Intel's Future Chips: News, Rumours & Reviews

[goldstone77]

Happy Holidays everyone! IEDM information recap to think about over the Holidays!

IEDM 2017 - Intel Versus GLOBALFOUNDRIES at the Leading Edge
by Scotten Jones
Published on 12-17-2017 06:00 AM

IEDM 2017: GlobalFoundries 7nm process; Cobalt, EUV
David SchorIEDM 2017, Process TechnologiesDecember 21, 2017

GlobalFoundries will have the smaller cell, but Intel will still have about ~13.8-19.6% better logic density, (published estimates)Intel's ~102.9-103 MTr/mm² to GoFlo's ~86-90.5 MTr/mm², because Intel is using contact over active gate. Intel reports 100.8 MTr/mm² for their own process making it only about 11% logic density gap compared to Scotten Jones estimate of 90.5MTr/mm². That being said, GlobalFoundries have made significant improvements to their transistors! And they will be on as close to level playing field that we have seen, and will end up being a contest mainly between who has the best design.


IEDM 2017: Intel’s 10nm Platform Process
Leave a reply
By Dick James
Contact over active gate

The dummy gates at the cell boundaries have gone, replaced by a single gate spacing; and the gate contact is now over the active gate, ending the need for isolation space to fit in the contact.

The 14-nm process had a dummy gate at the edge of each cell, on the end of adjacent fins, similar to this image of a 22-nm device;

The 10-nm cell uses a dummy gate spacing between fin ends, which saves a gate pitch when packing two cells together, a claimed 20% cell area saving.

In actual fact there is no dummy gate in the finished product, just the fin etched where a single dummy gate would be. This was shown in the presentation, but it is not in the paper, but Samsung did something very similar in their 10-nm offering:

In fact, a dummy polySi gate is used, allowing source/drain formation without risking the fin edge; but for these particular gates the polySi removal etch goes a bit further, and etches the fin to separate the cells.

The second layout change is to shift the gate contact into the active transistor area, over the functional part of the gate (see below).

Such tight alignment with the source/drain (diffusion) contacts requires the development of self-aligned contacts to the gate, and modification of the self-aligned diffusion contacts that were already in use at 14-nm and 22-nm.

Diffusion contacts (left) and gate contacts

To do this, two etch-stop materials and two selective etches are used. After gate formation it is etched back and the cavity is filled with silicon nitride, as in earlier generations; the contact is then put in and also etched back, and the cavity is filled with silicon carbide. Then there is a selective etch to open the gate contact, which does not touch the SiC in the contact cavity, and a second selective etch removes the SiC from the contact cavity, but does not affect the gate contact periphery. Clearly this sequence is reliant on excellent etch selectivity between the different materials.

 

[goldstone77]

Intel and AMD neck and neck when it comes to battery life...

https://www.laptopmag.com/reviews/laptops/hp-envy-x360-15t
Ryan Shrout loves his HP 360X and recommends it as his pick of the week!
Picks of the Week:
1:19:10 Ryan: HP Envy x360 Ryzen 5
https://youtu.be/ou2M5NKO25A?t=4752

 

[juanrga]

Intel and AMD neck and neck when it comes to battery life...

https://www.laptopmag.com/reviews/laptops/hp-envy-x360-15t

The Intel-based laptop had 12% more battery life, but the laptops aren't the same. The Intel-based laptop has twice more RAM and 45% more bright screen

The Intel Envy x360 emits a paltry 186 nits of brightness, while its AMD counterpart maxes out at a shockingly low 128 nits.

So HP had to reduce the memory in one half and reduce the screen bright by 45% to compensate for the higher power consumption of the AMD SoC, and still the Raven-based laptop drained the battery first.

And the HP laptop is using Kabylake. CoffeLake laptops will be faster and efficient than Kabylake laptops.

 

[goldstone77]

Intel and AMD neck and neck when it comes to battery life...

https://www.laptopmag.com/reviews/laptops/hp-envy-x360-15t

The Intel-based laptop had 12% more battery life, but the laptops aren't the same. The Intel-based laptop has twice more RAM and 45% more bright screen

The Intel Envy x360 emits a paltry 186 nits of brightness, while its AMD counterpart maxes out at a shockingly low 128 nits.

