Intel Kaby Lake: 14nm+, Higher Clocks, New Media Engine

[Realist9]

From the article..."limited performance improvements available from 10nm products". Isn't Cannon lake (2018), which is supposed be an actual performance increase, unlike the past 5 yrs of desktop CPU's, supposed to be 10 nm??? Is this bad news for Cannon lake?

 

[TJ Hooker]

From the article..."limited performance improvements available from 10nm products". Isn't Cannon lake (2018), which is supposed be an actual performance increase, unlike the past 5 yrs of desktop CPU's, supposed to be 10 nm??? Is this bad news for Cannon lake?

There doesn't seem to be much Cannon lake news yet, but nothing I've heard has pointed to it being a more significant performance increase than the last few generations. Have you heard otherwise?

 

[InvalidError]

From the article..."limited performance improvements available from 10nm products". Isn't Cannon lake (2018), which is supposed be an actual performance increase, unlike the past 5 yrs of desktop CPU's, supposed to be 10 nm??? Is this bad news for Cannon lake?

That comment wasn't about Intel, it was about some of the other foundries deciding to skip re-tooling their fabs for 10nm and focus on the jump to 7nm instead.

Cannonlake is primarily supposed to be a Kaby Lake shrink. Based on Ivy Bridge and Broadwell, the last two process shrinks, there is no reason to expect more than 5-7% gains from those. Even Skylake's updated architecture only produced sub-10% improvements over Broadwell/Haswell.

In all likelihood, you can forget about ever seeing major leaps in architectural performance gains per clock per single-threaded core.

 

[Guest]

I hope AMD brings ZEN which will challenge LGA 2011-V3 platform. And as far as this quad core joke...it is not even worth looking at.

 

[bramahon]

"But while the mainstream PC segment is contracting (Intel noted the majority of PCs are five years or older), the enthusiast space is experiencing a healthy growth trend."

In other words, the enthusiast space is getting isolated with every new release. I wonder if the "healthy growth" is due to some enthusiasts being restless and spending more to break-free from the 4c/8t/16 lane barrier. With Intel hiking the entry-price of HEDT with Broadwell-E, fewer will choose that route next round causing an even larger rift between mainstream and enthusiast segments!

 

[turkey3_scratch]

If you're a gamer it shouldn't even matter if Intel's upcoming chips are a small improvement because their current chips already are more than sufficient for everything you need it to do.

 

[InvalidError]

If you're a gamer it shouldn't even matter if Intel's upcoming chips are a small improvement because their current chips already are more than sufficient for everything you need it to do.

When you get to the point of needing an LGA2011 for extra performance or extras, that isn't merely enthusiast. It is more prosumer and entry-level workstation/server.

There is a similar rift in photography where you have tons of sub-$200 point-and-shoot cameras but if you want manual control over focus, exposure, aperture, etc., you need to step up to $600-1000 DSLR or mirrorless cameras even though the $100 camera has all of the necessary hardware to implement all of those functions, they just don't make the controls available to the user for "simplicity's sake". Phones and tablets are also similar: you have ~$100 phones which have all of the basic stuff covered and then not much worth buying until nearly $300.

Most consumer stuff exhibits the same divide between race-to-the-bottom devices and the high-end with not much in-between.

 

[Wisecracker]

Looks interesting ... but could be a sitting duck for AMD's Basilisk and Styx APUs --- not to mention 10w Stony Ridge at 28nm.

 

[10tacle]

My PC build/upgrade history:

1997: PII 333Hz
1999: Celeron 333Hz
2000: PIII 750Hz (Coppermine)
2002: PIV 3.06GHz (Northwood) <--longest owned CPU/chipset ever between upgrades
2008: Core 2 Duo E8400 (Wolfdale)
2011: Core i5 2500K (Sandy Bridge)
2014: Core i5 4690K (Devil's Canyon) <--forced upgrade after ASUS P8P67 Pro motherboard died

^^Based on the direction I see Intel going upstream, I hope my 4690K will last as long as the Northwood chipset did for gaming.

