Read more.Meanwhile the 24C/48T Intel Xeon Processor E7-8894 v4 has launched.
Read more.Meanwhile the 24C/48T Intel Xeon Processor E7-8894 v4 has launched.
IDK Skylake to Kaby Lake was a 15% improvement.
While part of me thinks "great!", there's a more subtle part that thinks "15%. So what?"
And I wonder if Intel shares a feature in common with most sharks .... keep swimming, or drown.
I mean, given that there will be a few exceptions to this, including perhaps gamjng and certainly a few true power-user applications, but for the vast majority I wonder .... just what will 15% increase in performance do for you?
Historically, IMHO, the performance race was about one of two things :-
1) Productivity increases in your workload, or
2) Enabling something new to be done that previously wasn't possible, or not at a pragmstic performance.
Or both.
An early example of 2) might be CAD, where you could get AutoCAD to run, even on 1980's era XT-class machines, but it was so slow as to be useless for all practical purposes. Another example was viable voice recognition and consequent dictation capabilities, where software waited for hardware to catch up.
My daily PC life, these days, consists of mainly humdrum stuff, like WP, spreadsheets, email, and so on. Then, I do use Photoshop but even that runs acceptably fast for my needs on a Q6600-era machine with 4GB DDR2 and HD, not SSD.
Oh, and as a writer, I use voice-recog extensively, and that machine copes perfectly well.
I suspect, for me at least, that a 15% system performance improvement would pretty much amount to my machine going from 90% of cycles in idle, waiting for activity from me, to 92% idle waiting for me, and a 15% CPU gain is highly unlikely to amount to anything like 15% system-wide.
I'm interested to know what others, if anyone's excited about this, thinks the real-world actual benefit to their daily PC usage will be? What will it let you do you can't do perfectly well already, or what prodictivity gains will be really noticeable?
Or is it just proof, however technically clever, of a shark's steely and grim drive to keep swimming?
Yes, it would seem that they are on about be the same +15% they claimed for Skylake vs Kaby Lake?
Which was more like this:
Ah, so Intel's marketing department has 15% = 7.5%. (All due to the increased base frequency and turbo).) Looks like their maths is exactly half of reality?
Anyway, I am sure there are some Kaby Lake mobile i7 which in some loads do perform 15% better than their Skylake equivalents most likely 15W models mainly due to not throttling as much.
But that is just used be expected from silicon stepping revisions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stepping_level) and that is what Kaby Lake was: a new stepping of Skylake with some new fixed function video decode hardware. Certainly did not deserve a 1000+ numbers: the Haswell Refresh was a lot more honest, and years ago it might have gotten a designation like E2 from B2.
I do a lot of CPU (and RAM) intensive development work - particularly around encryption/compression and recently emulation. I like to keep my CPU as quick as possible without having to tear down my whole system or getting in to a constant minor upgrade cycle. That way I actually notice the performance bumps and it doesn't cost ridiculous amounts for what is ultimately a hobby.
So, as an example I bought in to my 4790K and keep it overclocked and watercooled. It is starting to fall slightly behind newer chips now, even though it tickles 5ghz most of the time, less in summer when ambient temps go up. So 2017 will probably be my next big upgrade, depending on what AMD actually do and how Intel react - especially with affordable extra cores/threads.
Being 3 gens behind, I think a 15% performance increase on my current setup is probably achievable. Which to me would be 10% quicker encryption, or 10% more FPS in a software rendered emulation. With overclocking headroom I'd be set for a while. So yes, this is exciting for me, even with the large pinch of salt it has to be taken with.
Saracen (10-02-2017)
Interesting, virtuo.
Though, you do have a use of the type I'd class as " exception", not normal use. But in your shoes, I'd be interested too.
This is exactly the kind of example I was hoping to see, where CPU performance is, presumably, the main bottleneck.
15pc = 15 Personal Computers?
Honestly I'm still running a i7 2600k (boost overclocked to 4.8GHz) and I'm yet to find anything that it can't deal with.
I contributed nothing here, but thought I'd throw that in anyway.
I think, like most, the slowest part of my computer setup is me!
I use a E3-1230V3 (a slightly downclocked i7-4770 minus the iGPU) and it will be more than suitable for me for the foreseeable future. It browses the net, plays the occasional game of World of Tanks or similar and that's about it. From time to time it does a little bit of Plex transcoding, but since I have the majority of my Plex library on my microserver (except it's currently out of commission) that's a tertiary task at best.
The aspect of AMD releasing these processors that genuinely excites me is that they give the end consumer options. Which we have been distinctly lacking of late! It will generate competition for my hard earned pound and will mean I get more for it. Saying that, I'm not interested in this upgrade cycle. I'm quite content at 1080p and my E3-1230V3 and GTX 770 more than suffice for that.
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so we can expect faster clock speeds and minimal changes to the architecture as usual then...15% on sysmark isn't anything to boast imo about considering there have been accusations of 'cheating' the benchmark by 'optimising' the 'workload' tests to favour intel cpus...
There's no accusations, at the bottom of the slide (clipped from the image Hexus is using) they say "Software and Workloads used in performance tests may have been optimized for performance only on Intel microprocessors" Who knows if that's sysmark in general or just for the test Intel use.
Well after Haswell,the Xeon E3 chips were artificially locked to the C232/C236 chipsets even though it uses the same 1151 socket as consumer motherboards.
Its what really annoys me - I was one of the first people on UK forums to talk about the Xeon E3 chips as a cheap way to get a 4C/8T CPU,and have the Xeon E3 1230 V2 myself,so it really grates Intel did another artificial product segmentation.
Unless Coffee Lake has been brought forward I expect these will be a further overclocked Core i7 7700K with better TIM. So maybe instead of a 4.2GHZ to 4.5GHZ base clockspeed,its a 4.5GHZ to 4.8GHZ/5.0GHZ SKU.
However,whether overclocking will be any better is another question - since it could just literally be another clock boosted line,but this time running closer to the max clockspeed you can expect for the chip.
If you are staying with Intel don't upgrade to a Core i7 8000 series unless the platform can take one of the 6C Intel CPUs otherwise it is Intel taking the piss by launching three new generations using the same CPU cores.
Last edited by CAT-THE-FIFTH; 10-02-2017 at 02:27 PM.
The reason I am waiting for the dust to settle on Zen, and see what Intel do in response.
My high-resource-demand work is not paid-for (yet..) and is only something I play around with in my spare time. I will indeed be looking at more physical cores/threads for my next upgrade though.
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