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

http://www.anandtech.com/show/11722/intel-reveals-ice-lake-core-architecture-10nm-plus

by bauta-steen • 9 years ago

326 236 9 years ago

anandtech.com

nodesocket• 9 years ago

Is this Intel's response to AMD Threadripper and EPYC?

wmf2• 9 years ago

No, that would be Cascade Lake-X and Cascade Lake-SP.

nullnilvoid• 9 years ago

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.

wmf2• 9 years ago

Ice Lake has been delayed from 2017 to 2018, so I'm not sure what competition has to do with it.

spyhi2• 9 years ago

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 surface, increased competition has led to increased transparency, which is good for consumers...or at least I'm happy knowing I have the option to avoid a big, hot, power-hungry chip if I want to.

phire• 9 years ago

We never had a date for Ice Lake. I think we only started hearing about it this year.

It's Cannon Lake (Intel's first 10nm chip) which is supposed to come out this year.

nodemochatea• 9 years ago

Wow. Great comment.

frik• 9 years ago

Now that Intel got competition again with very competitive new AMD CPUs, Intel is releasing "new" CPU to the public that waited in their basement for some time. AMD CPUs are a lot faster than they hoped, so Intel has to skip one generation.

kakwa_2• 9 years ago

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.

std_throwaway• 9 years ago

Gains in instructions-per-clock start to flatten out. And that's where the gains were coming from in the last years. Some time ago a paper was posted here that showed how even if you have an infinite amount of transistors, you will still be limited in the range of 3-10 instructions-per-clock for typical programs.

Clock speeds seem to have leveled and IPC will only see another gain of 50-100%. Single threaded performance is close to the limit. What after that? Is this the end?

willtim• 9 years ago

There are still tons of things to improve in CPUs: power consumption, cost, embedded functionalities (SoC)

Don't forget bugs! We have had buggy silicon, microcode and drivers, all of which probably still need fixing.

nolok• 9 years ago

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).

Ah, I can answer that one for you: my work computer of that time (E6850, 8 GB RAM), which cost me less than a thousand euros to build back then, has since been reconverted as a work computer for one of my employee, running Windows 10, Office 2016 and Chrome all day long. Only addition has been a 120GB SSD.

It runs much better than the "modern" and "cheap" ~ 400 euros integrated work computer I bought from ASUS and HP in 2015.

bluedino• 9 years ago

People like to say a Core 2 Duo can still hang, and while it might be okay for basic tasks (and you could use a 10 years old computer in 2007 for basic tasks like word processing, internet), modern PC's are much faster.

On benchmarks you're going to be 4-6x faster on most tasks with a 2017 Macbook Pro compared to a 2007, and then don't even get started with anything that takes advantage of SIMD or GP workloads.

The other reason people say they can use a 10 year old PC today is because they've upgraded it. Early Core 2 Duo systems shipped with 512MB or 1GB RAM. They came with very slow 80GB hard drives. Upgrading to an SSD and 4-6GB of RAM is a must.

ori_b• 9 years ago

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).

The only issue I have with my old laptop from around then is browsing the web. Everything else, the performance is fine.

sliverstorm• 9 years ago

Maybe the gains are running out, but that song has been sung for decades and never proved true yet.

It's hard not to look at everything and interpret the marginal gains the past half decade as monopolist laziness/arrogance.

compuguy3• 9 years ago

I believe the last big improvement in power consumption was (at least for Intel) was the 5th generation Haswell chips. What they have been doing is cutting back support on older chips (2nd and 3rd generation specifically).

slededit7• 9 years ago

At this point real compute happens on the GPU. I think we'll see a shift to major apps being driven by GPGPU.

The CPU's performance has started matter less and less.

jacquesm4• 9 years ago

That's just simply not true. The 'real computation' happening on GPUs is either very heavy floating point work or graphics related work, almost everything else is running on the CPU.

davemp4• 9 years ago

What do you mean by major apps? Do you have some reason to believe that apps will suddenly become embarrassingly parallel? Major apps often don't even take full advantage of SIMD instructions on the CPU. As soon as you need a context switch, branching, or fast memory access your GPU is crap.

GPUs are only good at _very_ specific workloads.

slededit7• 9 years ago

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 speedups are just too tremendous.

