Quote from article "We need to move faster. Validation at Intel is taking much longer than it does for our competition. We need to do whatever we can to reduce those times… we can’t live forever in the shadow of the early 90’s FDIV bug, we need to move on. Our competition is moving much faster than we are". Competition pressure could make a company's new product worse than (in this case, less stable than) their previ…
The FDIV bug was the original Pentium floating point bug, right? Could this be the biggest blow to Intel since that one?
So I recently bought an 8700k. I was wondering if I should rather return it and get AMD instead? Not sure how much the recent bugs will impact me performance wise.
8700k is an "end of the line" CPU in terms of motherboard support. Also AMD Ryzen CPUs give you much better bang for buck.
I can't tell if end of the line is a good or a bad thing here?
Before we all jump on Intel for being buggy, what's the list of serious AMD bugs like for the past five years? If AMD has a similar amount of bugs we should jump on them, too. If not, then we will actually know that Intel deserves being jumped on to the exclusion of AMD.
8700k is an "end of the line" CPU in terms of motherboard support. Also AMD Ryzen CPUs give you much better bang for buck.
I can't tell if end of the line is a good or a bad thing here?
Most likely bad. With Intel you tend to need a new motherboard anytime you upgrade your processor since they change sockets frequently. This also makes it harder to find replacement motherboards for old processors.
AMD has committed to the AM4 socket they're using until at least 2020, so if you buy a Ryzen processor and motherboard today, you should be able to use that motherboard with Ryzen class processors until 2020.
I can't tell if end of the line is a good or a bad thing here?
Most likely bad. With Intel you tend to need a new motherboard anytime you upgrade your processor since they change sockets frequently. This also makes it harder to find replacement motherboards for old processors. AMD has committed to the AM4 socket they're using until at least 2020, so if you buy a Ryzen processor and motherboard today, you should be able to use that motherboard with Ryzen class processors until 20…
Ah okay. Thanks. I have been an Intel guy for all the years now, so I was used to getting new motherboards.
Good to know AMD is doing that! Getting new motherboards is annoying.
Or, because they're not flush with cash, they go for a simpler to verify design. Remember, a lot of the Zen arch was developed by Jim Keller, who is the brains behind the Athlon 64.
I loved my Athlon 64. IIRC, it ran hot as hell, but the price/performance was amazing.
I remember running two of the AthlonXPs on a Tyan SMP board back in the day. That was before we had multiple cores on a single processor.
As a former Intel employee this aligns closely with my experience. I didn't work in validation (actually joined as part of Altera) but velocity is an absolute buzzword and the senior management's approach to complex challenges is sheer panic. Slips in schedules are not tolerated at all - so problems in validation are an existential threat, your project can easily just be canned. Also, because of the size of the compa…
not quite true regarding the focus - you aren't building a $50B+ company when you don't have focus, it's just that their core compentency isn't fashionable right now. they can't grow in the markets they're in because they either own them completely or were driven out, so they're trying different ones (pivoting, if that's applicable to mature companies).
Intel had the problem of growing their market after their monopoly on 386-compatible processors in the late 80s, which AMD only caught up with their Am386 like 4 years later. Besides their shenanigans to rebate PC manufacturers for not using AMD processors, they did create the IAL—Intel Architecture Labs, which created and gave royalty-free technologies like PCI, AGP, USB, and PCI Express to move the industry forward so that it can grow. That was pretty innovative, at a time where getting a soundcard seemed more practical than choosing a faster processor.
I can't tell if end of the line is a good or a bad thing here?
Most likely bad. With Intel you tend to need a new motherboard anytime you upgrade your processor since they change sockets frequently. This also makes it harder to find replacement motherboards for old processors. AMD has committed to the AM4 socket they're using until at least 2020, so if you buy a Ryzen processor and motherboard today, you should be able to use that motherboard with Ryzen class processors until 20…
Wow, that's .. kinda opposite world from a few years ago. For the Intel chips, the socket remained consistent from the Pentium D all the way up to the Core2Duo. IIRC they had an offboard memory management unit, so the chips wasn't tied directly to a motherboard. The AMDs on the other hand had integrated MMUs and each new chip required a totally different board and the processors themselves were tied to the RAM type (DDR2 vs DDR3 etc).
Intel switched to the AMD model starting with the i3/i5/i7 series, now moving to an integrated MMU themselves.
Denverton is much more complex than a "simple" Atom (performance of a C3958 is up to about half of an i5-7500 in single-thread, twice the total multi-thread performance). Avoton is really no slouch either. It's really not surprising that the incidence of bugs is increasing on those uarchs as the complexity grows. The Skylake/Kaby hyperthread bug has been fixed in microcode and is no longer applicable. It's perfectly…
> The Skylake/Kaby hyperthread bug has been fixed in microcode and is no longer applicable. It's perfectly safe to run HT on these processors now.
Only if you can actually get the fix. My main home PC has this bug and the motherboard manufacturer (ASUS) has yet to ship a BIOS update with the fix.
Denverton is much more complex than a "simple" Atom (performance of a C3958 is up to about half of an i5-7500 in single-thread, twice the total multi-thread performance). Avoton is really no slouch either. It's really not surprising that the incidence of bugs is increasing on those uarchs as the complexity grows. The Skylake/Kaby hyperthread bug has been fixed in microcode and is no longer applicable. It's perfectly…
> The Skylake/Kaby hyperthread bug has been fixed in microcode and is no longer applicable. It's perfectly safe to run HT on these processors now. Only if you can actually get the fix. My main home PC has this bug and the motherboard manufacturer (ASUS) has yet to ship a BIOS update with the fix.
Your OS can deliver a microcode fixup that's installed at OS startup, Windows should do it automatically and Linux you just need to install the intel-microcode package.