So HP had to reduce the memory in one half and reduce the screen bright by 45% to compensate for the higher power consumption of the AMD SoC, and still the Raven-based laptop drained the battery first.

And the HP laptop is using Kabylake. CoffeLake laptops will be faster and efficient than Kabylake laptops.

Ryan Shrout loves his HP 360X and recommends it as his pick of the week! So, I guess he doesn't care about the battery life, and the brighter screen when he is using a monitor, because he can actually game with the AMD unit in games where the Intel unit with it's igpu is unplayable.
Picks of the Week:
1:19:10 Ryan: HP Envy x360 Ryzen 5
https://youtu.be/ou2M5NKO25A?t=4752

 

[dineshcgokhale]

Which Intel i7 is best for video editing in after effects

 

[goldstone77]

Which Intel i7 is best for video editing in after effects

When you say best is CPU price a consideration?
Recommended Systems for Adobe After Effects

Processor (CPU)
The processor (or CPU) is one of the most important pieces of an After Effects workstation. While many other parts of the system impact performance to some degree, the CPU is the core piece of hardware that is a part of absolutely anything and everything you do in After Effects.

One thing we want to note is that while older versions of After Effects (2015 and older) worked well high core count CPU configurations (including dual Xeon systems), due to the removal of the "Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously" feature the current version of After Effects actually runs better on more affordable CPUs that have a lower core count but higher operating frequency. The exception to this is the 3D Renderer with Cinema 4D engine as that is still able to make terrific use of high core count CPUs.

With all the different CPUs available on the market, our workstations only use one of three options depending on the type of After Effects workstation you need:

Intel Core i7 8700K 6 Core 3.7GHz (4.7GHz Turbo) - Used in our General AE Optimized workstation, the Core i7 8700K provides the highest possible performance for most After Effects tasks. In fact, compared to the previous generation Core i7 7700K, this CPU is about 20% faster for general AE tasks and ~35% faster when using the C4D 3D Renderer. However, the downside to this CPU (and it's overall platform) is that it is limited to just 64GB of RAM and while the performance when using the 3D Renderer is very good, it is not the best you can get..
AMD Threadripper 1950X 16 Core 3.4GHz (4.0GHz Turbo) - Used in our Cinema 4D Rendering Optimized workstaion, the AMD 1950X is not quite as fast as the other two CPUs for most AE tasks but provides terrific performance when using the Cinema 4D rendering engine while giving up minimal performance in other tasks. If you need even higher 3D rendering performance at the expense of general AE performance, we recommend looking at one of our workstations that is optimized for pure CPU-based rendering performance such as our Arnold or Keyshot recommended systems.
Intel Core i7 7820X 8 Core 3.6GHz (4.3/4.5GHz Turbo) - For those that need High RAM Capacity, the Intel Core i7 7820X allows for up to 512GB of RAM for customers working with extremely large and complex projects in After Effects. Note that this is the only CPU we are currently offering in our After Effects Standard workstation as it is the best performing CPU with the higher RAM capacity but we can use any of the other Core i7 or Core i9 CPUs by request.

 

[Isaiah4110]

Ah, but won't GPU Compute (CUDA or OpenCL) beat the pants off any of those CPUs? I know my GTX 970 would typically run Premiere Pro encoding jobs in about half the time it took my Core i7-5930K running 32GB quad channel DDR4 RAM.

 

[gamerk316]

https://gizmodo.com/report-all-intel-processors-made-in-the-last-decade-mi-1821728240
https://www.techspot.com/news/72550-massive-security-flaw-found-almost-all-intel-cpus.html

Starting to pop up elsewhere as well. Someone at Intel is getting fired for this.

As I'm understanding this (everyone is mum until the OS level patches come out), Intel's speculative execution engine isn't properly checking for permissions, which allows for attackers to get at kernel memory. The "fix" is to basically stuff the kernel in it's own separate address space, which is going to kill performance due to the increased overhead involved in context switching.