Intel knows this, which is why they purposely limit PCIe bandwidth.

jostmey• 9 years ago

Right on. Core speeds are not getting any faster. Chips with thousands of cores are the future. Intel is way behind in this area

mrep• 9 years ago

A quick look at AWS shows probably 5 out of 100 services that use GPU as their main resources whereas all of the others use CPU's.

Machine learning may be all the hype right now, but it is still suboptimal for most software demands.

frozenport2• 9 years ago

Intel chips have a giant iGPU, that on certain models occupies near half the space. It can currently decode 4k Netflix. The technology is equally applicable to GPUs.

TorKlingberg2• 9 years ago

The video decoding is done by a hard block called Quick Sync. It's part of the iGPU, but is not using the regular GPU cores.

ant6n• 9 years ago

I've never run a piece of software that used a GPU for anything other than rendering. I believe I'm part of a very large majority.

oceanswave• 9 years ago

If you'd like to, these links will let you do so from the comfort of your (desktop) browser.

https://tenso.rs

http://gpu.rocks/

zanny2• 9 years ago

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.

deepnotderp10• 9 years ago

Let's try a compromise, how about multithreaded programs? Or how about programs utilizing less control flow so that static processors (yes, like the infamous VLIW) can extract ilp?

imtringued2• 9 years ago

GPUs are only useful if your problem is data parallel. The majority of compute intensive problems that are also data parallel at the same time have been shifted to GPUs and SIMD instructions already. A GPU isn't some pixie dust that makes everything faster.

GuiA2• 9 years ago

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 love to hear the thinking of anyone educated on the topic.

Edit: very intrigued by the sustained downvotes on this ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

spydum• 9 years ago

widely assumed 5nm is the limit. I know i've seen others discuss some ideas around how close they can get, but i'm struggling to find the thread.. In any case, this may help: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_nanometer

Found it.. http://semiengineering.com/will-7nm-and-5nm-really-happen/ and the HN discussion from several years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7920108

SemiTom• 9 years ago

also Is 7nm The Last Major Node? https://semiengineering.com/7nm-last-major-node/

jacquesm4• 9 years ago

The step from 14 to 10 nm is huge. Both from a technological perspective on the manufacturing side as well as on the effect it will have to the number of transistors on a die and the power consumption of those transistors. Remember that power consumption and the number of transistors are related to the surface area so there is a square factor in there. 14 nm ^2 = 196, 10 nm ^2 = 100, so that's almost a doubling of the number of transistors and approximately a halving of the power required per transistor for a given die area.

Osmium• 9 years ago

While true, the same math holds for 22 nm^2 (484) to 14 nm^2 (196).

Real world gains will never be as high as the math suggests, as you get into leakage currents etc.

deepnotderp10• 9 years ago

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.

deepnotderp10• 9 years ago

Yeah, so the node names now apparently refer to the "smallest feature size", which is some random thing on the M0 metal layer. Source - from a former Intel engineer for more than a decade

rayiner• 9 years ago

There are various limits in play: https://www.extremetech.com/computing/97469-is-14nm-the-end-.... At sub-nanometer we're talking about features of 5-10 atoms across. At that scale you get effects like electrons quantum tunneling between transistors: https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2016/10/6/13187820/o.... We probably won't get there with existing silicon technology.

TheSpiceIsLife• 9 years ago

I read on HN, a couple months ago, these numbers no longer represent the physical size of anything but are now just a marketing label, a sort of 'performance equivalent to a theoretical size of'.

Anyone know if there's any truth to this? Might try to find the comment later when I have time.

wereHamster• 9 years ago

Going from 14nm to 10nm increases the number of transistors per mm from 37 to 100 millions. That's a huge difference!!

leggomylibro• 9 years ago

I think that beyond our current processes, there is the potential for different materials to take the place of XXnm silicon processes, which could fit more transistors in a smaller area.

Research like: http://news.stanford.edu/press-releases/2017/08/11/new-ultra...