 

[turkey3_scratch]

My PC build/upgrade history:

1997: PII 333Hz
1999: Celeron 333Hz
2000: PIII 750Hz (Coppermine)
2002: PIV 3.06GHz (Northwood) <--longest owned CPU/chipset ever between upgrades
2008: Core 2 Duo E8400 (Wolfdale)
2011: Core i5 2500K (Sandy Bridge)
2014: Core i5 4690K (Devil's Canyon) <--forced upgrade after ASUS P8P67 Pro motherboard died

^^Based on the direction I see Intel going upstream, I hope my 4690K will last as long as the Northwood chipset did for gaming.

So you've always done an upgrade, never really started with a fresh build? So do you still have Roller Coaster Tycoon on that PC all the way back from 2000?

 

[alidan]

If you're a gamer it shouldn't even matter if Intel's upcoming chips are a small improvement because their current chips already are more than sufficient for everything you need it to do.

When you get to the point of needing an LGA2011 for extra performance or extras, that isn't merely enthusiast. It is more prosumer and entry-level workstation/server.

There is a similar rift in photography where you have tons of sub-$200 point-and-shoot cameras but if you want manual control over focus, exposure, aperture, etc., you need to step up to $600-1000 DSLR or mirrorless cameras even though the $100 camera has all of the necessary hardware to implement all of those functions, they just don't make the controls available to the user for "simplicity's sake". Phones and tablets are also similar: you have ~$100 phones which have all of the basic stuff covered and then not much worth buying until nearly $300.

Most consumer stuff exhibits the same divide between race-to-the-bottom devices and the high-end with not much in-between.

unless i'm wrong, camera phones have crap sensors and lenses, cheap point and shoot have better sensors and sometimes decent lenses, then a cheap dslr has an even better sensor then that, unless i'm wrong, my nikon d3200 has the best sensor in its price bracket, which was i think sub 350$, and even then, if I got a better lense, I could likely take a yet better photo.

Also, having a point and shoot, a recent cellphone, and a dlsr, the sensor and quality difference between each price bracket is VERY obvious, though not to noticeable in optimal lighting, however the worse you are at pictures, the better pictures you take with the better camera.

on the other side, what SHOULD happen, is the better the tech gets, the lower the price for performance is getting and thats just not happening.

the majority of gamers don't want to go from quad core to quad core, especially if they have a sandy bridge, and intel refuses to put something interesting out at a not stupid price point. would really love to see what happens once zen comes out and if its priced competitively, especially that 8 core, or god forbid they try to price match intel, what they do with the 4core apu, as that should slowly drive intel down.

 

[Aspiring techie]

So basically Zen will compete with a glorified Skylake.

 

[neblogai]

Compared the scores to processor in my Surface Pro 2, 15W 2c/4t U4300. 15W i7 7500U scores 30% higher in CPU tests, and +60% in 3Dmark11 graphics score. Or, the U4300 has the performance in graphics as 4.5W Kaby Lake, and in CPU as 7W Kaby Lake. So generally these are nice new chips, well suited for small form factors- except for the fact that my Surface Pro 2 cost similar price to just i7 7500U CPU. Which makes cheap 15W Bristol Ridge in small form factor much more interesting than this, if placed in good quality ultra-portable.

 

[microwerx]

Hmmm...I was hoping for a touch more graphics rendering capability. But, the extra clock speed would be nice in a new Surface Pro 5...I wonder if they'll have a higher clocked GPU for the i7 series U processors...Business wise, I get how they focused on the video rendering issue. I hope that USB 3.1 support will be in and external GPUs can help alleviate the graphics issue...

 

[Aspiring techie]

Maybe what Intel needs to do is to feed their CPUs some spinach

 

[10tacle]

So you've always done an upgrade, never really started with a fresh build? So do you still have Roller Coaster Tycoon on that PC all the way back from 2000?