Until the exact details are understood (which won't happen until every major OS gets patched), I would be very hesitant to purchase any new processor, especially from Intel. But if what I'm reading is true, expect major performance losses for all Intel CPUs to show up in about a month, to the tune of 20-30% performance loss across the board.

 

[-Fran-]

https://gizmodo.com/report-all-intel-processors-made-in-the-last-decade-mi-1821728240
https://www.techspot.com/news/72550-massive-security-flaw-found-almost-all-intel-cpus.html

Starting to pop up elsewhere as well. Someone at Intel is getting fired for this.

As I'm understanding this (everyone is mum until the OS level patches come out), Intel's speculative execution engine isn't properly checking for permissions, which allows for attackers to get at kernel memory. The "fix" is to basically stuff the kernel in it's own separate address space, which is going to kill performance due to the increased overhead involved in context switching.

Until the exact details are understood (which won't happen until every major OS gets patched), I would be very hesitant to purchase any new processor, especially from Intel. But if what I'm reading is true, expect major performance losses for all Intel CPUs to show up in about a month, to the tune of 20-30% performance loss across the board.

Since it's memory that involves context switches, it will be the worst when you need to swap from different heavy threads running into other heavy threads. Heavily threaded apps that need lots of IO will be affected the worst (from what I'm reading), but stuff that puts their things in memory and doesn't need to switch constantly, won't be affected as much (i.e. games). This is a kick in the nuts for the cloud world, haha. We're already aware over here and we'll have our servers patched by Friday.

What a year start. Jeez.

Cheers!

 

[juanrga]

https://gizmodo.com/report-all-intel-processors-made-in-the-last-decade-mi-1821728240
https://www.techspot.com/news/72550-massive-security-flaw-found-almost-all-intel-cpus.html

Starting to pop up elsewhere as well. Someone at Intel is getting fired for this.

As I'm understanding this (everyone is mum until the OS level patches come out), Intel's speculative execution engine isn't properly checking for permissions, which allows for attackers to get at kernel memory. The "fix" is to basically stuff the kernel in it's own separate address space, which is going to kill performance due to the increased overhead involved in context switching.

Until the exact details are understood (which won't happen until every major OS gets patched), I would be very hesitant to purchase any new processor, especially from Intel. But if what I'm reading is true, expect major performance losses for all Intel CPUs to show up in about a month, to the tune of 20-30% performance loss across the board.

The bug only affects some datacenter workloads. The impact for final users is virtually zero. Patched linux and Windows have been already tested. [strike]The i7 even run faster in some workloads under the new windows.[/strike]

 

[YoAndy]

https://gizmodo.com/report-all-intel-processors-made-in-the-last-decade-mi-1821728240
https://www.techspot.com/news/72550-massive-security-flaw-found-almost-all-intel-cpus.html

Starting to pop up elsewhere as well. Someone at Intel is getting fired for this.

As I'm understanding this (everyone is mum until the OS level patches come out), Intel's speculative execution engine isn't properly checking for permissions, which allows for attackers to get at kernel memory. The "fix" is to basically stuff the kernel in it's own separate address space, which is going to kill performance due to the increased overhead involved in context switching.

Until the exact details are understood (which won't happen until every major OS gets patched), I would be very hesitant to purchase any new processor, especially from Intel. But if what I'm reading is true, expect major performance losses for all Intel CPUs to show up in about a month, to the tune of 20-30% performance loss across the board.

The bug only affects some datacenter workloads. The impact for final users is virtually zero. Patched linux and Windows have been already tested. The i7 even run faster in some workloads under the new windows.

That will be a plus

 

[juanrga]

https://gizmodo.com/report-all-intel-processors-made-in-the-last-decade-mi-1821728240
https://www.techspot.com/news/72550-massive-security-flaw-found-almost-all-intel-cpus.html

Starting to pop up elsewhere as well. Someone at Intel is getting fired for this.