"3D" processes which build multiple layers on top of one another may also see more investment as other methods become prohibitively expensive. And once you've cheaply gone to 2 layers in a big blob of epoxy, what's stopping you from doing 4? 8? 16? 32? [Heat dissipation, probably]

But whatever, people have been saying Moore's Law is dead since Moore's Law was invented. Who knows whether we'll technically hit one milestone or another. Things get faster, what the hell.

nhaehnle• 9 years ago

People are already stacking multiple layers today for memory, although the layers are always manufactured separately and then bonded together in a separate step.

I wouldn't be surprised to see more of that in the future, think caches on top of cores, but I doubt we'll ever see multiple layers of transistors produced in a single step. Technical challenges aside, the economics of trying to produce multiple layers at once are just always going to be worse: higher latency from a wafer entering a fab to finishing the wafer, and much higher rate of defects. (When you produce the layers separately, you can potentially test them separately before putting them together, which is a huge win for defect rate.)

It's possible that manufacturing multiple layers at once might eventually allow for a higher density of vertical interconnects, but I just don't see that becoming the deciding factor.

ijidak• 9 years ago

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.

Dolores122• 9 years ago

If you consider relative change it looks like

2011: 32nm

2012: 31% size reduction

2014: 36% size reduction

2018: 28,5% size reduction

GuiA2• 9 years ago

Yes, but in 1, 2, and 4 years respectively.

jabl• 9 years ago

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?

The lattice constant of crystalline silicon is 0.54 nm, and since it's an FCC structure the distance between neighboring atoms is 0.38 nm. So with a hypothetical 2 nm CPU, some feature would be only roughly 5 atoms across, which leaves VERY little room for manufacturing tolerance. How would one manufacture a device containing billions of transistors with such small tolerances? I don't think we'll ever see such things, at least not with a lithography approach.

Heck, I think it's close to black magic that they are able to produce transistors on a 10nm process, but apparently experts say that up to 5nm (13 atoms!!!) might be possible.

bullen• 9 years ago

All you get now is power reduction. Performance is completely bottlenecked since 22nm. Peak computing!

mtgx2• 9 years ago

Didn't 14nm arrive late 2015 or in 2016?

bhouston3• 9 years ago

What will be the clock when single threaded? Can we get above 5GHz finally?

zanny2• 9 years ago

We have been over 5ghz for a decade, it just takes ln2 to do it.

We aren't going to see ludicrously high clock rates for the foreseeable future. There are a lot of compounding factors as to why, but the biggest ones are the pressure for efficiency driving designs that aren't dumping higher and higher voltage to get frequency, the diminishing returns on voltage vs frequency (see Ryzen, where a 20% improvement in clocks costs about a 50% increase in power draw across all skews, and similar situations happen with Intel).

That being said, a 4ghz Skylake core crushes a 4ghz Core 2 core. Depending on your benchmark used it can perform anywhere from 80% to upwards of 170% faster per clock. You don't get as dramatic year over year improvements increasing the the per cycle performance, but innovations leading up to ~2004 (or 06 for the multicore boon) were just stuffing power hungrier and hotter transistors on smaller dies.

dom05• 9 years ago

We have been over 5ghz for a decade, it just takes ln2 to do it.

Non-x86 systems went over 5 GHz on air many years ago, e.g. IBM POWER.

floatboth2• 9 years ago

Delidded Kaby Lake also sometimes does 5GHz on air IIRC

bhouston3• 9 years ago

That being said, a 4ghz Skylake core crushes a 4ghz Core 2 core.

Core 2 Duos were slower per clock than Pentium 4s, I think by quite a bit. It was a real set back for performance when they came out.

yread• 9 years ago

5GHz is not that unreachable:

i5-4670K AT 5GHZ OC On a $30 Air Cooler https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUHm2qHI3gc

ksec• 9 years ago

We need something other then Silicon to have 4Ghz + at reasonable Power usage. I think Material Science is going to be the next big thing when we reach the limit of Silicon.

I really wish we could see more IPC and 10Ghz+, our single threaded performance have be stuck at the same level for far too long.

SSLy2• 9 years ago

a lot of i7-7700K's can be overclocked to 5.1GHz and beyond, while on air cooling

verroq• 9 years ago

Anyone else get redirected to malware?

sjtrny• 9 years ago

Yes! I thought it was my DNS or something. It only happens on mobile.

mappu• 9 years ago

Anandtech have great content, but their advertising can be... aggressive.

