else in the meantime.

     You are also forgetting the psychological impact that a
     few seconds can make. After 3 seconds of waiting without
     any progress indicator you've generally lost the
     attention of the user and they will do something else in
     the meantime.
When your talking about spinning up a MASSIVE number compute threads/servers >128 instances. This also takes a non-trivial time.

You really aren't seeing the forest though the trees. What I'm saying is it is a trade off.

Time gain: 1/2^x

Resource spending: 2^x

Figure out where the intercept based on cost.

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

#45

Post by frou_dh »

filereaper wrote: post #25

Caches. Xeons and the like dedicate much of their transistor budgets towards larger caches. If you take that budget for caches and put it towards more execution units, you get the equivalent of Xeon Phi which is a lot of Pentiums built on today's fabrication processes.

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.

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

#46

Post by pjc50 »

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)

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

#47

Post by netheril96 »

BatFastard wrote: post #8

I agree with the "less core but faster processors are what is most useful on desktops". But I ask, has anyone one or any language made the number of processors/hyperthreads transparent? Ideally I would just create a thread and some load balancing system would distribute it to the correct processor. Am I just behind the times?

Ha? Isn't that how it always works?

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

#48

Post by gpderetta »

theranos87 wrote: post #28

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 bring…

Phi is hardly a general purpose CPU though.

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

#49

Post by dogma1138 »

mtgx wrote: post #23
valarauca1 wrote: post #9

1) Nobody writes multi-threaded code For user applications multi-threading is overkill. It's hard to write, and there are very little benefits the average user will see. Good concurrency isn't even that important on servers. You can trash your cache and interrupt tables but you'll still handle 10million clients per node so nobody cares. Great concurrency is really only practiced in HFT and HPC. 2) Modern hardware/OS'…

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 only one leaked benchmark of a game in which it scored anywhere from pretty low to close to what a Haswell-E CPU brings to the table.

The pricing on Zen, especially big Zen which was the only CPU that was close to Intel's Haswell-E lineup is also unlikely to be a 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.

No PCIE 3.0 support, no USB 3.0/3.1, no NVME, no M.2 no many other things.

Intel's chipsets are and always were the golden standard (ever since NVIDIA stopped making Nforce 2:)) and AMD really needs to not only be competitive but to match them or beat them as far as peripherals go.

AMD is in a disadvantage out of the bat for no Thunderbolt support but it needs to come strong with low latency PCIE, a lot of PCIE interconnects, 10 gig USB 3.1 and native displayport and many other things.

If that will be a standard and the performance are at least in the 90th percentile compared to Intel AMD stands a chance, anything below that people again would not even bother.

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

#50

Post by Vexs »

frou_dh wrote: post #45
filereaper wrote: post #25

Caches. Xeons and the like dedicate much of their transistor budgets towards larger caches. If you take that budget for caches and put it towards more execution units, you get the equivalent of Xeon Phi which is a lot of Pentiums built on today's fabrication processes.

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 processors that don't have int graphics.
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