As I'm understanding this (everyone is mum until the OS level patches come out), Intel's speculative execution engine isn't properly checking for permissions, which allows for attackers to get at kernel memory. The "fix" is to basically stuff the kernel in it's own separate address space, which is going to kill performance due to the increased overhead involved in context switching.

Until the exact details are understood (which won't happen until every major OS gets patched), I would be very hesitant to purchase any new processor, especially from Intel. But if what I'm reading is true, expect major performance losses for all Intel CPUs to show up in about a month, to the tune of 20-30% performance loss across the board.

The bug only affects some datacenter workloads. The impact for final users is virtually zero. Patched linux and Windows have been already tested. The i7 even run faster in some workloads under the new windows.

That will be a plus

Edited my former post to correct a mistake. The windows reviews are in German (I don't speak German) and I mistakenly took some benchmarks as showing a faster CPU; but those benchmarks were in seconds, so the CPU was actually slower.

The impact of the patched Windows is however close to zero.

For the i7-7700k

The higher impacts in applications are 1% in 7-zip and 1% in Handbrake. The impact in others workloads is smaller, e.g. 0.6% in Cinebench and 0% in Blender.

The impact on Assasins Creed goes from 0.2% with highest preset to 3% with lowest preset. both @1080p.

For the i7-3960X

0.6% impact in FireStrike Extreme. 4% in DOOM (Vulkan). 3% in the Witcher 3. 5% in Stars wars Battlefront. 1% in Luxmark. 1.7% in Adobe After Effects. 1.4% in Blender...

It seems the older the chip the higher is the impact. but in any case the performance hits are 10x smaller than the anti-Intel sites pretended.

Toms has a nice article about this bug: I like the final section titled "So Much FUD"

 

[-Fran-]

It wasn't FUD though? They always said synthetics were the most affected and I didn't see a single tweet from respectable people saying otherwise. We all knew impacts to non IO intensive software would be minimal, if at all. Additionally, I would like to see a re-test from Toms once the patch for Windows becomes available, hopefully using older CPUs (maybe up to Sandy? ) to see if it does affect Streaming, since it *is* IO intensive.

In any case, this is just the start of the brown fest for Intel, I'm sure. They haven't even disclosed the list of CPUs!

 

[logainofhades]

If it does affect streamers adversely, I see a good deal of unhappy people popping up.

 

[juanrga]

https://newsroom.intel.com/news/intel-responds-to-security-research-findings/

This part of Intel official answer is very interesting:

Recent reports that these exploits are caused by a “bug” or a “flaw” and are unique to Intel products are incorrect. Based on the analysis to date, many types of computing devices — with many different vendors’ processors and operating systems — are susceptible to these exploits.

 

[goldstone77]

https://newsroom.intel.com/news/intel-responds-to-security-research-findings/

This part of Intel official answer is very interesting:

Recent reports that these exploits are caused by a “bug” or a “flaw” and are unique to Intel products are incorrect. Based on the analysis to date, many types of computing devices — with many different vendors’ processors and operating systems — are susceptible to these exploits.

Remember this is the Intel News Room, so not an unbiased 3rd party. That said examine exactly what they said:

Based on the analysis to date, many types of computing devices — with many different vendors’ processors and operating systems — are susceptible to these exploits.

Meaning other computing devices are susceptible- sure, but there are security features in place to prevent hackers utilizing those exploits on those devices! Intel's hardware design flaw is allowing hackers access to enable these exploits!

 

[juanrga]

Let us summarize this shocking news:

1. There are a huge security problem split into three known variants. Those variants are collected into two codenames: Spectre and Meltdown.
2. Spectre attack is confirmed to affect CPUs from AMD, ARM, and Intel. This is very serious. There are no patches available and maybe never will be and new hardware will be required.
3. Meltdown attack is confirmed to affect CPUs from Intel. The situation with AMD and ARM CPUs "is unclear".

 

[randomizer]

Given that this discussion is taking place over at least three different threads I think we need a thread dedicated to discussing the security flaws so that the existing threads can remain focused on their original topics.