I assume you have an adblocker on desktop but not on mobile?

lathiat• 9 years ago

This has happened to me multiple times.

I've reported it to them a couple of times, last time Ryan Smith told me on twitter that I'm welcome to report it to him direct: https://twitter.com/ryansmithat/status/877409854087806976

lorenzhs• 9 years ago

And people get mad on here when I say that I use an adblocker. Until the ad industry gets its shit together, I will continue to do so, as not blocking ads is negligent from a security perspective. This is a terrible state of affairs.

0xffff2• 9 years ago

And people get mad on here when I say that I use an adblocker.

Really? Can you link an example?

readams• 9 years ago

They used to go Process, Architecture, Process, Architecture, which was styled as Tick, Tock. Recently they switched to Process, Architecture, More Architecture.

I like to call it Tick, Tock, Clunk.

turblety7• 9 years ago

I wonder if this one will come with free backdoors and spyware installed, thanks to the wonderful Intel Management Engine (Intel ME) backdoor. [1][2][3]

Intel (and AMT) keep pushing more and more proprietary code that can not be read, changed or removed. No one knows exactly what it does and it has built in screen and key recording. It's my advice and the advice of privacy advocates that no one should purchase or use any processor made by Intel or AMD until they address these serious issues.

1. https://libreboot.org/faq.html#intel

2. https://puri.sm/learn/intel-me/

3. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14708575

piva002• 9 years ago

You know the depth of how unrealistic is your advice, right?

thinkfurther3• 9 years ago

Do you know the depths of not taking that advice and what lurks in them? Do you know that if everybody simply took it to heart, there'd be nothing unrealistic about it at all? How many months of abstinence and solidarity would be required to end these practices, or the companies if they so wish? And then that money simply shifts to ethical companies and we actually have a future. Or, we keep pretending it's all so very hard, and don't have one.

lawik• 9 years ago

Interesting. Pragmatically, are there any okay-ish options for consumer-level processors and motherboards that are not Intel or AMD?

ARM devices?

cyphar3• 9 years ago

The Talos II[1], which is a IBM POWER9-based machine. It's a bit more expensive than a standard Intel machine (~$2k for the whole prebuilt machine, a bit less for just the motherboard+CPU).

Everything in it is free, including all of the firmware, and the CPU is an open specification.

[1] https://www.raptorcs.com/content/base/products.html

baq• 9 years ago

The backdoor is super useful for large enterprises, don't hope for much.

rekado• 9 years ago

It would be more useful for them if it could be controlled at the source level. The management engine would be fine if it were free software and could be replaced.

I'm very unhappy with my old Sun servers, for example, because the management system cannot be upgraded and the servers are no longer supported. I'm stuck with proprietary insecure software that I depend on and that I have no way of changing. It's all worse if the insecure outdated software can only be replaced by soldering wires to a chip on the board.

turblety7• 9 years ago

The issue I have is companies like Google and Puri.sm have asked Intel and AMD for a blank signed blob that completely disables ME but they have refused this. It would take them literally no time at all. This raises all sorts of red flags that something dodgy is going on.

If you had the chance to make a supplier who creates millions of chromebooks happy, wouldn't you take every opportunity to help them, especially if it costs you little to no money at all. Obviously there is a big reason why they don't want this backdoor removed.

sspiff2• 9 years ago

I'm not sure this should be discussed in this thread.

Also, I don't know of any alternative that doesn't have large unauditable blobs integrated into the chip.

All ARM SoCs come with radio processors that are running a non-trivial piece of software with full access to the system memory, which is responsible for power management, boot sequence and wireless communications. It is by definition network connected.

AMD has a technology it calls the Platform Security Processor (PSP for short) which does basically the same thing.

To have a processor that doesn't have this kind of technology, you have to give up on decades of advancement in compute power, or buy a very expensive and non-portable POWER8 or POWER9 system.

turblety7• 9 years ago

Why should a serious backdoor, privacy concerns and ethical problems with a monopolies new product not be discussed in a thread about that product? Not sure I get your point on that.

