Read more.10nm desktop chips said to combine up to 8 Golden Cove and 8 Gracemont cores.
Read more.10nm desktop chips said to combine up to 8 Golden Cove and 8 Gracemont cores.
My hunch: this is so they can say "Look, we sell 16 core consumer chips too!". Also probably die re-use from laptops.
Technically having slower low power cores for background tasks will get you a bit more power budget to squeeze a few more MHz out of the high power cores and at a lower silicon cost than adding more full-fat cores, so I can see them marketing it as enabling you to game without background tasks getting in the way, but really this is a hammer looking for a nail on desktop
This will just make AVX-512 an even bigger mess, and put of software support.
Using Atom for low-power cores is a good idea for mobile offerings, but it really needs to support the same ISA as the big core to stop having the issues the article points out.
Haven't phones been doing this for a while mostly for power saving where the big cores kick in for more intensive tasks.
So in mobile platforms this makes a lot of sense but on desktop is it really needed, I don't mind having cores under utilised but would mind not all cores being up to the task at hand.
If both Gracemont and Golden Cove support AVX2, seems like it should be able to go head to head with Zen core SIMD, which are also limited to AVX2, right?
What a mess, sorry but who asked for BIG.little on the desktop?
It's like Intel is trying to make it a thing when it was never wanted to be a thing...
The ONLY reason they are doing it is out of complete, sheer desperation.
They've tried they're usual lies and dirty tactics, the trouble is, they are so far behind they had people trying to come up with anything they can.
This is all they can do. It gives them option for spin.
"Our 16 core chips operate at a fraction of the power draw of AMD"
It's never apples to apples with them, it's not even apples to oranges.
To be fair to Intel, hybrid makes sense for laptops. Modern Atom has more than enough grunt for ~ 90% of the stuff most people do, but it's atrocious for the other 10%. If they can stick some fast big cores on an Atom processor that are power-gated for 90% of the time, they can use the lower power draw of the atom cores to either extend battery life or enable EVEN THINNER designs.
And once they're baking hybrid silicon for the laptop, why not stick it on the desktop too?
I suspect - in terms of justifying big.LITTLE on the desktop - Xlucine's close to the mark in terms of background tasking on the little cores to leave the big cores free for "proper" work. Even sitting relatively idle my laptop can use 10% - 15% CPU - activity that has to time slice with any serious CPU tasks going on. Shunt those background processes onto dedicated little cores and the big cores don't have to slice time for them. If it's implemented well it might get you that 10% - 15% back in CPU intensive applications. Intel clearly think it's worth it...
Intel consumer socket CPUs for desktop have been mobile orientated for 10 years - what we get is overvolted laptop CPUs for desktop. They could have easily had 6 or 8 core consumer socket CPUs years ago,but spent the silicon budget on a bigger GPU instead which made little sense for desktop users. Also Intel will try and upsell it's HEDT line-up for people wanting more cores. As I said for years Intel has been quietly milking desktop users and gamers with minimal level efforts.
What's interesting is the power envelope.
125w
80w
80w
Now consider that the 14nm 10900k is 125w with 10/20 cores/threads, and you can see there's not much efficiency gains in the smaller node + Foveros packaging.
But then again...Intel Watts are different to everyone else's.
ME!
I want it.
Despite all the improvements in power gating, frequency control etc. I do not need a full fat vector brute churning away on background processes when I'm just browsing Hexus.
Likewise when I'm gaming, I'd be happy if there are dedicated cores taking care of background tasks like networking and preventing any interrupts.
But why not have 8, 12 or more full fat cores that can downclock when required? This just doesn't make sense for the desktop. I'm not sure it even makes sense for laptops when you can downclock so well now.
Its funny it reminds me of my a8-5550 based laptop. With boost clocks the thing is like a high power hairdryer but disable boost and it runs lovely and cool and i've not noticed the slow down. It's just a shame it requires me to disable it on each boot via software.
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