 

[goldstone77]

Given that this discussion is taking place over at least three different threads I think we need a thread dedicated to discussing the security flaws so that the existing threads can remain focused on their original topics.

CPU Security Vulnerabilities Information
http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-3609004/cpu-security-vulnerabilities-information.html

 

[YoAndy]

Which Intel i7 is best for video editing in after effects

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/game-streaming-encoding-coffee-lake-ryzen,5326.html?utm_source=notification

 

[goldstone77]

Intel's CEO reportedly sold shares after the company already knew about massive security flaws
Intel CEO Brian Krzanich sold off a large chunk of his stake in the company after the chipmaker was made aware of serious security flaws, according to multiple reports
An SEC filing last November showed Krzanich sold off about 644,000 shares by exercising his options and another roughly 245,700 shares he already owned
That reduced Krzanich's total number of shares to 250,000, which is the bare minimum that an Intel CEO should own, according to The Motley Fool
Saheli Roy Choudhury | @sahelirc
Published 10 Hours Ago
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/04/intel-ceo-reportedly-sold-shares-after-the-company-already-knew-about-massive-security-flaws.html

According to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing in late November, Krzanich acquired and sold 644,135 shares at a weighted average price of $44.05 by exercising his options. Those options let him purchase the shares at prices between $12.985 and $26.795, significantly lower than where Intel was trading at the time.

He sold another 245,743 shares that he already owned at a weighted average of $44.55. That brought down the total number of shares he owns to 250,000 — which is the minimum number of shares that the CEO of Intel is required to own, according to a Motley Fool report. Krzanich sold all of those shares for a little over $39 million, apparently netting about $25 million.

The filing showed that the sales were part of a 10b5-1 plan, which was created on Oct. 30, just a month before Krzanich sold the shares. The 10b5-1 is a trading plan that company executives set up to sell stocks they own at a pre-determined time so that they are not accused of insider trading.

Multiple outlets, however, have reported that Intel and other chip makers were notified of the security vulnerabilities in June.

Security researchers released documentation this week of critical vulnerabilities in modern processors used on almost every computer around the world. The hardware bugs — known as Meltdown and Spectre could allow programs to steal data including "passwords stored in a password manager or browser, your personal photos, emails, instant messages and even business-critical documents."

While Meltdown is specific to Intel processors, and can be patched, Spectre affects Intel, AMD and ARM processors — meaning almost every device that uses a chip — and is harder to fix. That sent the computer industry scrambling to patch those vulnerabilities. Though there are no known exploits for the problem yet, what is alarming is the fact that it can potentially affect millions of devices.

Watch the video on the CNBC website of the interview with Intel CEO Krzanich. He looks like a cat in a room full of rocking chairs!

 

[adamsleath]

looks like he's just made a tidy profit on his shares, and locking in a considerable nestegg. Don't think it's a big deal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Krzanich
Intel is too big to fail...in my opinion :lol: , has a near monopoly in its core business, performance lead, massive capital reserves, yada yada yada.
I just like to see some diversity in the market. AMD has a small slice of it.

 

[juanrga]

Intel launches 8th Gen Core Processor with Radeon RX Vega graphics

https://videocardz.com/74631/intel-launches-8th-gen-core-processor-with-radeon-rx-vega-graphics

 

[goldstone77]

Intel launches 8th Gen Core Processor with Radeon RX Vega graphics

https://videocardz.com/74631/intel-launches-8th-gen-core-processor-with-radeon-rx-vega-graphics

G: Thin & Light Performance w/ Discrete Graphics

Intel’s high performance mobile enthusiast CPU
First Consumer EMIB, HBM2, discrete graphics on package, power sharing
Enthusiast Gaming and VR Experience
Innovative designs

Laptop with 65-100W TDP?

Edit: Personally, I want to see this in a NUC!

 

[-Fran-]

I knew it... Intel had influence on the Vega they're using in that thing:

https://twitter.com/Cat_Merc/status/949730341912240128

This smells like Intel removed the fat from GCN in their Vega.

Cheers!