But yeah you are totally right on the alternatives. Nothing quite matches Intel and AMD, and a lot of those ARM SoC's have proprietary code running on their bootloader too. But you can get some processor from 7 years ago that are usable.

OpenPOWER is fantastic though and has real potential. There were a few projects out there looking to implement a laptop and personal desktop computer using it, but unfortunatly didn't reach it's funding goals.

I think the more people that know about Intel and AMD's shading practices that more funding open hardware projects can get, and maybe in the next few years we can replace Intel and AMD with ethical and open solutions.

vbezhenar• 9 years ago

Check out Talos II motherboard. It's a workstation-class motherboard with dual POWER9 CPUs for $2750. It's a good price for workstation computer IMO. They claim that all their firmware is open source. Specifications are quite modern. The only problem is (kind of) exotic architecture, but many people would be able to use it with open source software.

0xcde4c3db2• 9 years ago

All ARM SoCs come with radio processors that are running a non-trivial piece of software with full access to the system memory, which is responsible for power management, boot sequence and wireless communications. It is by definition network connected.

The high-end ones used for flagship smartphones/tablets do, but low-end ones used in cheaper tablets/TV boxes and more specialized hardware often don't have any radio interface.

wiz21c• 9 years ago

yep. Once everything will be under control, having the freedom to write your own software, especially software that challenges the rules, will be useless...

andy_ppp• 9 years ago

Does anyone here know someone who works on these various management engines? It'd be interesting to see if the security services were involved or if they really were back dooring all computers right?

My guess is it's definitely possible but it would have been popped by foreign agencies by now too and there would have been a leak of tools to exploit such devices? I guess maybe it's very tempting to be able to hack any device though so knowing the NSA they are probably for doing this, fuck the consequences?

turblety7• 9 years ago

There was this floating around a while ago: https://i.redd.it/id88hvysu3ny.png

dis-sys• 9 years ago

no one should purchase or use any processor made by Intel or AMD until they address these serious issues.

so go back to stone age by stop using all PCs/Servers? nice troll.

turblety7• 9 years ago

Have a look at https://minifree.org/ and a few Chromebooks (obviously with the operating system replaced). There are some options, but yeah it's a big problem that the microprocessor market has been locked up by two monopolies.

But I guess people have to make a personal judgement. Is ethics, privacy, freedom more important than a faster processor to run your games on?

cyphar3• 9 years ago

In addition to MiniFree, there's the Talos II[1] which is an entirely free motherboard and CPU (based on IBM's POWER9). It's a very modern CPU specification, and is also fairly powerful. Currently pre-orders are open. They are a bit pricey (~$2k for a fully prebuilt machine), but if you feel that you want a more powerful CPU that is an option. They also have server offerings.

[1] https://www.raptorcs.com/content/base/products.html

goodroot• 9 years ago

This is disturbing, to say the least. Given how much effort I've invested in securing myself, it's... disappointing. The rationale, it seems, is that government doesn't count as "someone to be concerned about", from a security point of view.

I'm curious about how one would be associated with a particular chip. I understand that key strokes can be logged, TCP/IP can be read; you can be scraped, but ultimately how is their backdoor aware of you so that it doesn't appear to them like needle in a stack of needles. A fascinating and revolting technical conundrum.

jsudhams• 9 years ago

So it does affect only Desktop workload right? Because on servers as long as we use virtuals we should be good. Am i right?

turblety7• 9 years ago

No. Basically the Intel ME is a completely separate ARM processor that's physically stuck onto each Intel Processor. It has direct access to everything the Intel chip does. The memory it's allocating, the hardware commands (ie keyboard, mouse, display), the software running, the processes running. This all happens at a higher level than the actual Intel processor and you have no control over it at all.

Basically whatever you run at any level on your Intel chip can be monitored by the Intel ME chip, no matter how many VM's, operating systems, encrypted files/processes you have installed/are using.

davemp4• 9 years ago

If CPU backdoors exist how has nobody logged network traffic required to abuse them?

Buge• 9 years ago

Malware is in fact using IME.[1] And remotely exploitable vulnerabilities have been found it in.[2]

[1] https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/mmpc/2017/06/07/platinum...

[2] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/05/intel...

ngneer• 9 years ago

Are you certain that the advice you are giving is suited to the security and privacy objectives of the masses?