Hah! Depends on what you define as "fresh build." Generally I kept my PC case and PSU for a generation or two and just installed new CPU/mobo/RAM/GPU upgrades. Eventually I would buy a case to put the old stuff in for a backup PC so nothing was really wasted as I always used a second PC for non-gaming stuff. A few times I've done the whole thing as "fresh" with all new components from scratch.

And as a retro gamer, yes, I still have all of the builds and they all still work, but the PIV and older rigs are just for offline gaming as they were years ago like stuck in a time machine (HL1, Quake II, Star Wars Rogue Squadron 3D, System Shock 2, etc.).

 

[turkey3_scratch]

A photo montage of then to now would be cool.

 

[bit_user]

Hmmm... might finally be time to upgrade my old Pentium M laptop.

 

[Realist9]

INVALIDERROR said: "...In all likelihood, you can forget about ever seeing major leaps in architectural performance gains per clock per single-threaded core."

I used to base CPU, and thus, system upgrades, on a new CPU giving 40-50% better performance in games and video editing/rendering. That led to skipping one, maybe two CPU types. But the way things are, I still have my i7-2700K because the CPU performance increases have been miniscule since 2011.
If Intel is making ~7% performance increases every 2 rys, I could go 12 yrs between upgrades.
Of course, I can't because GPU performance increases are moving faster than that, so I upgrade the GPU earlier (went from 780ti to 1080).
I guess I just need to watch out for major changes in the MOBO arena now. That is A LOT harder to track.

 

[Martell1977]

This leaves AMD in a good spot I'd think. If Intel had come up with a big performance boost with Kaby and Zen is just a little faster than Broadwell, it would have put Zen behind from the outset, but these incremental performance upgrades from Intel really are giving AMD a chance to get back in the game.

The next gen of desktop CPU's from both companies should make for a interesting Q4 2016/Q1 2017.

 

[InvalidError]

I used to base CPU, and thus, system upgrades, on a new CPU giving 40-50% better performance in games and video editing/rendering.

In my case, I need closer to +100% performance as an upgrade threshold and I have been skipping 2-3 generations since the Pentium MMX. Half of the time though, my main upgrade motivation has been platform-related instead of performance: I went from a 512MB P3 to a 3GB P4 and from a 8GB C2D to a 32GB i5-3470. The upgrade from P4 to C2D was both for performance and platform reasons since it felt grossly outdated in every way I can think of by the time I gave up on it.

 

[none12345]

Wait kaby lake uses the same core as skylake with no changes? same ipc? WTF, i was expecting at least some improvement.

All we get is a rebranded skylake with a small factory overclock applied? .... Oh well so much for considering buying a kaby lake.

Zen is my only hope now, please don't screw it up amd!

 

[InvalidError]

All we get is a rebranded skylake with a small factory overclock applied?

It isn't just a rebranded Skylake with factory OC, it has tweaked transistor and interconnect geometry which are the changes that enabled the increased factory clocks. It will likely also overclock better than Skylake thanks to those process tweaks, similar to what Haswell Refresh did.

 

[Guest]

seventh-generation Kaby Lake Cores have up to a 12 per cent performance boost over the sixth-generation – well, when running the SYSmark benchmark on a seventh-gen 15W 3.5GHz Core i7 7500U versus a sixth-gen 15W 3.1GHz Core i7 6500U.

they bumped the max clock speed 12.9% and got a 12% improvement ?

Ahahahahahahahaha !

 

[cmi86]

I have been saying this since Haswell, the core architecture in terms of throughput is played out. There are no significant changes that can be made anymore. That is why every "new" gen is but a few marginal percent improved in terms of IPC and efficiency. They have been milking every laat possible drop out of this architecture because AMD has given them no reason to push innovation beyond what is easy and cost effective. I am not saying intel doesn't have anything next gen in the pipeline because obviously they do, we just haven't seen it because there has been no market pressure. I feel Zen will bring this much needed pressure on intel and we will then likely see intel push something completely new on 10nm.