Also, the management engine is more about the chipset than about the core, which is what the announcement is about.

bitL4• 9 years ago

In retrospective, Intel should have bought NVidia when they had the chance; GPUs is the only area making huge progress year to year now.

ZenoArrow• 9 years ago

Intel didn't buy NVIDIA, but they did buy Altera, and there's plenty of room for growth with FPGAs.

bitL4• 9 years ago

Aren't FPGAs mainly for design phase and the real crunching in the industry done on ASICs? At least whole automotive industry works that way - FPGAs to design/test stuff, ASICs for production and making money.

SSLy2• 9 years ago

Even better course of action would be AMD merging with Nv instead of ATI.

Brockenstein• 9 years ago

But we're all out of DeLoreans...

Yizahi• 9 years ago

They couldn't, their logo colors doesn't match.

CountSessine• 9 years ago

Apparently AMD and Nvidia discussed this, but Nvidia's CEO Jensen Huang wanted to be CEO of the combined company. I think AMD saw the deal as an acquisition, not a merger.

Shorel• 9 years ago

That ship sailed 11 years ago.

smitherfield• 9 years ago

Besides GPUs, memory (DRAM), storage (SSDs, hard drives), wired networking (Ethernet, Thunderbolt, Fibre Channel), wireless networking (WiFi, Bluetooth, cellular) and displays (monitors, VR) are all still keeping pace with their respective versions of Moore's Law. Of course they still aren't going to catch up to CPUs any time soon. (Never in the case of networking, since light travels only so fast).

majidazimi• 9 years ago

Hmmm. It seems Atom/Electron devs need to work hard to slow down new generation processors...

mariusmg• 9 years ago

Don't worry, i'm sure they'll do it....

iplaw• 9 years ago

I will say that, despite its many shortcomings and after I was able to overcome the netbook-induced Atom stigmas, I really do like the Atom for small-business NAS applications.

will_hughes• 9 years ago

Pretty sure the comment was about the Atom and Electron editor / framework.

https://atom.io/ https://electron.atom.io/

bhouston3• 9 years ago

VSCode isn't similarly slow. Weird.

jshap70• 9 years ago

microsoft put in a lot of work into how vscode buffers the html its displaying for the file, and it runs very well because of it. It is actually a very cool setup; if you get a chance do an element inspection of the monaco in-browser editor, as it uses the same method. the same can not be said for atom, however.

bhauer• 9 years ago

Well, seeing as so many applications remain single-threaded despite years of mainstream multi-core CPUs, that shouldn't be too hard. Especially with many mentors in our industry cautioning new programmers that "concurrency is hard" so often that—at least within my small social network—new developers have been conditioned to avoid subjects like threading.

Yes, concurrency is a challenge, but it's tremendously rewarding. Plus modern languages make it much easier than it was in the past.

jrs953• 9 years ago

Atom has actually gotten significantly faster recently. It seems they've started to rewrite some core components of it in C++ for performance reasons. I've also used some Electron apps that are very lean. I think it's more of an implementation issue. Slack is pretty terrible at resource usage, for example, but Zeit's Hyper is very efficient & it's resource usage is comparable to iTerm in my experience.

Slack's issues with their electron app shouldn't be particularly surprising, either, considering it was their head architect that published an article on Medium advocating for PHP on the basis of it's concurrency model...

old-gregg• 9 years ago

Zeit's Hyper is very efficient

Ladies and gentlemen! I present you the efficient terminal application, which only needs:

         Process        Memory      Threads
         -------        ---------   -------
         Hyper	        40.8 MB	    32
         Hyper Helper	51.9 MB	    15
         Hyper Helper	18.8 MB	    12
         Hyper Helper	15.2 MB	    4

         Total:         126.7 MB    64

On a serious note, I think the insanity will stop when the operating systems will start shaming badly written applications and nudge users to get rid of them. It is in Apple/Microsoft interest, because users will blame their computers ("My Windows is getting slow...").

The phones already show the list of power hungry apps responsible for your battery life reduction, having this on a desktop would be nice too. If even a terminal needs 64 threads and 126MB of RAM now... looks like some wrist-slapping is in order...

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

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